​Hofesh Shechter Company @ BAM 2017

For Hofesh Shechter Company’s recent trip to BAM/Opera House (November 9 – 11), if you are familiar, you’d know it would be really loud, really dark and there’d be really good dancing in Shechter’s newest work, Grand Finale.  He brought Political Mother in 2012 and Sun in 2013, both were part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival.  Like Political Mother and Sun, in two sections, Grand Finale, came at us like an ocean of illimitable and commingling emotions.  Grand Finale is propulsive and not one-minute passes without a nod to tradition or to today’s unrelenting and disturbing political climate.  At first the stage is dark with just the musicians on strings, and after a while the dancers entered, bodies hunkered, weighted and reeking with depression and disdain. “I was trying to make poetry with atrocities around me,” Shechter noted in an interview for Dance Magazine.  In oversized shirts and pants, moving mostly in large groups as one, rife with Shechter’s raw and military-infused moves, they work up a well-deserved sweat pounding out repeating sequences while moving large walls that direct our focus. Repetition is indeed Shechter’s friend, and these bodies awaken all the senses. In one scene, tightly packed between very close walls, they jump, arms flail or pound chests as they ride percussive and repeating rhythms. In another, they stand perfectly still on one leg, the other foot resting on the inner thigh of the standing leg for what seems an eternity. And in yet another, they dance a duet of dead—one dancer manipulates a “lifeless” partner. To close the first half, in front of the curtain, a dancer is flopped over a chair with the word “INTERVAL” on a placard.  The second half begins with another placard—“KARMA.”  When they are back, they are happy, they clap and sing with the musicians, they kiss, they resuscitate those who have fallen—life seems good—there is merriment, it is time to forget the bad stuff, but we wonder where the onus of “karma” lies.  
The dancers are: Chien-Ming Chang, Frédéric Despierre, Rachel Fallon, Mickael Frappat, Yeji Kim, Kim Kohlmann, Erion Kruja, Merel Lammers, Attila Ronai, and Diogo Sousa.  The musicians are: James Adams, Chris Allan, Rebekah Allan, Mehdi Ganjvar, Sabio Janiak and Desmond Neysmith.  The original score is by Shechter, with percussion on soundtrack also by Shechter with Yaron Engler.