Back Practicing Empathy #3 – Anat Zacharia
- Anat Zacharia 07.04.2022
Practicing Empathy #3 – By Yasmeen Godder
Today, when it seems that art focuses all its efforts on capturing the viewer’s fleeting attention through magic tricks, juggling, and endless stunts with flashing lights, sounds, and gestures designed to hit us with a single blow that stuns us and elicits a gasp of “Wow!”, Yasmeen Godder’s solo piece Practicing Empathy #3, created for herself after 25 years, feels refreshing and unique. It’s a solo that contains nothing mechanical or flashy, grounded in sensitivity, skill, and sophistication, based on the body, the gaze, connection, and material. It captivates us instantly, especially through its performance.
Following Practicing Empathy #1 and Practicing Empathy #2, two gentle group practices for creating interpersonal encounters presented at the Israel Festival in 2020, Godder chose to return to her own body to continue exploring basic human practices such as empathy, inclusion, and compassion. She seeks to create an exposed and intimate space that allows for discovery, openness, and partnership, raising questions such as: What makes us open emotionally? What prompts us to empathize and connect with others and ourselves? And in today’s world, can we still create “safe spaces” for such emotional interactions?
In recent years, beginning with Climax (presented in 2014 at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art), Godder’s work has undergone a significant shift. She aims to discard hierarchies and offer interaction within a shared space, where the performers act as agents and guides. Audience responses influence and are absorbed into the structured choreography.
The performance begins with a run around the stage, echoing Godder’s story about how she began running during the first COVID lockdown to connect with her emotions and release endorphins. She then moves through a series of energetic skips and jumps, accompanied by vigorous hand gestures that toss something into the air. Occasionally, she pauses, lifts one leg, and makes eye contact with us, maintaining a frozen poise with her hands in defensive gestures, like a weapon drawn. Godder performs movement sequences consciously built not to express a specific emotion, repeating them as she surrenders to the image and lets her body tell what it knows. She offers the audience a kind of key with which to read the variations and developments in the piece. At one point, she lies down, rocking on her back, her finger pointing at her neck, touching her throat where the vocal cords are. Then, there’s the forward bending, repeatedly pulling her hair downward — a place of grounding, where one can always reconnect when control or understanding is lost. The body’s stored memory seems to release and blend with the present. The recurring circular motion around the stage space weaves her into a cocoon, like a chrysalis.
This cocoon element continues with Gili Avissar’s knitted objects, which are not merely described or fixed in place but are alive with movement. Their hanging, stringy, pagan-like nature interacts with Godder’s body, generating new imagery — breast-like cones, a choking hood, a carnival mask. These alternative exchanges and the economy of service and pleasure allow Godder to embrace rawness, revel in a kind of shabby heroism, vibrate with refined expressivity, and maintain her animalistic edge. She folds herself into a richly textured form that transcends identity constructs, deliberately sidestepping identity politics, and forges a meaning all her own. At times, she turns her body into a small, perfect wicker basket, an absurd vessel for preserving the ephemeral.
It is precisely because Godder has the extraordinary ability to create something that transforms the viewer both cognitively and experientially that she succeeds in being both intensely frontal and, at the same time, offering a separation from reality. She creates a meditative time, culminating in a guided imagery session in the latter part of the performance, where she leads the audience to connect with their own bodies, feeling them as prosthetics. This analytical-therapeutic aspiration seeks to extract narrative information and build a story from whatever emerges. As a performer, Godder is a powerful explosive, exceptionally expressive, capable of releasing her pent-up energy in a split second. When she moves, it’s like a shockwave spreading through matter, almost allowing us to see thoughts and internal emotions passing by. She possesses the ability to undergo transformation and change, even when her expression seems distant, foreign, or exaggerated. And even when the imagery is subtle, the private slowly reveals itself and takes on external form.
Practicing Empathy #3 is a work that explores something that has a word but not yet a clear shape in the world. A piece that reaches into the unconscious, the non-beautiful, the subversive, the avant-garde, the conceptual, and the formal. A solo presented in just the right dose — not overwhelming, not loud. It stops you in your tracks, makes you think, without spotlights, whistles, or stunts. It’s a work that owes nothing to anyone, that doesn’t tick off boxes or pay dues, largely due to Godder’s immense power to generate casual movement and elevate it to the highest critical importance.