Back “Bare on Rust”: Yasmeen Godder’s New Work Is a Visceral, Gut-Wrenching Choreography – Haaretz
Ran Brown
29.12.2025
“Bare on Rust”: Yasmeen Godder’s New Work Is a Visceral, Gut-Wrenching Choreography
The emotions the dancers experience – and express – spread and take shape in the body. This is a beautiful work that speaks directly to the heart.
“Bare on Rust.” A dense, threatening presence
Photo: Vojtch Brtnick
Bare on Rust
Choreography: Yasmeen Godder
Additional creators: Itzik Giuli, Ofer Laufer, Lior Pinsky, Eran Shanny
Venue: Habait Theatre, Jaffa
Next performance: 14.2
“Bare on Rust,” Yasmeen Godder’s new creation, is a visceral, gut-wrenching choreography. It distills her singular movement language into a dizzying whirl of oscillations, rhythms, sensations, and forms that become tangible, surprising embodiments of emotion-present to the point of pain. Freud suggested that pain is a bodily sensation that mediates between inside and outside. Perhaps for this reason the choreography is experienced as painful- because it blurs the distinction between the two. The emotions the dancers experience and express do not arise solely from within, nor are they imposed from without; they pass between them, spreading and incarnating in the body, in form, in an undeniable tension that activates even the core muscles of the audience members, who find themselves contracting in their seats.
The work is a paragon of pure movement. Well, perhaps not exactly pure – rather rusted, contaminated, infected, saturated with experiences etched into the seasoned bodies of the remarkable dancers: Inbal Aloni, Anat Vaadia, Ilana Sara Claire Bellsen, Ofir Yannai, and Godder herself. Young dancers cannot dance like this – exposed, in friction with reality, willing to return again and again to what has already left its mark on their bodies, continuing to rub against it, wallow in it, without defenses and with complete honesty. With persistence and determination, they create a space that precedes recognition and naming – a pure pleasure of dense movement. It is a pre-linguistic, pre-conscious experience that eludes all conceptualization, seizing the entire body and binding dancers and spectators together for an hour.
“Bare on Rust.” The abstract choreography allows a sinking into depths that seem only to expand further and further
Photo: Omer Alsheich
Like a Rothko painting, the abstract choreography allows a sinking into depths that seem only to widen and widen. The stage is lit (lighting design by Ofer Laufer) in green and purple, and the piece begins with the dancers leaning against the walls, while only Inbal Aloni sits at center stage, slowly turning toward the audience.
As in Lior Pinsky’s original music – where the plucked sound of a single string repeats and gradually becomes a melody – the dancers return again and again to isolated gestures, gathering them together, welding a crossing of arms into a full-body turn, joining one another in an identical gesture and then separating. At moments, clear form bursts into what is later experienced as an undefined oscillation – an intense sculptural quality, concentrated, distilled movement. Some of the dancers place a forearm on the floor and tuck their heads into the crook of the elbow; knees dig into the ground, feet lift away. They seem to contract inward, to gather into themselves, yet miraculously their presence only intensifies, becoming dense and threatening.
Later, waves of turbulent movement wash across the stage: the dancers collapse, rise and fall, lie on their sides, an arm and a leg pleading upward, roll onto their backs and stand again, surge forward, drop to their knees, strike their thighs. The movement is raw, coarse, yet not formless. Godder’s aesthetic is ruled by asymmetry, spasm, simultaneity. It is founded on a fractured language – like hair falling across the dancers’ faces, like a leg crossing behind – that holds tension and release, movement and its opposite, at once. The torso slumps forward, suspended over the thigh, yet clenched fists push against the floor; arm muscles interlace from the insistence on the right angle between upper arm and forearm, and the leg rises upward, like a narcissus emerging from the swamp.
In a truly alchemical performance, a fist thrust into an open mouth, a thumb stretching the side of the temple, hands sheltering the knees- these are distilled manifestations of emotion embodied in form, glowing like gemstones the dancers mine from the depths. In an act of craftsmanship, the choreography weaves them together in an unexpected, stormy, ever-changing way- a dazzling piece of artistry made of encounters and separations, of interdependence and autonomous movement. The choreography seems to allow us to peer through a powerful microscope at the constant motion beneath the surface, and the dancers- like cells that merge and divide – infect one another with a shared emotion.
They huddle together, at one moment becoming a coral reef in a corner of the stage, legs and arms extending upward, licking the air. The next moment, they collapse into one another without ceasing to move, leaning on each other, one dancer’s hands groping and sliding across another’s face, like a many-headed monster prowling the stage. They split and reconvene in a line, a column, a diagonal, a circle at whose center their hands grow increasingly entangled – never just one thing.
The work illustrates how emotions are always in motion, passing through us and moving us through our closeness to others, even before words are given to them. At the end of the piece, as they lean on one another, they produce sound – murmuring, singing strange syllables – remaining within a space devoid of verbal language, where the body occupies a central place and emotion has not yet been named. The light gradually fades on their chorus of voices, which continues to tremble and resonate within the audience even after the stage has gone dark. This is a beautiful work that speaks directly to the heart.
“Bare on Rust.” Choreography: Yasmeen Godder. Habait Theatre, Jaffa. Next performance: 14.2