CONTEMPORARY DANCE 2.0 at the Battersea Arts Centre
★★★★★
“The effect is paradoxically dreamlike, but shot through with the energy of the battlefield”
Contemporary Dance 2.0 is a breathtaking reminder of the energy and innovation that choreographer Hofesh Shechter brings to the dance. Fans of earlier productions such as Political Mother will delight in the pounding rhythms and signature movements that the Shechter II Company brings to this latest work currently on tour at the Battersea Arts Centre. Contemporary Dance 2.0 is of our time, yet draws on a paradoxical, often ironic, combination of modern dance, ballet, and traditional folk dance. On the music side, in addition to Shechter’s own compositions, there are deliberately incongruous nods to Bach and Frank Sinatra along the way.
Shechter hails from Israel, where he trained as a musician, before finding an additional calling as a dancer and choreographer. His training in dance, especially in folk dance; his years as a musician, and his commitment to dance as both a political and community based act, show up constantly in his work. Based in the UK since 2002, he has worked with a number of companies before forming his own. The Shechter II Company that performs Contemporary Dance 2.0 is drawn from young dancers aged between 18 and 25. Shechter has worked very successfully with these comparatively inexperienced artists to produce dancers capable of moving in disciplined unity with the high powered energy that his choreography demands. The company has also emerged as a group of dancers more than capable of putting their own stamp on individual breakout moments throughout the performance.
Contemporary Dance 2.0 begins with a characteristically heavy beat as the dancers come on stage. A handwritten card announces Part One: Pop. Each dancer works in tight coordination with the others, but thanks to the costuming by Osnat Kelner, each dancer has an individual, as well as a collective identity. The movements are a complex mix of pulsing, undulating bodies and fluttering of hands, juxtaposed with moments of explosive athleticism. It’s a seamless coordination with the music. The lighting (Tom Visser) and the stage effects often shift between a semi dark smokiness where you can barely see the dancers, to moments of bright illumination scattering across their bodies. Again, echoing the beat. Dancers Tristan Carter, Cristel de Frankrijker, Justine Gouache, Zakarius Harry, Alex Haskins, Oscar Jinghu Li, Keanah Faith Simin and Chanel Vyent dance, often in wedge formations, to a moment where a dancer is forced into an individual statement, a breaking away from the pack. Bodies are rolled across the stage. Even thrown against a potential partner, only to be rejected, and fall away. And just when you are accustomed to the incessant beat, there is an abrupt shift in music, mood, sound and lighting. Traditional forms assert themselves against the pounding modernity. The stage fills with an austere serenity. Bach. Ballet moves. A deliberate parody of the past. Parts Two (with feelings), Part Three (Mother) and Part Four (Contemporary Dance) even parody Shechter’s own artistic past as well as the history of dance. But there’s no linear storytelling at work here. The overall effect of Contemporary Dance 2.0 is not so much a coherent narrative, as an invitation to a trance like state that pulls dancers and audiences alike into an awareness of heightened realities. The effect is paradoxically dreamlike, but shot through with the energy of the battlefield. Finally, there’s another abrupt shift as the dancers announce The End — again on a rough piece of card held up on stage. It’s the last ironic touch as the dancers swing into the sound of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.”
If you don’t get a chance to see the Hofesh Shechter Company live, there are films and videos you can watch online to get a sense of this remarkable work. But do try and see them live if you can. An opportunity to watch the audience succumb to the same hypnotic rhythms as the dancers — to get caught up in those rhythms yourself —should not be missed. Catch Contemporary Dance 2.0 at the Battersea Arts Centre if you can.
Reviewed 26th October 2022
by Dominica Plummer
Photography by Todd MacDonald
Contemporary Dance will be playing at Dance XChange Birmingham on 24-25 November which is the last UK date of its international tour.
“a hyperaware choreography of multiple realities, alive to the possibilities of reconfiguration and reorientation”
Canadian company Kidd Pivot present Gogol’s Government Inspector as their latest collaboration between dancers and the spoken word at Sadler’s Wells this week. Crystal Pite, as choreographer and director, and writer Jonathon Young, take this well loved classic of the Russian stage, and turn it into something utterly unanticipated. It is a piece true to its roots—Pite and Young give their work Gogol’s Russian title Revizor (literally, inspector)—but in changing one letter in the title, they form a pun in English. It allows them to take us on a journey as unexpected as that of Gogol’s protagonist Khlestakov, when he winds up in a small provincial town to discover that he is mistaken for an important “government inspector.” By changing the ‘z’ to ’s’, Kidd Pivot’s subsequent ‘re-vision’ is not only an opportunity to ‘re-imagine’ Revizor but to re-configure their creative process as the dance proceeds. The company quite literally puts the whole process on stage.
It’s hard to describe how Revisor unfolds in words, even though, ironically, words form so much of the “music” that moves the dancers. In any given moment, Revisor is weaving together words spoken by off stage actors, often with additional music and sound effects underneath, and with lighting and even furniture, all in seamless synchronicity. The piece begins conventionally enough, with Gogol’s characters assembling to share the news that a mysterious stranger has arrived in town. We watch the dancers’ bodies respond, staccato-like, to each syllable of a text spoken by unseen actors. The dancers’ costumes (designed by Nancy Bryant) work well in the series of tableaux which the dancers configure and reconfigure the satirical intent of Gogol’s story. Particularly brilliant are dancers Jermaine Spivey as Postmaster Wieland, and Cindy Salgado as Anna, wife of the Director. But added to all this is the Choreographer’s own voice, creating and recreating the instructions for the dance. And it is her voice that causes everything else (from furniture or doorways flying in, or lightning strikes on a backdrop) to move as she makes one choice, then erases it in favour of another. It is this rich, multi-layered texture of the dance; the voices of the characters; the music and sound design (Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani, and Meg Roe); the scenic design and the lighting (Jay Gower Taylor and Tom Visser), that takes us out of Gogol’s nineteenth century world and into a world that is very twenty-first. It is a hyperaware choreography of multiple realities, alive to the possibilities of reconfiguration and reorientation. And in watching, we realise that this is what Gogol was aiming for all along—a play of fantastic meetings and hyperbolic movements that seem no more real than fever dreams, but fever dreams that poor bodies must respond to, whether in ecstatic hope or dashed ambition.
Revisor begins with Gogol’s play, but mid performance it transforms into the abstract movements that are Kidd Pivot’s signature. Pite and Young’s vision plays out as an endless loop in which the dancers’ bodies twist and turn in extraordinary patterns that are always attempting to come together, only to be forced apart. In the endless quest to find new configurations, these restless dancers find the creative energy that drives the dance on. Eventually, almost leisurely, they find a way back to Gogol’s Khlestakov—a man trapped in the middle of a vast emptiness populated only with frustrated desire. He catches the imaginations of those he meets, he is caught in their schemes. But at the last moment, he (and the dancers) break free so that the dance can begin again.
Kidd Pivot’s take on The Government Inspector is an exhilarating evening that will appeal to dance fans and theatre goers alike. Don’t miss the opportunity to see this extraordinary company.
