Don’t write off Hofesh Shechter – his new work is uniquely haunting

In 2010, when his thrillingly edgy and angry Political Mother delivered modern dance a winding punch right where it hurt, I had high hopes for Hofesh Shechter. Here was an outsider with the courage to make his own rules and engage dance with real-world issues (he had served a traumatising period in the Israeli army) rather than blindly following the fashionable goddess Pina Bausch down the rabbit hole of postmodern irony. He wasn’t interested in playing games.

But success has taken his edge off and what has followed has largely been disappointing. Trapped by a limited choreographic vocabulary, Shechter has repeated himself, relying too hard on the brute effect of mere chaos and failing to find sharper images in which to express his rage and anxieties. I’ve also grown exhausted by the crude electronic thrash of the music he composes for spectacles that now seem relentlessly one-note and stridently banal. Time to write him off?

The problem is there are things I liked very much about From England with Love, an hour-long work he created for Nederlands Dans Theater in 2021 and presented in the UK for the first time last month. Although what he does with bodies isn’t innovative or interesting and there’s still too much recourse to mass flailing about in unspecific anguish, there was something uniquely haunting about an opening sequence in which eight young dancers in dishevelled school uniforms huddle together and pay reverent homage to Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ before scuttling off through a rainstorm. Are they in pursuit of a Duke of Edinburgh Award, or are they pilgrims on a longer progress?

This plucky Harry Potterish band continues on a bumpy and agitated journey, accompanied by sublime Tallis and Purcell, as well as bursts of footie chants and Shechter’s own bash and crash, until they frolic merrily to the seraphic sounds of a cathedral choir singing ‘Abide with Me’.