✦ Origins ✦
Hofesh Shechter created Grand Finale in 2017 for his own company, choreographing and composing the piece himself as he had done for most of his prior work. It received its world premiere at La Villette in Paris, presented with Théâtre de la Ville, in June 2017, before receiving its UK premiere at Sadler's Wells that September. Ten dancers share the stage with a live band of musicians in evening dress, with Nell Catchpole and Yaron Engler credited as music collaborators alongside Shechter.
Where Political Mother built its imagery around a recognizable, if unnamed, authoritarian figure, Grand Finale turns toward something more existential: a vision of a civilization in collapse, with no single villain or event driving the action. The score blends Shechter's own electronic and orchestral writing with fragments of existing classical repertoire, most recognizably a waltz drawn from Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow, which surfaces amid the darker, more abrasive textures of Shechter's own music like a fragment of a more genteel world that the piece has already lost.
What Makes It Distinct
The piece's defining image is Tom Scutt's set: a series of massive, freestanding black monoliths that glide silently around the stage throughout the performance, continually reconfiguring the playing space without a single blackout or pause. Critics have described the slabs as suggesting, by turns, a cityscape of tower blocks, a wailing wall, concrete bunkers, or open tombstones - the ambiguity is deliberate, letting the same architecture read as city, battlefield, and graveyard depending on how the dancers move around and against it.
That instability runs through the score as much as the set. Shechter lets the music swing between driving, percussive passages and sudden digressions into the Lehár waltz, and the choreography follows suit, alternating between full-company unison collapse and passages of surprising, almost vaudevillian comedy. The effect is a piece that critics have called "part gig, part dance, part theatre" - by turns comic, bleak, and beautiful - building toward a finale that piles bodies together around a single praying figure and pairs of dancers facing a dead-end wall, leaving open whether the image reads as despair or a last, stubborn instance of human connection.
Legacy
Grand Finale was widely reviewed as one of Shechter's most accomplished works, earning a nomination for the 2018 Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production and a 2019 Dora Award for Outstanding Touring Production following performances in Canada. It toured extensively across Europe, North America, and Australia in the years after its premiere, cementing Shechter's reputation well beyond the UK venues, including Sadler's Wells and Brighton Dome, most closely associated with his company.
Within Shechter's own output, the piece is often read as a companion and counterpoint to Political Mother: it retains that earlier work's scale, live-music-driven structure, and interest in crowd behavior, but trades explicit political imagery for a more abstract, existential register, treating collective mortality rather than any single regime as its subject.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Hofesh Shechter.