Sweet dreams aren’t made of this, exactly. Hofesh Shechter’s disarming new show is closer to a fever dream or nightmare. Raucous, wired and vulnerable, it’s undeniably a banger.
As usual with the Israeli-born choreographer, best known for irresistible group works like Political Mother and Grand Finale, you get less of a story, more of a vibe. Here, he summons the restless shuttle of images of a sleeping mind, capering on the very edge of delirium.
The stage is shaped by dark curtains, layer on layer. They open to tease an arresting picture, then whisk it away into oblivion, like an uneasy mind shuffling nocturnal images. You might see bodies lost in the groove, or moving in a zombie stagger. Tom Visser’s gloriously dusty lighting appears so thick you can almost taste it, dunking the stage in hazy crimson and amber.
Theatre of Dreams is a smart title: dreams are where we stage our hopes and fears to ourselves. Some images are classic night frets, like the naked bloke caught in the audience’s gaze. Others are fragmented visions: an off-kilter chorus line, a woman’s furious staccato totter, dancers shedding their clothes as they hurtle on the spot.
The indefatigable dancers are superb: you don’t register their precision so much as the energy of stomp and sinew. Some moves are signature Shechter – fidgety paws, an ecstatic squirm of hips. He is a magician of unstable group dynamics, caught between bliss and brawl. He loves to pack a ruck of bodies into a tight spot or release them across the stage like lairy gibbons.
“My sternum is throbbing,” I scribbled in my notebook. Shechter’s music is often loud – but here it’s not so much an assault as an incursion, the electronic rumbles burrowing so deep they might dislodge a kidney. Cutting into the density of beats on repeat is Molly Drake’s hauntingly fragile song I Remember (“I remember firelight and you remember smoke”).
Once a scarlet-coated cabaret band appears, we might be at a bleary lock-in at the end of time. There were some walk outs on the first night, but also a joyous rush to join in when the cast beckon people forward for a section of woozy samba, like a collective dream. A woman in our row eagerly raced to the front – “I couldn’t help myself,” she beamed as she returned.
It’s a good note for Shechter’s work, which invites you to surrender to sensation. His committed dancers hold nothing back, especially in the relentless final section, which just keeps going further, harder, until the movement barely holds together. As they look out at us, you wonder: are we imagining them, or are they dreaming us? Theatre of Dreams is a full-bodied, mind-warping show.
