The Stage

Sun, Sadler’s Wells, London, 2013

My taste in theatre came mostly from my school theatre studies teacher Miss Thorpe and the technician there, Pete. However, when I was 20 and at Rose Bruford College studying lighting design, a friend of mine gave me a spare ticket for Sun. I grew up doing ballet, but I didn’t go to the theatre to watch it and dance, for me, was always classical. When I went to see Sun, I didn’t know anything about it or Hofesh Shechter.

The visuals were so stunning. Lee Curran had lit it and his work was so beautifully done, it was jaw-dropping. He used a particular acid yellow that was really striking – and an array of hanging practical lights – and the way that angle came in fitted the movement, which was often very sharp.

And the music and movement moved me in such a visceral way. I had such an emotional response to it that I couldn’t quite tell you exactly what the specifics were, but I felt this wave of emotion throughout the whole piece. It continuously felt like it surprised me. As I walked out, I remember feeling really inspired by art: it was art, not just dance or theatre. It was like alchemy, unlocking a whole new level in a game. To evoke such a deep emotional response that you didn’t know you had within you… it opened my eyes to what things on stage can do to you.

What I loved a lot about it, like a lot of contemporary dance I’ve seen since, was that it gave you a nugget of what it was about and then you had to fill in a lot of the rest. You, as an audience member, are not spoon-fed. Depending on your own experience, you fill in the gaps. That show had such a brilliant balance of me not knowing exactly what was going on while I could feel something within me understanding and connecting to it.

I think that happens with all art. You see a painting and feel a connection to it even though it has no context for you: again, you fill in those gaps. Art evokes all this emotion and imagination within us. It gives you the freedom to explore something within you that you wouldn’t otherwise have in your day-to-day life.

Seeing Sun was one of my earliest memories of feeling that this is what art can do – which is why it’s so important. I feel really lucky to be in a job where I get to explore that every day. Sun made me see the world in a completely different way.

Analysis – David Benedict

Theatregoers unfamiliar with the work of London-based choreographer Hofesh Shechter may recall the thrill coursing through his visceral dance segments in last year’s otherwise becalmed Oedipus at London’s Old Vic.

Shechter once described his aesthetic as “flow, freedom and fuck you”. Running with that, critic Judith Mackrell wrote that Sun, his 2013 full-length work for 14 dancers was “ballet gone feral”. Technically speaking, it was contemporary dance peppered with folk dance, but that only hints at its dramatic range and intensity. Against his own score, ranging from electronic music to Wagner and Irving Berlin, choreographer and composer Shechter’s potent, patent choreography is alive with dynamism, his group movement patterns often built from and displaying a collective spirit, while never sinking into neat, identical uniformity.

In Sun, the atmosphere on a bare set was equally determined by Lee Curran’s lighting, with the sun’s pale orange light balanced by savagely chilly brightness. And after a jokey, faux-baroque opening, the dance lurched into a non-literal world of brutal beatings, goose-stepping and other images suggestive of war.

What gave Sun distinction were the stillness and intermittent silences woven into fiercely shrugging, vividly energised, seemingly throwaway movement conceived and executed with cut-throat precision.