Political Mother
BAM | Brooklyn Academy of Music
Hofesh
Shecter’s first evening-length work, Political
Mother, is a brute and provocative tableau of fervid human interactions
wrapped in a dystopian abyss. We are dislodged from the comforts of our
sanguine perceptions of the world and nudged into our deepest cynicisms of it. This
work enabled me to think intently about what it means to be voiceless and in
captivity within a top-down chain of command that is both ruthless and
destructive.
Shechter,
and his stunningly heterogeneous dancers, shape themselves within haunting,
feisty, and emotionally loaded movement vocabulary. These movements are
paralleled with abrasive music that is ear-splitting. Thrashing electric guitar
players, heavy hitting drummers, and a lead singer whose vocals are so
thunderous it projects out garbling mumbles, accompanies the intensity of the
dancers. The drummers are arranged upstage with the guitarist and lead vocalist
staged directly above them on an elevated platform. The band is a
representation of a hierarchal figure, in which the lead vocalist seemingly characterizes
the head authority. He performs dramatic, out of body movements that are
vicious and billowing. The dancers appear to be the subordinates, performing
ritual like movements that are repetitive and done by rote.
There is an
unnerving temperament in Political Mother
that creates intrinsic havoc and instability. The piece opens with a man
dressed in a samari outfit stabbing himself with a sword. It is a gripping
scene to start off a piece. Dancers then begin to flock in and out, dressed in
shabby clothes, in a tribal manner. The roundedness of the
shoulders and upper back, the insightful gesticulation of the fingers and
hands, and the disorderly nature of the dancers thread a voluminous narrative
of what it means to survive in a tumultuous, power driven society. Another
incisive portion of the piece occurs when a man appears with a gun and slowly
walks behind all of the other members of this tribe-like cohort, as they stand
in a horizontal line, waiting for their fate. This nerve-racking incident fills
one with extreme trepidation but so vividly illustrates the complex psychology
of survival and how far one will go to come out alive. We are being entangled
within this web of constant conflict but given a moment to smirk once the words
where there is pressure there is folkdance
brightly lights up against the backdrop of the stage. It is up to the
individual to interpret the meaning of this quasi-amusing statement.
In the final
moments of Political Mother, Shechter
takes the seventy-minute piece and retrogrades it in a matter of minutes. I
found this to be one of the more compelling aspects of the work. These
dexterous dancers facilitated the psychotically rapid movement with ease and
mastery. The lengthiness felt necessary in that it informed and foreshadowed
future events, which would later be the retrograde sequence. I felt I was given
enough time to process, access, extrapolate, and organize all that had occurred
into a clear context, which made for the retrograde a dazzling experience. If
it were any shorter it would have felt rushed and I believe every moment of the
piece had valuable significance.
Shechter is
a master at crafting movement that permeates and rattles the nervous system. He
is thorough in how he structures an allegorical frame, for the overarching thesis
of control, by way of hostile movement phrases. Although the intensity of the
movement and music appeared to be the dominating force, moments of softness and
stillness sporadically sprinkled throughout this raging and ambitious
performance.
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