Uprising/In Your Rooms

Published Monday 1 October 2007 at 11:35 by Lyndsey Winship

Hofesh Shechter has had a busy summer. In the last six months, the young London-based Israeli choreographer has performed his new work, In Your Rooms at all three of London’s major contemporary dance venues, the Place, the Southbank Centre and Sadler’s Wells, reworking it each time.

It was a unique project for the three venues, who chose to fast-track Shechter’s career by propelling him from a 300-seater theatre to an audience of 1,500. The question was - could he take the pace? Could he make a small-scale piece work on a big stage? Was he up to the challenge?

The answer is a resounding yes. Shechter is a choreographer whose work has scale - not just in terms of physical space but in terms of his vision, his ideas and his bold, masculine movement.

What was an intimate and engrossing work in its original form has become something powerful and cinematic, a faintly dystopian vision made up of snatched glimpses, fragments and memories illuminated in the half-light. Shechter builds up an oppressive momentum as hunched dancers rock and lurch in unison driven by the sound of pounding percussion, each movement rebounding from the last like the drummer’s stick bouncing from the drum skin.

With an underlying sense of desperation, of violence, tragedy and harsh truth, it feels like this is a choreographer who has something to say about the state of the world and the human condition. But Shechter is never explicit. This is dance that should be deeply felt rather than objectively analysed.

No-one else in Britain is making dance like this - Hofesh Shechter is on his way to being a big name.