Adelaide Festival. Hofesh Shechter Company. 13 Mar 2026

 

Dreams are the subconscious at play, food for artists of every creative medium there is. Food for humankinds yearnings, despairs and joys.

 

Choreographer and Composer Hofesh Shechter manages to meld mediums of theatre, dance, music and cinema offering a stunning production profoundly giving life to the psychological realm of dream worlds, which seem at once obvious to you intellectually after the fact, as the experience of the production is pondered.

Yet actual experience of the work in the moment, like all dreaming, is beyond comprehension in words as it grips your soul.

Does one ever understand a dream? The forces behind dreaming?

We would all say we feel them, yes? It’s a primal, emotive thing.

 

The primal and emotional are foremost in the first half of this 90-minute work.

It begins intriguingly as a suited dancer in the front row of Festival Theatre, while house lights are on, climbs onto the stage and disappears under the stage curtain.

Once the lights are down, Shechter unleashes on the audience a realisation of dreams and dreaming all too close to reality psychologically.

He does this by means of framing whiplash wild phrases of ensemble movement using two layers of moving curtains to shape the scope of what we see, in partnership with Tom Visser’s excellently aware lighting, spanning the technical requirements of both film and stage.

 

Visser and Shechter deliver a mise en scène alike to the modern mind’s eye of scene to scene dream experience, as lighting moves from deep near darkness to revelatory light. Most significant of all is the sudden drops to instant darkness, back to light, motion and darkness again, the very episodic nature of a dream.

 

Shechter’s score played live is a masterful expression of the inner self in its other worldly ways; ripping techno riffs and beats backed by wind instruments expressive of a place beyond reality, in which physical expression of psychological chaos and emotion is at its heights.

Then, like dreams do, tempo shifts.

 

We enter a dirty blues phrase musically. The band appear on stage dressed in red; Norman Jankowski, Barttomiej Janiak, and James Keane. Frenzy shifts down several notches ushering in a reasonable period of what seems like a red lighting swathed Twin Peaks feeling world and almost happy salsa dance like atmosphere.

Which does not last.

 

On the mad dream rolls. Even a waking moment, as house lights come up and the audience is itself encouraged to dance. Then, to sit, to ‘dream’ again.

 

That in itself is the power of this work. To take an audience deep into the inner depths of dreaming in the dark theatre of fantastical sights, sounds lights and feelings, awaken and submerge them again.

 

David O’Brien

 

When: 13 to 15 Mar

Where: Festival Theatre

Bookings: Closed