Israel-born, Britain-based Hofesh Shechter brings his nitty-gritty Political Mother to the National Theater this weekend as part of the 2012 Taiwan International Festival of Arts.
“This piece deals a lot with anger. What makes me angry is the distance between the way reality is presented and the way it is ... We saw the collapse of the financial world because it was a complete lie … this distance is for me the main thing,” he said.
Political Mother was created for 10 dancers and eight musicians, but now Shechter’s using 11 dancers.
Photo Courtesy of Gabriele Zucca
The dancers are very much an international cast, with eight nationalities represented, including a Taiwanese, Chang Chien-ming (張建明).
Music is very much part of the show, Shechter said. (Warning: according to various reviews, the sound is apparently deliberately loud.)
“It’s all about timing. The choreography has to be about the rhythm and my dancers have to learn the songs,” he said.
Courtesy of the National Theater Concert Hall
The 36-year-old Shechter only formed his eponymous company in 2008, but he has already collected awards and accolades from the world’s press that a longer established company would envy.
Shechter may have taken a roundabout path to becoming a choreographer, but all those side paths have contributed to the productions he creates today.
He began dancing at school, but the folk dance that everyone had to do. He went to the Jerusalem Academy for Dance and Music — apparently lured by the girls in the youth dance troupe there — and then joined the Batsheva Dance Company. While in Tel Aviv with the company he also began studying drums and percussion. From there he moved on to drum studies at the Agostiny College of Rhythm. He worked on various dance and theater projects in France and Europe before moving to London in 2002, where he joined the Jasmin Vardimon Company. By 2004, he was beginning to develop a reputation as a choreographer and by 2008 he was ready to form his own troupe, for which he not only choreographs, but composes the scores as well.
The 70-minute long Political Mother, which debuted in 2010, was Shechter’s first full-length work, and it’s a powerful, explosive one. Focusing on the way power, war and oppression can impact relationships, Shechter lets audience members know right away that they are in for a roller-coaster ride as he has a samurai commit ritual suicide (to a snippet of Verdi’s Requiem), which segues into a dictator ranting, which segues into — well you will just have to go see it.
Asked about the work’s name at a press conference at the National Theater on Wednesday, Shechter said it was just a title.
“I was speaking with a friend of mine, a director from the Royal Court [Theatre in London]. I said my work isn’t about politics and he said everything has to do with politics … The combination of these two worlds in this title for me is very interesting — the political world is very cold … the world of the mother is very warm … but there is a confusing overlap between the way politicians treat us and the way parents treat us,” he said.
However, conflicts and politics are often front and center in his work.
“Israel is a very extreme place. Everything there is amplified, so growing up there really influenced me … made me ask a lot of questions, many of these enter into my work,” he said, before adding that “issues exist everywhere, so does conflict.”
While there may be conflict in Israel, there is also dancing.
“The dance world in Israel is also very rich … we also have a lot of folk dance. Almost everybody in Israel does folk dance, we do it in school … to be a boy in Israel, it is easy to dance,” he said.
Folk dance continues to play a key role in his work and even serves as a motif toward the end of Political Mother, when a sign lights up with the message, “Where there is pressure, there is folk dance.”
Shechter said he came across the phrase while he was working on the show.
“I got in contact with the author and asked if I could use it and he said ‘sure,’ for some money. I really connected with it, it hits a chord for me,” he said. “In Israel, folk dance is a way of connecting … it can be looked on very lightly … but it is about the human need to gather and sometimes we need this.”
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