The Grand Finale is a powerful rendering of the apocalypse, in which despair and joy aren’t juxtaposed so much as they are indistinguishable from one another.
Grand Finale
Choreography and music by: Hofesh Shechter
Performed by: Hofesh Shechter Company
Venue: Bluma Appel Theatre
Presented by: Canadian Stage
The postmodernists believed that meaning is constructed out of difference – that we only understand despair through our reference to joy. A word is encoded, not just with its opposite, but with every word that wasn’t chosen in its stead. Think about this for too long and you might worry you’ve hit the limits of language, where all meaning is co-dependent and collapsible.
No moment in this two-act work with 10 dancers contains an easily nameable feeling.
So, forget language and think about dance. Imagine this difference turned into something visual and experiential, stretched out in front of you as image and movement. This is the power of Hofesh Shechter’s Grand Finale, which opened in Toronto at Canadian Stage on Wednesday night.
In Shechter’s rendering of the apocalypse, despair and joy aren’t juxtaposed so much as they are indistinguishable from one another. Loss is measured only by the beauty and intensity of what there is to lose. No moment in this two-act work with 10 dancers contains an easily nameable feeling; every emotion is haunted by its opposite – and then, perhaps, another 10.
In the Grand Finale, men are seen dragging the limp bodies of women in an eerie, posthumous duet.
The U.K.-based, Israeli choreographer has created a landscape that feels both beyond time and acutely of the here-and-now. Using several towering monoliths that are moved around to define the space, Shechter tells a story that is both non-literal and non-linear.
People die and are resurrected. Lovers show solidarity from beyond the grave. Beneath shifting cones of white and orange light – the dramatic lighting is by Tom Visser, who designed Crystal Pite’s extraordinary Betroffenheit – the dancers hustle, reel, fight and collapse.
The sense of ensemble is crucial, but there’s an unshakeable loneliness on stage, too. We might face the end together, but we know too well that we’ll experience it alone, and our experiences will remain unshared.
A quintet of musicians travels through the space playing Tchaikovsky.
While technically simple, Shechter’s choreography is full of subtlety. Every twist, shuffle and contraction has its own life in an individual body and there’s sensuality wrought from these little differences in each dancer. Shechter builds minor, sensitive phrases into exultant communal expressions without any sense of labour.
Violence is pitted against romance; neither feels used in vain. His use of pause and stillness can be breathtaking. At one point, the dancers turn en masse and seem to hover over a precipice as they stare in our direction – the suspension is gripping and time feels slowed. A couple of refrains are deployed carefully. One sees men lifting and dragging the limp bodies of women in an eerie, posthumous duet.
The other uses the effect of a stretched mouth – a mute scream. The latter isn’t original, but Shechter establishes it in an original way, letting the image build organically over a sequence of tableaus. He has a great talent for this sort of organic build, which enables us to endow often very abstract images with emotional meaning.
Shechter uses the effect of a stretched mouth – a mute scream.
A quintet of musicians travels through the space playing Tchaikovsky, which is infused with Shechter’s original, and heavily amplified, percussive score. The second act has more of a revelatory, ecstatic atmosphere and, through the use of coiling wrists and shimmying shoulders, we get inflections of the Middle East and Ashkenazi traditions. In these moments, the violence can suggest Palestine and Israel as much as it can suggest environmental disaster.
While the work is multimedia in its synthesis of live music and design, Grand Finale distills something of dance’s singularity. The sense of storytelling is neither literal nor typically narrative – it’s a story about bodies, told through movement, but it’s encoded with the most urgent anxieties of the day.
Grand Finale continues until Nov. 18 (canadianstage.com).