Hofesh Shechter's barbarians blasts the senses

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      A DanceHouse presentation. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday, November 13. Continues November 14

      Seeing the ushers handing out earplugs in the aisles was an early warning that we were in for a show more hardcore than Vancouver is used to.

      And sure enough, Hofesh Shechter proceeded to reaffirm his status as the bad boy of contemporary dance, assaulting our ears and eyes. At the same time, he blasted our brains with a lightning pastiche of forms—snatched from night clubs, ballet barres, bedrooms, folk forms, hip-hop battles, concert halls—and self-reflective ideas about love, life, and chaos. It was provocative, pummelling, raw, and urban—unlike anything out there, clearly dividing the audience into haters and fans, the latter jumping to their feet for an ovation at the end.

      In an interview before the show, the Israeli-born, U.K.-based Shechter hinted to the Straight the first two pieces were meant to "disrupt" the audience in preparation for the main dish, the final duet—titled, not so romantically, two completely different angles of the same fucking thing.

      That "preparation" amounted to throwing us into anarchic sensory overload. The first piece, the barbarians in love, began with searchlights madly tracing the stage, and a female robotic voice issuing commands to the dancers. At first, their all-white costumes seem to look like the uniforms of a sci-fi movie, but by the end, they seem more like asylum pyjamas. That's because, while the piece starts out like a world working, Big Brother–like, toward some structured Utopia, it spirals into existential chaos—presumably, the chaos of Shechter's own mind. He's summoned by the robot and, in voice-over, begins to talk about looking for a thrill and turning 40. Set to a mix of ear-splitting electro and structured baroque, it's a disorienting and highly atmospheric work that questions, in the most metaphorical way possible, our ability to exist within structures as humans—specifically, the structure of monogomous love, a theme that recurs in the other pieces as well.

      So it's a bombardment, deadpan-funny, and yet deeply questioning—a strange mix that somehow only the scarily smart, angst-ridden Shechter can pull off. Tying in with the soul-baring going on, the dancers even doff their clothes.

      It's fair to presume most people were grateful for the intermission. That's because the second work was arguably even more in-your-face. tHE bAD was inspired by Shechter's use of gold-lame bodysuits, and it's a work where he explores the almost animal, physical outrageousness that the frankly lewd, liquidy attire allows. Again set to skittering house beats with baroque interludes, it's a relentless, rapid-fire release of movement, from concert-style fists in the air to pelvic grinding and twirky hump-bumping to Shechter's trademark chugging grooves. At one point, a man lifts a woman and her legs flail and kick in the air.

      From this mayhem the work transforms into the duet between Bruno Guillore and Winifred Burnet-Smith (the former decked out surreally, and somewhat randomly, in lederhosen) shuffling to a cliched jazz-piano riff. But their pairing works into something much more loaded and provocative—a dance of love and hate and infidelity and destruction that gets at issues uncomfortably raw and confessional. At one point, Burnet-Smith gnaws hungrily at Guillore's chest; at another, she leaps right up onto his shoulders, curling around his face as he tries to speak, like some kind of sinister human hood.

      There might be a few people who  leave Shechter's show feeling screwed around. But here's arguing that he can get away with it because, ultimately, he's screwing with himself. And because his dance mashup, pulled off by a gifted, committed group of charismatic young artists, is so dizzyingly, discombobulatingly, exhaustingly fascinating to watch—with, or without, the earplugs.

       

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