We are delighted to work with the Kalamata International Dance Festival once again and this year present Political Mother, a dance performance by the Hofesh Shechter Company - described as an 'audio visual masterpiece' by critics - which closes this year's festival.

Israeli born artist Hofesh Shechter, the enfant terrible of the British dance scene, remarked that he 'became involved with dance because of music'. Winner of the Critic’s Circle National Dance Award for Best Choreography (modern) in 2008, Shechter is one of the UK’s most exciting artists.

Following worldwide acclaim for Uprising and In your rooms, Shechter and his young and talented dance company have quickly established themselves as a leading force on the UK dance scene. Schechter moved to the UK in 2002 and, following a career as a dancer, made his choreographic debut two years later with Fragments.

In Political Mother Shechter maps out mechanisms of power and control, manifestations of submission and resistance, reactions of violence and solidarity. The powerful score, also created by Shechter in collaboration with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and barbicanbite09, is performed on stage by a rock band.

Ten dancers conjure, with their rapid succession of movements, heterogeneous snapshots of rebelling crowds, rock concerts, public speakers in paroxysms, loving couples, exasperated prisoners. Touched by the rapid succession of movement and possessed by the intensity and beat of the 'epic' music, we are inevitably called upon to reflect on the political contradictions of human co-existence.