What is left for us to do when we feel the end is approaching? What would it be to have one last dance, one last celebration?
In Grand Finale, Hofesh Shechter creates a world in the fog where dance and music are finally together; like the vivid encounter of two lovers that have been separated for a long time.
Shechter’s composition in both choreography and music reveals his love for both practices and a desire of having them live on the edge side by side.
Ten dancers and six musicians from all over the world live a hypnotic trance in front of our eyes. Not only they share the same space, but also they experience together a journey of ups and downs, of ecstasy and melancholy.
A now familiar language of movement whose clarity and precision continues to excite with perfect unisons, beautiful contrasts in dynamic and emotive gestures, musicality in every inch of the skin. The pure joy of dancing!
And in between all that wild festivity, we see bodies being dragged and walls moving right at us. The contradictions then begin.
How do we dance with the absence? How do we party together if there’s a wall between us?
Grand Finale is an intense collision between light and darkness, strength and weakness, energy and passivity, life and death.
It seems to me that I have the experience of looking at a still image. A photograph that then goes on with slight variations throughout the end of the piece.
At some point along the way, I know there’s nothing that will surprise me or that will change my engagement with the work. (Except for the bubbles, that with a gorgeous waltz fall from the ceiling; an image of hopeful beauty).
Shechter’s Grand Finale frames a situation where bodies exist in a limbo where energetic tribal drums and nostalgic cellos, screams of celebration and inert faces coexist. A memorable farewell, or rather, a coming back to life.
Reviewed as Sadler’s Wells on 6th of July by Coral Montejano Cantoral
