Hofesh Shechter Company

A DanceHouse and Vancouver New Music copresentation. At the Playhouse on Friday, November 6. No remaining performances

First, a caveat: a Hofesh Shechter Company dance show is so visceral, so all-consuming, that you reduce its impact by attempting to put it into words.

In his crowning work, In your rooms, you’re inundated with flashes of the human condition—tormented vignettes broken up by cinematic blackouts. A couple grips each other in a slow dance as if their lives depended on it; a throbbing crowd pounds the air with clenched fists; a line of bodies hunches and scuttles on crouched legs, like they’re bearing some collective weight on their backs.

In his troupe’s first Vancouver appearance, the rising U.K. star proved himself as gifted a composer as he is a choreographer. For both his haunting, beat-pumped music and his primal, athletic dance, he often plays with sampling. His choreography is brilliantly fragmented, sometimes looped and repeated, even rewound, and spat out again in seemingly random order. Imagine electronica vet Amon Tobin mashing up human bodies and heavy ideas as well as working with turntables, and you get somewhere close—but still not close enough—to the effect.

The first piece on this double bill, Uprising—an exhilarating, testosterone-oozing ode to men and manhood—was the most directly appealing. It opened with seven guys in everyday khaki cargos and long-sleeved Ts, striding straight toward us out of the darkness to the sound of an ear-splitting smash-smash-smash beat. What followed was a cacophony of studies on aggro gesture: men loped on all fours, apelike, across the floor; they clutched each other’s heads in wrestling holds that morphed into something comforting and intimate; and in a universal sign of camaraderie, they patted each other on the back, gradually becoming more violent until the hitting burst into a brawl.

If any of this sounds literal, it wasn’t: it was rhythmic and contemporary, propelled at warp speed, with hints of hip-hop and the explosive, from-the-gut movement of Tel Aviv’s Batsheva Dance Company (where the Israeli-born Shechter cut his teeth).

But for sheer ambition and complexity, In your rooms was the mind-blower of the evening. In their abrupt, frantic vignettes, the 11 dancers came off as humans struggling to connect amid cosmic-scale chaos. The performers were all so fully committed—when they flailed their hands upward in one of the piece’s almost ritualistic motifs, it looked like their arms were going to fly out of their shoulder sockets—that it was impossible to separate a standout. Adding to the intensity, a quintet of musicians from Britain played Shechter’s eerie soundscape of sobbing strings and pulsing percussion, appearing live in their own dimly lit, square “room” that floated above the dancers. The overall impression? Sound and fury—signifying everything.

This is the cutting edge, folks—proof that dance can speak powerfully to the here and now. And a cheering crowd jumped to its feet to give Shechter, and DanceHouse, a big thank you for bringing us into the international loop.