DeGeneration: an unfettered dance into darkness | GIAF review

deGeneration

Black Box Theatre, Galway

****

Youth is wasted on the young. It’s a point that is not wasted on Hofesh Shechter. For this triptych, the British-Israeli choreographer has recruited a new young company of dancers, Shechter Junior, whittled down from more than 1,000 applicants, to revisit his choreographic salad days.

Among the three pieces are his earliest work, 2003's Fragments, a teasing and tense pas de deux; and a politically provocative piece for six dancers, Cult, from 2004; followed by his most recent work, Disappearing Act.

Shechter’s contemporary and unfettered style may have been refined through the years, although mercifully it remains untamed. Seen together, the pieces suggest that not an awful lot in his spirit has changed.

Cult initiates a fixation with the individual within the collective, physicalising tensions between resistance and accommodation, a youthful prerogative. We discover six figures through a thick haze – three men in olive jackets and three women in vivid red dresses – who manoeuvre through a contained frenzy, reaching high then scything low. The tone is one of high angst, over one of Shechter's own splenetic and bombastic compositions, where the mode is one of extremes.

“In the beginning . . . there was darkness,” reports a projection, and into this darkness we will surely return, insists the piece – sometimes hysterically – tracing movements both fluid and tightly regimented among the group as they merge into huddles or split into factions. If there is something filmic about Shechter’s stage, it is his insistence on a controlled image: the force of the music erases the noise of effort (you won’t hear a single footfall) and swift blackouts snap the focus from a thrashing shoal to a single body suddenly alone on stage.

Fragments, in its depiction of a relationship more fractious than entwined, seems to stretch the difficulties of harmonious contact into a generational condition. The excellent pairing of Kenny Wing Tao Ho and Ayelet Nadav collide or fall apart, stunned into stillness with a sudden slap to the face, just as the music of Bach, or Art Garfunkel singing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, routinely splinters into disturbed glitches.

Disappearing Act, the most viscerally exciting piece (itself based on another recent work), works here like a recapitulation, in which the dancers negotiate between free and heedless expression – stretching their arms high, heads thrown back – then within boundaries mapped out on the floor in light. Such are the insurrections and counter- insurgencies of accessing the adult world and finding your place within the multitude. But the fine display of Shechter's new generation, in artfully controlled and eruptive passions, expresses its own stirring coming of age. Until July 25th