Choreography and Music: Hofesh Shechter
Dreams are funny things. They usually comprise snippets of life mixed in with pure fantasy, making wild, veering narrative U-turns. And every so often, there may be a splash of nudity.
That sums up Hofesh Shechter’s Theatre of Dreams, a fantasia in which a lone figure enters a figurative rabbit hole – in this case, the small opening revealed when a pair of stage curtains are parted slightly – and tumbles into a myriad of various shapes, sounds, colours and dances.
We are exposed to a series of vignettes of varying length. Some are revealed and hidden by curtains opening and closing; others by sudden, dramatic lighting changes. We may see dancers running frenetically, tearing off their shirts one second; then, after the briefest of blackouts, they are sitting cross-legged, motionless until their heads all snap around at once.
Shechter uses his music compositions also to convey a changing sense of perspective. Sometimes the relentless, driving bass is muffled, as if emanating from some underground club to dancers 12 feet above; at other times, it is all-encompassing, like being at a rave where all around you they dance in unison even while they retain a core sense of identity.
But while the music is ever flowing and never stops, it also mutates regularly into different styles and tempi. Recordings seep in of Molly Drake’s ballad “I Remember”, with its haunting last lines, “When I had thought that we were ‘we’ / But we were ‘you and me’.” And an onstage three-piece band bring in some jazz stylings, as well as some wordless (or, at least, incomprehensible) lyrics.
Sometimes, some of the 12 dancers settle, watching their colleagues studiously as they continue to perform before being swept up themselves and rejoining the fray. And indeed, there is a moment where the house lights come up and the dancers encourage us, the audience, to join in similarly.
There’s a constant, playful inventiveness in evidence. Nothing ever truly stops, with even motionless dancers ready to spring into manic energy at a moment’s notice. The reverse is true, too – a dance floor full of the company going wild to the band’s Latin beat is capable of coming to a halt as one, each dancer’s movement reduced to the sole quivering in one hand.
The use of curtains and the sharply changing colours of Tom Visser’s lighting designs make all the varying choreographic styles and music feel like one coherent, connected whole, like a contiguous dream whose disparate scenes become totally coherent in the moment. Even one fully naked male dancer, briefly coming downstage to stare out at the audience and dance in a semi-simian pose, feels like he belongs.
This, then, is a journey through the theatricality of dance, in all its forms and all its expressions. A mesmeric confluence of styles, moods and rhythms that is both a tribute to both the power of dreams and the magic of theatricality.
All too often, even the most intense of dreams disappear into dust as we wake. It is unlikely that anyone witnessing Theatre of Dreams will forget it so quickly.
Runs until 18 October 2025
