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High Tension Before the Fall – FEUILLETON

  • Elisabeth Einecke-Klövekorn 21.04.2026

High Tension Before the Fall
The dance solo festival returns to Bonn: “Shelling” celebrates its premiere at Theater im Ballsaal

A woman crouches, curled up near the back wall of an empty, sparsely lit room. Her black outfit resembles a combat suit, and her long gray hair covers her face. Again and again she tries to straighten up, but keeps running into imaginary boundaries. Is it a protective shell like that of a mussel, or a confining casing from which her body wants to break free? Quiet rhythmic sounds, like metal being struck, accompany this constant rising up and collapsing.

“Shelling” is the ambiguous title of the piece with which the widely acclaimed Israeli choreographer and dancer Yasmeen Godder appeared this weekend as part of the 9th International Bonn Dance Solo Festival at Theater im Ballsaal. The artist, born in Jerusalem in 1973 and raised in New York, founded her own company in Tel Aviv in 1999 and opened her studio for choreographic research and community-based dance productions in Jaffa in 2007.

As a freelance choreographer, she works internationally and has also worked in Berlin, where in 2018 she held a visiting professorship at the Institute for Theatre Studies at the Free University.

Godder’s interest lies in physical movement as a living archive of experiences and collective emotions. However, her solo, which premiered in Bonn on Saturday, moves away from all forms of theatrical representation and narrative. Although as a viewer one cannot ignore the current situation in Israel, “Shelling” also means bombardment, shelling, and impact. The music becomes increasingly louder; bell tones blend into a monotonous droning. The dancer straightens up, but repeatedly falls backward to the ground. It is a constant alternation between breaking out of the imprisonment of the body in its personal vulnerability and instability, and reacting to invisible influences that prevent new unfolding.

For a brief moment, a door opens in the background, revealing a mysterious figure that immediately disappears again. For a moment, the dancer moves as if freed from external constraints in the spotlight, while wisps of fog drift in from the side. The military-style cargo pants are torn; the body appears both strong and defenseless at the same time. At the end, she sits with a fixed gaze in the center of the stage and, absorbed in herself, begins to sing a song.

Yasmeen Godder’s courageous performance illustrates nothing explicitly. Yet with her individual physical language, she moves in a constant state of high tension between uprising and collapse, outer shell and inner energy. The dialectic of constructive and destructive “shelling” becomes a sensual-physical event here. The audience responds with long, impressed applause to the highly concentrated performance. It is a stroke of luck that, despite all the difficulties with traveling from Israel, the dance solo festival—after opening on Friday at the Brotfabrik—was now also able to celebrate its opening at the Ballsaal.