Who is choreographer Hofesh Shechter?

Multi-award-winning choreographer, filmmaker, composer and Artistic Director of his eponymous UK-based dance company, he is, it’s safe to say, a pretty big deal.

But we’re also aware that not everyone who stops by the Southbank Centre is a dance aficionado, and so ahead of the London-premiere of Shechter’s IN THE BRAIN in our Queen Elizabeth Hall this summer, we wanted to offer an introduction to the man behind this performance that is part rave, part ritual.

One of the most exciting artists making dance work for both stage and film, Shechter is known for composing atmospheric music scores that complement the unique physicality of his own choreography. And here’s a little bit more about how he got in here.

Music was his introduction to the arts

Born in Jerusalem in 1975 Shechter was ‘sent’ to study the piano from the age of five – ‘I say sent because I really hated it,’ he told Danz’ Lauren Sanderson in a 2019 interview, before adding ‘but I eventually fell in love with it’. He continued to play the piano, but also began folk dancing at school. Recognising Shechter’s talent for dance his teacher sent him to audition for a folk dance company where he ‘fell in love with the lifestyle and the challenge’, and spoon dropped the piano and began dancing.

His dedication to dance almost suffered military intervention

After studying ballet and modern dance at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Shechter progressed to Tel Aviv’s Batsheva Dance Company, but at 18 was conscripted into the Israel Defence Force. Conscription means three years military service, but thankfully for Shechter he only had to endure four weeks of active training, before being assigned to night time clerical duties, which left him free to continue to train with Batsheva in the day. 

He left Israel in his twenties

The effect of having to endure military service left Shechter ‘asking a lot of questions’, and in the wake of 9/11 he took the decision to head to Europe. ‘Israel became an even more intense place,’ he told The Guardian’s Judith Mackrell in 2009. ‘Politics and war were pouring through the windows and doors; they were everywhere. At that time, I just wanted to deal with art. I needed a quiet place to go inside myself’. He found that place briefly in Paris, but then more permanently here in England.

And formed his own dance company in his thirties

In 2008, having settled here in England, Hofesh Shechter the man formed Hofesh Shechter the dance company, one of internationally diverse dancers who ‘celebrate and inspire the freedom of the human spirit through dance’. Such has been the success of Shechter’s company that in 2018 he created Shechter II, a dynamic young company composed of recent graduates. And reiterating his belief that dance can bring about meaningful change he’s also established Shechter Moves, a learning, engagement and development programme for young people aged 14 and over.

His influences stretch from dance studio to film studio

Though some of his earliest artistic encounters came from his father’s record collection – an eclectic mix of Chopin, Bach, Queen and Pink Floyd – Shechter’s most notable influences come from the worlds of dance and film. From the former he’s cited American dancer William Forsythe, Swedish ballet choreographer Mats Ek and Belgian director Wim Vandekeybus. And from the latter, Stanley Kubrick (‘a genius of storytelling’) Paul Thomas Anderson and Charlie Kaufman – ‘I’m really inspired by connections,’ he told The Arts Desk in a 2014 interview, ‘the way these artists place things with one another and make you think’. But it’s not all high brow, and Shechter is not one for rewriting history, noting that as a child, 1980s favourites The Goonies, Gremlins and Back to the Future had as much of an influence on him as dance did at that age. ‘I don’t think I ever really grew up beyond 16,’ he told The Guardian’s Lyndsey Winship in a 2024 interview.

Don’t call him a rock star, at least not of dance

Shechter’s departure from Israel in the early 2000s coincided with a point at which he was questioning dance as a calling. He’d returned to music, playing drums with the rock group The Human Beings, and studying music in Paris. He was still with the band when he first came to the UK and continues to arrange the music for most of his productions. ‘I wanted to be a rock star,’ he told The Guardian’s Winship, although he was less enamoured with the label when he began to earn it through his choreography. His contemporary works, particularly a performance of Political Mother at Brixton Academy in 2015 saw him Shechter referred to as ‘the rock star of contemporary dance’ – ‘that’s not what I meant,’ he explained to Winship, citing it instead as ‘the biggest insult that I’ve received over and over’.

He sees connection as the purpose of dance

For Shechter the secret to the success of his dance work is that most of the time ‘it’s not about dance’. Speaking to Bachtrack’s Laurine Mortha in 2018 he explained, ‘as much as I love the mathematics of dance and working with timing, there must be something deeper which matters to me…  I think a personal work is also easier for the audience to relate to. Processing something personal also means processing something honest and emotional.’ It’s a point he expanded on further in his 2024 Guardian interview, saying ‘dance and music are tools [to get to] something that matters much more, which is the human experience… in the end we’re having a visceral experience for an hour and a half and feeling like we went through something.’

And he seeks to avoid politics

Or at least he avoids offering answers or guidance when it comes to politics. ‘There is no political agenda, no political purpose,’ he told Bachtrack’s Mortha when asked if there was a political dimension to his work. ‘But there is,’ he continued, ‘a political influence: the work is created under the pressure of a very politicized world. It opens political questions but there are no answers anywhere… my work is a sort of observation, an observation without answers.’ Six years later Shechter was still keen to stress his avoidance of politics when speaking to The Guardian. ‘I’m clear about my choice in life,” he told Winship, “and it’s to make dance and music, because I believe those things make the world a better place. I believe that.’

His choreography has long been hailed as cinematic

And so it was perhaps inevitable that he would one day bring his choreography and his love of film together in one project. He did this first in 2018 creating the Hofech Shechter Company’s first dance film Clowns, with the BBC. Further film works have followed including his directorial debut for the multi-award award-winning short film POLITICAL MOTHER: The Final Cut which was filmed at Battersea Arts Centre during the Covid-19 lockdown. And in 2021 he collaborated with French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch to work on the feature En corps for which Shechter also wrote the soundtrack.

His work has appeared in a number of places

Even if you haven’t seen one of Shechter’s many dance pieces performed live, or one of the aforementioned films, there’s still a strong chance you’ve encountered his choreography somewhere else. On the stage he has choreographed for Nico Mulhy’s Two Boys at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and for Motortown and The Arsonists at the Royal Court Theatre. He choreographed Broadway’s revival of Fiddler on the Roof – winning a Tony Award for his troubles – and created the ballet Red Carpet for the Paris Opera. He even choreographed the dance sequence that opened the second series of Channel 4 television show Skins.

And he’s also popped up at the Southbank Centre on more than one occasion

Back in 2007 the Southbank Centre was one of three London venues, alongside The Place and Sadler’s Wells to jointly commission the critically acclaimed In your rooms from Shechter and his dance company. Across performances at each venue the work grew to fit the increasing available space – from the intimate setting of The Place to our Queen Elizabeth Hall to its final form at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. More recently, Shechter returned in 2024, this time with Shechter II for another new work and the London premiere of From England with Love. And of course this summer, he’s back again with Shechter II’s new full-length work IN THE BRAIN.