{"id":29320,"date":"2014-05-08T00:45:22","date_gmt":"2014-05-08T07:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=29320"},"modified":"2014-05-13T22:02:46","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T05:02:46","slug":"dance-at-the-israel-festival-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=29320","title":{"rendered":"Dance at the Israel Festival 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Hofesh<\/a>
Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother\/Photo: Gabriele Zucca<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Looking towards Jerusalem and its creative artists this year, the Israel Festival will open with Hofesh Schecter<\/strong>‘s Political Mother<\/em> on May 29, 2014. Mother and political are both very charged words, no matter how you use them, put them together and you’ve got a power blast of associations. That verbal burst of energy suits Shechter’s choreography very well, his work is characterized by the visceral quality of its physicality, which merges with the soundtracks – often composed by Shechter – to evoke the sense of a tribal event driven by deep, primal urges.<\/p>\n

The provocative title is all the more so when one considers that Shechter – born in Jerusalem and a former dancer with the Batsheva Dance Company, is based in the UK, where he has been living and working for over a decade, founding his dance company there in 2008. Is this work to be construed as a commentary on Israel, which might well be considered Shechter’s ‘political mother’? Perhaps.<\/p>\n

Just as intriguing a thread to follow, is a quote from the soundtrack on Shechter’s The Art of Not Looking Back<\/em> (2009): \u201cMy mother left me when I was 2 years old. It\u2019s like having a bucket with a hole. No matter what you pour in, it\u2019s always empty.\u201d One might well imagine that for Shechter, the word ‘mother’ is imbued with meaning. Yet, infer as one may, what matters is the thing itself – the performance onstage. Having seen Shechter’s Uprising<\/em> and In Your Rooms<\/em> when his company performed in Israel in November 2008, and the more recent performance of Uprising<\/em> by the Batsheva Ensemble (this gift to his ‘mother’ company conveying yet another layer of the choreographer’s complex ties to his national and dance roots), my most salient comment must be: Hofesh Shechter is a choreographer to watch, with a distinct voice of his own, merging sound and dance to create an experience of immersion in sensation.
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