Disturbing, Delightful: Hofesh Shechter’s Double Murder on tour
By Kaija Pepper
It’s complicated. Not just Hofesh Shechter’s Clowns — the chilling first half of Double Murder — but the audience’s enthusiastic response to the work, with its almost casual descent into killing. To be clear, there is no cinematic realism, no close-ups of battered or broken bodies, which are viewed every day on television shows in homes around the world. The tale is told solely through dance, with choreographed depictions of shooting, stabbing, and garrotting inserted so deftly into the flow of entertainment they become just part of the aesthetics of this disturbingly fascinating and provocative work.
Clowns, which opened its Canadian tour on October 21 at Vancouver’s Playhouse theatre as part of the DanceHouse season, doesn’t give us time to be repulsed. There is no long set-up to the deaths, no plot of jealousy, revenge, or drug-running. There is no dwelling on the effects on individuals and society. But that is part of the power of this dance, which communicates in the moment, viscerally, through shapeshifting theatrical abstraction that builds its own reality.
Clowns was the Israeli-born, London-based Shechter’s first piece for Nederlands Dans Theater, in 2016, and then became a BBC film. The 45-minute work felt honed to a state of high intensity, with the cast of 10 devouring the wild trajectory of Shechter’s trademark mix of movement and body postures. From Israeli folk dance to ballet, from hunched gremlins to off-kilter clowns to flamboyant showmen and women, arms raised in triumph, the dancing was masterfully staged and performed.
The musical accompaniment is mostly Shechter’s own electronic composition, as is typical of the artist, combining a menacing repeating drumbeat with eery vocals. There is an orchestral opening number, a fiery rendition of Offenbach’s famous cancan music to which the dancers respond with spirited, loose-limbed hijinks that get their — and our — blood racing. Add a scarlet curtain upstage, a few strings of light above, and vaguely 19th-century circus-inflected costumes (some ruffs around the neck, a scarlet scarf, a sort-of frock coat) and you have all you need for this unsettling study of human behaviour.
The Double Murder double bill premiered in 2021 at London’s Sadler’s Wells. The second half is made up of Shechter’s The Fix, a shorter work for seven dancers. The Fix is set in the same gloom, though with more light coming through, and more hope, too. It features the dancers sitting calmly in crosslegged meditation, and also sharing (literal) hugs.
My mind, though, was still with Clowns, that macabre tale of clowns and killers who are eager for their climactic moments of applause. The Vancouver audience — myself included — gave them all the attention they could want, with a rapturous standing ovation that is in some ways a bewildering response to such a dark piece. The love-fest of The Fix did help send us out into the night with peace of mind.
Double Murder tours to Toronto, October 27-29, at Fleck Dance Theatre, Montreal, November 2-5, at Théatre Maisonneuve and Ottawa, November 9-10, at the National Arts Centre.
