Britain’s Hofesh Shechter Company returns to Hong Kong for the first time since 2014 with the much-heralded double-bill programme “Double Murder”.

In this case, it’s the devil who has all the best tunes.

The nightmarish Clowns is brilliantly imagined and starkly powerful, while The Fix, intended to counteract the darkness of its companion piece, is more anticlimax than antidote.

Created in 2018, Clowns explores how we have become desensitised to violence and see it as mere entertainment, through constant exposure to video games, movies or even news coverage. Hofesh Shechter, the dance company’s founder, is British-Israeli and the current events in his birth country make this theme particularly relevant today.

It opens with the full ensemble of 11 dancers performing a superficially high-spirited, yet disturbingly frenzied routine to Offenbach’s Can-Can.

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The lights go down and the mood changes as the dancers form a line across the stage and start moving slowly in unison, with repeated small steps on a continuous double beat, like a heartbeat.

This sequence produces an intensely sinister effect and a sense of menace builds as the dancers advance towards the audience, then turn but continue to look backwards at us over their shoulders as they move away.

Similar moments alternate as the piece progresses, with wild sequences of chaos and increasing violence. Gleefully the dancers beat each other up, slash each other’s throats or shoot each other in the head – then the victims spring back to life and in turn kill their killers.

Shechter is composer as well as choreographer and his throbbing electronic score and the dance are inseparably intertwined, drawing on each other to build the power of the piece, as deceptively simple movements are used to create mesmerising effects.

There’s no doubt that this is the work of a mature choreographer with a distinctive voice and something original to say.

The piece is a little too long and becomes repetitive – but then perhaps that’s Shechter’s point: the more times you see such acts of violence, the less impact they have on you.

The dancers are simply magnificent – their inexhaustible energy, fierce commitment and deep affinity with the piece are thrilling to watch.

The Fix was created in 2021 and while the idea of juxtaposing the brutality of Clowns with a portrayal of compassion and humanity makes sense, the execution is disappointingly banal: not so much “a tender, fragile energy” (to quote the publicity material) as Kumbaya around the campfire.

However well intentioned, it comes over as naive and falls flat compared with the demonic energy of Clowns.

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The Fix begins with more violence but the dancers (a smaller group of seven) gradually move away from this towards a gentler way of life.

They sit meditating peacefully or gather around someone strumming a guitar. When one of their number has a seizure, they seek to comfort him until he is healed.

It ends with the dancers first embracing one another, then climbing down from the stage and hugging members of the audience.

Reminiscent of how in some churches the congregation is asked to exchange a kiss or handshake of peace with their neighbours, some will find it spiritually uplifting, while others will be squirming with embarrassment.

“Double Murder”, Hofesh Shechter Company, New Vision Arts Festival, Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Reviewed: October 20