By way of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, Hofesh Shechter is now based in the UK with his own contemporary dance company. It’s been six years since his work was presented in Vancouver by Dance House, and dance lovers have been itching to see more of his choreography. As local dance artist and choreographer Vanessa Goodman explained before the show, Barbarians is a trilogy made up of three distinct works, each with its own self-imposed choreographic challenge for Shechter.
In the first section, the barbarians in love, Shechter wanted to create a science fiction-inspired work because he felt that was not something he would ever voluntarily do. It was a stark, clinical piece of choreography with sudden lighting changes and the dancers moving surreptitiously around the stage in what resembled white hazmat suits (minus the gas masks). As the spot lights follow the group, moving as one unit, they flashed off and then back on to reveal the group in new formations.
An eerie, robotic voiceover shared cryptic messages that lead to a somewhat gratuitous punch line of “I am you” — turns out it was the voice inside your head. Shechter’s voice joined the conversation and there was a humorous exchange that had the robot voice denigrating his work, saying things like “You just had to put yourself into the work, didn’t you Hofesh.” While this conversation elicited laughs from the audience and seemed quite self-effacing on the surface, the longer it went on, the more it seemed self-aggrandizing. Shechter eventually says that he is a cliche of a man just looking for a thrill; the statement left me wondering whether this is truth or a finely constructed resemblance of the truth that becomes a cliche by virtue of being inauthentic.
After this lengthy voiceover section, the dancers left the stage before a seemingly unrelated segment saw them return wearing nothing while standing still facing the audience in a line across the front of the stage.
tHe bAD changed the tone drastically with its mix of different upbeat dance and hip hop music and smorgasbord of dance styles blended together. Five dancers in metallic gold, full body unitards graced the stage and performed a marathon of choreography that never let up. Switching rapidly among various contemporary dance style and influences, the movements melded together and by the end were something new yet with hints of each of the other styles. For the creation of this piece, Shechter said that he wanted to create without thinking too much, just allowing whatever happened. The effect is a hypnotic bombardment of movement, sound, and light that makes you want to get up and join them.
The final piece of the trilogy, two completely different angles of the same fucking thing, was a duet that began with a heart-warming, romantic tone and soft piano music, but became uncomfortably aggressive and suggestively abusive. The male dancer, dressed in lederhosen, seemed to be physically controlling the female, and while they seemed to continually regress into peaceful, slow dancing together, there were unnerving moments within the choreography that confused the message of the piece for me. This section is said to be the crux of the whole evening, but I failed to see how other than that dancers from the two previous pieces joined the couple on stage as he seems to have an epiphany and change his ways.
