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’. Then gunshots ring out, and it’s farewell the trumpets. We don’t need Shechter to tell us that the country is up the spout, but at least this oddity of a tribute conveys a muddled sense of glories we have lost. I’ll give him another chance.
Do people of darker skin colour face obstacles, prejudice or discrimination in the ballet world? At the top level, emphatically no, not any more: the establishment bends over backwards to accommodate and celebrate talent in a spirit of positive discrimination. Marcelino Sambe and Francesca Hayward send Royal Ballet audiences into ecstasies. Misty Copeland is a superstar in New York and even the super-conservative Paris Opéra Ballet has elevated Guillaume Diop to the supreme status of étoile. Black choreographers, sometimes of mediocre quality, are gushingly reviewed. Ballet Black is what its name implies and is generously funded by the Arts Council. Birmingham Royal Ballet, a company with an exceptionally broad ethnic make-up, is led by Cuban Carlos Acosta.
But it wasn’t always like this, as a lecture-recital last month at the Royal Opera House reminded us (it can be watched free via ROH Insights on YouTube). Even 30 years ago, it was considered preposterous that a black or brown ballerina should lead a white ballet – and ballet is so very white. Only the advocacy of Arthur Mitchell, a protégé of Balanchine who went on to set up the all-black Dance Theatre of Harlem, forced the doors open. He was a fearsome man, but a necessary one.
Even today, problems fester elsewhere: how, for instance, do Muslim parents react when a child announces a desire to don tights and pointe shoes? There are still barriers to break – something that Alexander Campbell, the incoming artistic director of the Royal Academy of Dance, might like to consider.
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