“Fiddler on the Roof” is about balance. The idea is there in the title image and at the start of the show, when the dairyman protagonist, Tevye, explains that the people of his shtetl maintain their balance by relying on tradition. Much of the plot challenges him to keep his footing while adapting to new ways.  Anyone staging a revival of “Fiddler,” especially on Broadway, faces a similar test: how to offer a fresh take without tilting too far from what audiences know and love. For the “Fiddler” now playing at the Broadway Theater, one of the bolder decisions taken by the director, Bartlett Sher, was to hire someone to update the choreography made by the show’s original director, Jerome Robbins.  On the one hand, Mr. Sher’s choice, Hofesh Shechter, is an outsider who had never choreographed a Broadway show. He runs an acclaimed dance company in London, where in recent months a series of performances billed as Hofest has spread his aggressive and cheeky aesthetic across multiple theaters, including the Brixton Academy (home to rock and pop music) and the Royal Opera House. His company has performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He has choreographed for the Royal Ballet, and his works are in the repertory of major European dance troupes and American ones like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.  On the other hand, Mr. Shechter was born and raised in Israel, and the first dances he learned were Jewish folk dances. “That’s the DNA of my dance education,” he explained recently in the lobby of the Broadway Theater. “I have been to Orthodox weddings,” he said. “I know how it looks like, how it has to feel. I didn’t have to research. My life is the research.”  Growing up in Jerusalem, Mr. Shechter, now 40, watched the 1971 “Fiddler” movie on television. (The original stage show is from 1964.) “It was kind of a big deal in Israel,” he recalled, “a Jewish show so successful around the world and one that carries the essence of the Jewish story: It goes from bad to worse.”  Mr. Shechter had previously passed on several offers to choreograph musicals. But he had worked on Mr. Sher’s 2013 production of Nico Muhly’s “Two Boys” at the Metropolitan Opera House, and his own connection to “Fiddler” made it seem like the right fit — especially, he said, after Mr. Sher told him, “I want it to be real.”  For the current revival of “The King and I,” Mr. Sher asked the choreographer Christopher Gattelli to hew closely to the original Jerome Robbins dances. But in “Fiddler,” Mr. Sher said, “the dances grow out of real situations, so I thought it would be more fun to reinvestigate them.”  Since Mr. Shechter had “grown up in that universe,” Mr. Sher said, “I thought the conversation between him and Robbins would be interesting.”  It isn’t the first time that the Jerome Robbins Foundation has allowed alterations. Christopher Pennington, director of the foundation and the Robbins Rights Trust, explained in an email that “while the right to use Jerome Robbins’s choreography and direction are included in licenses, such use is not necessarily required.”  CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times  He added, “We felt that both Bart and Hofesh could be trusted to serve the material appropriately and deserved the opportunity to do so.”  Mr. Shechter said his mandate from Mr. Sher was, “You have to base it on the Jerome Robbins choreography, but you’re free to do whatever you want.” Grinning, he added, “I didn’t know exactly what that meant.”  For what is probably the most famous dance moment in the show, the wedding scene in which bearded men place bottles on their black hats and link hands, Mr. Shechter has created what he called “a 2.0 version,” because, he said, “we’re more skillful now.” Whereas in the original the men climatically bent down to slide a bit on their knees, he has two men assist a third in much faster gliding, an effect close to floor-skimming flight.  Such low-riding is characteristic of Mr. Shechter’s style. The dancers in his own company often slink like vehicles with dropped suspensions, their posture concave and their knees bent low. Their hands would graze the ground, were their fingers not grabbing at the air in front of them or stretched heavenward.  In his “Fiddler” choreography, hands are again prominent — fingers splayed not openly, as in the “jazz hands” of Broadway convention, but twisted. Even the puppets in Tevye’s invented dream hold their hands like that, with their grotesquely long fingers exaggerating the effect.  What is the significance of this physicality? “We can speak about the meaning it carries,” Mr. Shechter said, “and we can find a lot: The arms are up, the head is down. We try to reach, but there’s an oppressive feel.”  He said he was most loyal to the original choreography in the bottle dance. About the rest of the Robbins material, he said, “For my taste, it was not energetic enough.”  Yet in making it more energetic, he had to take care that the dancers, drawn both from Broadway and from concert dance, not appear too skillful. “During rehearsals, we made things that are more complex, but we took them out,” he said. “What they do now is not nothing, but you can get away with the feeling that it’s a group of guys in the shtetl that worked on it.”  In Mr. Sher’s view, Mr. Shechter found the balance. “It’s chaotic, raw, improvisatory — Hofesh calls it ‘smoky,’ always pushing into new places,” he said. Yet, “as organic as it looks, if they really hit the accents where Hofesh wants, it’s significantly more amazing. If it’s too loose, it falls apart.”  Reviews of Mr. Shechter’s alterations have been mixed. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout found Mr. Shechter’s dances to have a “folk-like brawn and thrust that is entirely persuasive in its own right.” But in Newsday, Linda Winer disparaged the “busy, wiggly-armed, contorted dances,” declaring, “You have to be better than this to get flexible with Jerome Robbins.”  For Mr. Shechter, conforming to the strictures of a Broadway show took some adjustment. “The editing is quite harsh,” he said. “People are always looking at the watch and saying, ‘That is too long.’”  At the same time, he found the experience to be lighter than working on his own. “There was a corridor I had to walk,” he said, which was easier than total freedom. “I was worried about coming to Broadway and it feeling cheap, but it felt good.” And he learned something about creating for a broader public.  “A musical is built to carry the audience, no problems,” he said, “while in my work, sometimes I say: ‘You connect. You don’t connect. Good luck!’ ” Working on “Fiddler” — in which “there is also a place where you can feel something darker and deeper,” he said — has made him ponder the relationship between show and audience.  “My work reaches 50,000 people a year,” he said during previews. “This show hasn’t even opened yet, and maybe 40,000 people have already seen it. It makes you think.”  A version of this article appears in print on January 10, 2016, on page AR13 of the New York edition with the headline: In ‘Fiddler,’ a Balancing Act to Rival Tevye’s. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Hofesh Shechter had never choreographed for a Broadway show, but his childhood experience led him to embrace the challenge of adjusting the work of Jerome Robbins.