Provocative in its essence, Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother triggers a reaction even before the action begins, the title alone sets up associations and expectations – all the more so in its performance in Shechter’s motherland, at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem.
It is as much a happening as a performance, subverting the formality of the theatre into the sensory experience of a rock concert. Sound came before image as the audience sat listening to the music, eyes fixed on the dark stage. A warrior illuminated by a single, soft spotlight drew his sword, and as string instruments played and voices sang, he met his destiny. Then everything changed.
The music hits you like a wave, taking you down and lifting you up again with it, crashing into the core of your being, mind and body, time and time again. It’s overwhelming, literally. Two male dancers appear out of nowhere, bent forward arms outstretched in a classic pose of invitation to a dance. Dressed in white shirts and suspenders, they dance like Hassids at a rave, a frenzy of energy and ecstasy, looking, reaching upward.
It’s a steady assault on the ears, electric guitars and drums coming at you full force. The musicians appear and disappear, arrayed on two levels at the back of the wide stage, they seem to float on a black abyss. Among them, a person with a mic orates, gyrates, rants and sends out an indecipherable message. The dancers too, emerge from the darkness, in a series of non-narrative scenes cut by blackouts. The stage is submerged in gloom much of the time, the lighting minimal and then some. When a scene is brightly lit, it comes as a relief, and perhaps that is the intention.
The vocabulary of folk dance is threaded through this work, eliciting different effects. There is a sense of oppression, people subdued, constrained, contained; at other times there is a feeling of protest, pushing against those external forces. One feels that Shechter has a point to make, undercutting romantic visions of a unity achieved through oppression and the promises of leaders whose verbiage is so false as to be, in effect, incomprehensible. Yet is the image of unity conveyed by a circle of folk dancers any different from that of the crowds at a rock concert, headbangers rocking to oblivion in unison? Perhaps that is intimated in the choice of the concluding song, Joni Mitchell’s bluesy rendition of Both Sides Now.
Political Mother
Choreography and music: Hofesh Shechter; Musical collaborators: Nell Catchpole, Yaron Engler; Percussion arrangements: Hofesh Shechter, Yaron Engler; Additional music: J.S. Bach, Cliff Martinez, Joni Mitchell, Guiseppe Verdi; Lighting design: Lee Curran; Costume design: Merle Hensel; Performed by Hofesh Shechter Company: Maeva Verthelot, Chien-Ming Chang, Sam Coren, Frederic Despierre, Christopher Evans, Bruno Karim Guillore, Philip Hulford, Yeji Kim, Kim Kohlmann, Erion Kruja, Merel Lammers, Sita Ostheimer.
