Back S.O.S. – Songs of Sequence

Yasmeen Godder has been exploring the concept of empathy in her work since 2019. Her partners in research and experience are the company’s dancers, co-creators and the audience: with their help, she has developed a complex movement language of physical images, actions and rituals. The motional practices, either individual or collective, create a space that enables mutual dependence, devotion and a multi-layered experience of togetherness.

S.O.S. – Songs of Sequence is the fourth chapter in Godder’s ongoing research, channeling together all the fluxes of knowledge accumulated so far. Presenting the show at the Museum, with an ensemble of 11 dancers in front of an audience and together with it, focuses the gaze and the formalistic dimension of the movements, and illuminates the way in which abstract formality can be charged with the most profound human contexts. The extensive experience of working with an audience that Godder and her company have accumulated reaches its pinnacle during their residency at the Museum: five consecutive days, three hours at a time. Visitors are welcome to join – as viewers, witnesses or active contributors, and participate in a joint voyage towards creating an ad-hoc, empathy-based community. The pandemic years have made this concept more relevant than ever, and the call for help implied in the title injects a dimension of urgency into a work that is conducted between the intimate and the monumental, between calm and storm, between expansion and depletion. As the show progresses, the bare gallery, with the bodies moving in it, can be imagined as one, living and breathing body.

The work premiered in TLV Museum of Art on February 2023, Supported by Acziun Program of Muzeum Susch, Switzerland