What is there to say about the Hofesh Shechter company performance last night... a lot. The work was fierce and intense. The dancing was stunning and skilled and unrestrained. The scale of the performance may have been the perfect way to wrap up the Fluid Festival, to feel a sense of unity and a collective energy to go out and…. I don’t know.

The performance’s ferocious physicality called the audience to action. The dancers’ pumping fists and musicians’ pounding drums are universal calls to unite and act. What exactly In your rooms was calling us to do isn’t crystal clear, but it doesn’t matter so much as the fact that we were called to do something and we all felt it together.

The big statements and large themes in Shechter’s work requires his cast of twelve dancers and four musicians to fulfill. Even with that many bodies he gets even more impact out of every image by amplifying it with lots of repetition and unison movement. It’s pretty clear his dance is talking about big things and addressing a society that includes us in our seat and one that also matters to us.

The first question asked in the chat back was about how Shechter felt we were as an audience in comparison to the other audiences that the company has performed for on this tour. Shechter loved the question and reassured us that we performed well and I would have to agree. For a performing arts community that can be at times inconsistent and divided we showed up and were there full force last night. Sharing that experience with a packed house of fellow artists and supporters of the arts was awesome. There was something shaken up in that theatre that I predict will linger on our skins for a while. I hope that next time we sit down in the theatre together a little taste of last nights fist-pumping energy might still hang in the air between us.