Choreographer Hofesh Schechter On Why Audiences Have Such Powerful Reactions To His Work

Hofesh Shechter walks out of Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville, where people are gathered on the pavements, full of post-show chatter. They notice him with a flutter of excitement. Inside the foyer two women linger, self-consciously clutching programmes for the show, Theatre of Dreams, for him to sign.

It’s like being with a celebrity, not so common in the world of contemporary dance. Shechter tells me he never gets this reaction in London, where he’s been based for the last 22 years, but Paris has clearly fallen for the Israeli choreographer big time. His company is premiering Theatre of Dreams here, with a three-week run. Backstage we meet one of the musicians, who tells us a woman came up to him at breakfast, crying. She’d seen the show the night before. “I now know what to do,” she told him. That’s powerful stuff.

Why do you think the work connects with people, I ask Shechter over lunch a couple of weeks later at London’s Groucho Club (he’s an honorary member – not a complete nobody here, it turns out). “I don’t know,” he says, with characteristic bemusement. “I think the simple answer is because the work is about people. It’s not about dance,” he says. “Dance and music are tools [to get to] something that matters much more, which is the human experience.” Connection itself is the point. “In the end we’re having a visceral experience for an hour and a half and feeling like we went through something.”

Visceral is the right sort of word for Shechter’s shows. As well as creating the dance, he writes the music, often played loud enough to vibrate your seat. It’s dance that wants to physically move you, grab you by the collar and pull you into its maelstrom. The world of Theatre of Dreams morphs continually, and uses a recurring device of theatre curtains that open and close, revealing and subverting what’s behind them. You get inklings of themes: the act of watching, conventions of theatre, dreams, memories, the creative process itself, all with Shechter’s muscular, rhythmic, protean movement – sometimes frantic, sometimes slo-mo, both heavy and soft. It escalates to a sense of ecstatic experience, the dancers’ bodies moving in sync, faces raised to the ceiling; part intellectual deep-dive, part rave in a field.

Shechter admits that what he likes about dance is “the weirdness of it. The ceremonial, ancient thing.” And much like dreams, watching dance might give rise to strong feelings, but we often struggle to find words for it afterwards. What his intentions were when he made the work, well, don’t read too much into that, he says. “Making a piece is an associative experience.” He started with poetry, why some words move us and others don’t. He thought about expectations in the theatre, and how what we think is “good” is formed by our education and values and a kind of cultural agreement. He was thinking about how the world is only made up of what we can imagine. “The beautiful things and the horrible things are all a projection of that and we have no one to blame but ourselves.” But none of those things matter, he says, it’s just a starting point when he gets in the studio. “It’s like the beginning of a football match. You kick the ball. And then you see what happens. And the idea is … to win?” he laughs. “I really don’t know.”

Three or four months into the making of the piece, Shechter’s laptop was stolen from his car; it contained all the music he’d made for it and videos of choreography from the studio. After a few days he realised he hadn’t been in love with what he’d made, but had not admitted that to himself. Now he was forced to start again. So he’s not angry with the thief. “I hope they got a good price for it!”

Over time Shechter has managed to separate himself from other people’s reactions to his work. “I put my heart on a plate,” he says. “But in the end, the dance is just what happened. I know I was driving the bus. I was doing my best and the intentions were good. And if you enjoyed it, great for you. And if you hated it, I apologise on behalf of the universe.” After all: “Waking up in the morning and putting anything out there is really tough. That’s an act of bravery on its own.”

Part of what Shechter is really trying to do on stage is capture some of the intensity of feeling that overwhelms us when we first discover great music, art or film, and connect to a bigger world outside our own. Growing up in Jerusalem, he spent a lot of time on his own after school, avoiding doing his piano practice and putting on headphones to listen to his dad’s record collection: Chopin, Bach, Queen and especially Pink Floyd. “This was what really marked me. Being transported to another time and space.” Unexpectedly, Shechter also namechecks The Goonies, Gremlins and Back to the Future, all the elements of a 1980s childhood that were as much an influence on him as dance, which he came to relatively late, in his teens. “I don’t think I ever really grew up beyond 16,” says the 49-year-old.

When Shechter first came to the UK he was drumming in a band. “I wanted to be a rockstar,” he says. “And the biggest insult that I’ve received over and over is that I’m ‘the rockstar of contemporary dance’. Ah dude, that’s not what I meant!” he laughs. That label stuck after he staged one of his biggest successes, Political Mother, at Brixton Academy in 2015, complete with moshing audience. But his work has taken him to all kinds of theatres around the world, to film – he and his company appeared in the 2022 film En Corps, about an injured ballerina who finds a new identity in contemporary dance – and to Broadway, where he choreographed the 2015 revival of Fiddler on the Roof and earned a Tony nomination for it.

Since 2018, alongside his main company he has been running Shechter II, a dynamite group of recent graduates who are now touring the piece From England With Love, a biting satire on English identity. Next on Shechter’s to-do list is a new version of Oedipus with co-director Matthew Warchus, starring Rami Malek, which opens at the Old Vic in January. And he’s making his first full-evening piece for the Paris Opera Ballet.

The projects are wide-ranging, but there’s always something recognisable about Shechter’s choreography, even when it’s on a ballet company, and in the mood on stage too, I suggest to him: a sense of heaviness and bleakness, especially when it comes to human nature and power and control. “I suppose I look at this period in time and all I have to say is, I rest my case,” he says. He still has family in Israel and we talk about Gaza, his feelings of horror and helplessness. “What people don’t understand is that they [Israelis and Palestinians] will have to live together. There’s just no other way. It’s like your children: they’re fighting a lot, but they will have to learn to live together,” he says. “I really try not to speak about politics, but I will say the problem is the leaders.” He can’t lose faith in human nature. “People don’t want to die and they don’t want to kill.”

Sometimes Shechter struggles with questioning what he’s doing: what does anything matter amid the horrors we’re witnessing, what good can it do, “shouting dancers into the void”? “But I’m clear about my choice in life,” he says, “and it’s to make dance and music, because I believe those things make the world a better place. I believe that.”