“Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar,” Sigmund Freud famously wrote. Emblematic of his psychoanalytic work, his emphasis on symbolic iconography in family relations set him apart from his colleague and friend, Carl Jung, whom he mentored. Jung popularized symbology in myth and religion as the more reliable repository for sourcing answers to the question, “What explains human behavior?”
According to the choreographer, Hofesh Shechter, his “Red Carpet” is just a red carpet. It’s on the audience to bring to it whatever symbology may suggest itself. As for this audience member, while I saw no red carpet on the stage, I did view Red Carpet’s US debut in the context of two events weighted with symbolic resonance—Shechter having been born and raised in Israel, and the Hamas terrorist attack launched on that country’s Nova Concert on October 7, 2023, from the Gaza Strip. They suggest a focus for reconciling symbols and symbology that Shechter likely would have disavowed when he made the 65-minute-long piece. In a YouTube interview, he says that he avoids politics when making art because politics is the domain of big leaders who often make even bigger mistakes. Such a posture, which discounts both the fate and potential power of those who suffer the consequences of the big leaders’ significant errors, seems cavalier in these times, despite Shechter’s well-intentioned, if antiseptic approach.
After the show, while I waited for my ride, someone, a total stranger, approached me. “Did you just see that dance performance in there?” He felt the need to confess to me that what he saw, he did not at all “get,” and asked me what I thought. Identifying myself as a dance writer reviewing the show, I then asked whether he had liked it. He hadn’t: too long, too repetitive, and didn’t “speak” to him. I asked him whether he had been thinking about the Middle East situation as he watched it. Here, I proceeded with caution. Especially on the Berkeley campus, any such inquiry, if it implies support for Israel’s right to exist, can put you at risk for a verbal or physical assault. This time, there were no noisy gangs of threatening protesters in front of the theater as there had been during Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company appearance several months earlier. That situation necessitated beefed-up Mossad-level security checks to enter the theater. Nonetheless, the synagogue stabbings in London, reported earlier in the day, were on my mind. As he spoke, I began to mentally compose my review from notes I had scrawled, as I often do during a show. I shared the results with my interlocutor, as I now do here:
“These are Paris Opera dancers, legatees of ballet traditions that originated in the court of Louis XIV. They have danced stories from a wide swathe of cultures in the classical idiom. Tonight, their near-perfect bodies are given over to the risky business of telling a contemporary story, drawing on tribal traditions, club moves, and contact improv tropes, to capture the excesses of a society in decline and the reactionary subjugation of Jews, scapegoated by Islamist terrorists who have targeted them for total extermination.
“After the club scene, a clutch of repetitive combinations explores and exposes excess. A massive chandelier descends from on high and shines its light on them. A score that ranges from indigenous drumming to techno to sacred music, and on to New Age, leads to a moment that diminishes the dancers, now stripped down to nude leotards. They are sitting tailor-style, in subjugation suggestive of having become hostages. They look upward in supplication. Male dancers in street clothes drag a random number of them upstage, head-first, into darkness, as if into tunnels. As the music takes another direction, they recover, lifting their arms to form a rapturous “V.” Then, as somber chorale music suffuses the house, clumps and strands of dancers literally turn their backs on their flotsam and jetsam past. The band, now lit up, strikes up a resounding coda. The dancers find their footing around the chandelier that illuminates them on their newly solidified foundation.”
My son calls my name from the car’s driver’s seat. My exchange with the stranger ends abruptly. As James drives, we speak about my chat with the stranger. James is a retired ballet dancer. He is completing a degree in engineering at Cal Berkeley. I ask him whether he liked the show. He doesn’t mince words. “It’s danced well, the [Chanel] costumes are exquisite, but the subject matter is thin, and there’s just not enough nuance to justify a 65-minute run. It comes off as self-indulgent without making a comment about self-indulgence, and I had the sense that he made it in the mirror. So, I agree with what that guy said to you.” We continue exchanging impressions until we reach our destination. Later, from an online interview with Shechter by Antony Desvaux, James finds evidence to support his assessment of the piece as “Gatsbyism.” In it, Shechter says the following:
“The title Red Carpet sounds to me like an invitation. Or like a clue. The keyhole through which we glimpse what the piece will look like. At once a color, an idea, an atmosphere. Something visual. Something that opens up the imagination. And simply, I love this title! Beyond the various explanations I could give, I need to fall in love with my titles.
In contemporary dance, the stage is filled with references and expectations, like echoes of life. We all know what red carpets are, but we all have different expectations aroused by them. Red Carpet won’t provide answers or define meaning. It’s a playground for bringing questions and emotions to the surface. I don’t believe the role of dance is to provide solutions. A ballet must remain open, unresolved; that’s its beauty.
“For me, a red carpet first evokes thoughts of glamour. I see a lot of them on my tours, when I stay in a hotel or a bed and breakfast in England. But those red carpets are sometimes not very glamorous. They can be like an old tradition that has aged. We also find glamour in places like Paris’ glorious Palais Garnier, where Red Carpet premiered last June; its plush red velvet was a wonderful contrast to my rougher side. Today, glamour also evokes celebrities, pop culture, and MTV. There’s almost an opposition between the old glamour—that of the Garnier—and today’s glamour. And it’s this contrast that interests me. In Red Carpet, there’s no real story, no narration. It’s above all about a place where energies and emotions unfold. I like the meaning of all this to be sometimes very clear, and other times more confusing, without the audience knowing if we are being serious or grotesque or parodic.
The uncomfortable dimension of the grotesque also interests me; it allows us to show the bad and dirty side of reality, the ways humans organize themselves.
“My ballets always present several coats that can be removed to show what’s underneath. Like makeup, a mannerism, or a tradition.”
It is not the critic’s job to ask the choreographer what he or she had in mind. That question must find an answer in what the work shows and tells the viewer.
Instead of a red carpet, I envisioned a red sea, and the legendary path that ran through it when a miracle divided it. On the road to salvation, which begins and ends on the terra firma of Israel, two men danced self-interrogating solos. Regiments of the resurrected followed in their wake.
Freud and Jung can have their opinions about what this choreographic piece revealed about its choreographer and to me. For this dance writer, a firm believer in Israel’s right to exist, the October 7th survivors’ slogan, “We Shall Dance Again, and Everyone’s Invited,” became the “cigar” I took with me, as I left Berkeley’s red-carpeted Zellerbach for home.
Toba Singer
