✦ Who He Is ✦
Hofesh Shechter trained at Jerusalem's Rubin Academy of Music and Dance before joining Batsheva Dance Company, where he danced under Ohad Naharin and absorbed the release-based, internally sourced movement language known as Gaga. He left Israel in the early 2000s, eventually settling in London, and founded Hofesh Shechter Company there in 2008 after several years of freelance and collaborative work. Unusually among contemporary choreographers, Shechter is also a trained musician and composer, and he writes or co-writes much of the original music for his own productions, giving him direct control over the relationship between sound and movement that most choreographers can only shape through collaboration.
Shechter's aesthetic favors large groups of dancers moving in dense, low-to-the-ground unison, often shifting between tribal-feeling, percussive ensemble passages and moments of near-collapse or unison breakdown. His scores blend live and recorded elements — strings, electronic bass, distorted rock textures — into scores that function almost as a second choreographic voice, driving the pacing and emotional temperature of the movement as much as the steps themselves do.
Signature Works
Uprising (2006)
An all-male ensemble work built around themes of group loyalty, aggression, and collapse, an early piece that established Shechter's interest in crowd psychology as choreographic subject matter.
In Your Rooms (2007)
A large-scale ensemble work combining live musicians on stage with dense group choreography, often cited as a turning point in Shechter's international profile.
Political Mother (2010)
Staged with a full rock band and choir positioned above the dancers, this loud, relentless work on authoritarianism and submission became Shechter's most widely toured and discussed piece. Read the full profile →
Grand Finale (2017)
A meditation on conflict and mortality performed against a set of sliding black monoliths, pairing Shechter's original score with recomposed classical fragments.
Style & Method
Shechter choreographs from rhythm outward: rehearsals often begin with music he has already written or sketched, and the dancers' unison phrases are built to sit inside that pulse rather than sit on top of it. His movement retains traces of Gaga's internally generated, texture-driven approach to the body — filtered through his years at Batsheva — but pushes it toward harder-edged, more aggressive group patterning than Naharin's own work typically pursues, with volume and darkness treated as choreographic tools in their own right.
Recognition & Affiliations
Hofesh Shechter Company holds Associate Company status at Sadler's Wells in London, one of several long-term venue relationships that has helped anchor Shechter's touring schedule in the UK even as his commissions abroad have grown. He was appointed OBE for services to dance, formal recognition of a career built almost entirely outside the ballet-institution pipeline that shapes many of the other choreographers profiled on this site.
Legacy
Shechter's fusion of live music production with choreography has influenced how a generation of ensemble-scale contemporary works are staged, and his company has become a reliable box-office draw for festivals and venues seeking work that reads as urgent and contemporary without abandoning technical rigor. His crossover commissions, including choreography for opera and a Tony-nominated credit for the 2015–16 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, reflect the same rhythmic instinct that drives his own company's repertoire.
His dark, crowd-driven aesthetic sits alongside Crystal Pite's large-ensemble work as one of two dominant models for how contemporary choreographers now stage groups of dancers as a single collective force rather than a set of individuals.