‘A bubbling smoothie of the weird, the wacky, and the wonderful’
“And it was all a dream” is a universally acknowledged cop-out ending, yet that doesn’t deter Hollywood from trotting it out again and again. Conversely, choreographers regularly view somnambulation as carte blanche-an opportunity to break free of the already largely ignored narrative rigidity and let their freak flag fly.
Hofesh Shechter has a whole freak flag workshop, in which, in 2024, he crafted his piece Theatre of Dreams. Massive billows of red and brown curtains bisect the space throughout-part bedroom sheets, part moving walls-manipulated by the dancers. Almost like a show of animated statues, they are dragged to and fro to expose montages of movement: in turn frantic, obsessive, cruel, and delicate. Like a picture book, but very adult. Tom Visser’s lights carve the space up anew, working in perfect tandem with the curtain work. Harsh LED white points forward and a red wash back onto the stage, meaning that as the four or five pieces of curtain dash this way and that, the lights make each section look utterly distinct, highlighting the variety and scope of Shechter’s choreography. As they say (who?), curtains are the eyelashes of the room, and all this flapping makes me seriously consider redoing the ones in our spare room.
Moving on. Like snippets of many different shows, the dancers are constantly exploding out of gaps in the fabric or doing the now-expected Shechter animistic gallop. Draped in Osnat Kelner’s sequins and silks, patchwork suits and flimsy tops, the costumes are more party than loungewear-but that might have been a bit on the nose. The choreography surely makes up for the lack of visual surrealism, with slow craning necks towards the audience, lashing limbs, and painfully angular wrists.
Dancers frequently imitate chimps and gibbons, bow-legged as they wander onto the stage (artist, reveal thyself). There is full-frontal nudity (well, of course there is) that captures perfectly that sinking feeling of nakedness so common in dreams. The impetus for movement is sporadic, and with his now-iconic score, this morphing of techno-babble underwater feels very nocturnal. A live band, at one point revealed in starched red suits, proceeds to musically dislocate from Spanish or Portuguese mumbling to screams, trumpet blaring into the constantly changing blur of limbs and layers.
The randomness at points does pull a little, and twenty minutes could be confidently shaved off without much damage to the body overall. The “get up and dance” audience participation now dreaded in his shows, has no place in a work about dreams, as it is impossible with our current technology to share them-yet it seems to be a branding Shechter can’t escape. Being picky, I wish something had been done to make the curtains glide more mechanically, instead of seeing the dancers pull them-but that is pure pedantry (writer, reveal thyself). Multiple workable endings bounce up, then are snatched back into the orgy of movement, but editing has never been a genius’s strong point, and as each crescendo is more chaotic than the last, we can hardly complain.
Reminding us of his recent hits, Shechter has proven he can blend a bit of Bausch and a heavy dose of Fuerza Bruta into his own NutriBullet and come out with a bubbling smoothie of the weird, the wacky, and the wonderful. When I lay my head down to sleep, I can only hope my nighttime preambles are this stylised, energetic, and well-timed-although, most likely, it will just be all my teeth falling out again.
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