Back SHOUT ALOUD”: A Space Where There’s Room for Everyone – Ha’aretz

Ran Brown
22.09.2024

Ha’aretz- Ran Brown

SHOUT ALOUD”: A Space Where There’s Room for Everyone

“Love Music (Now!)”, the collaborative performance by the Yasmeen Godder Company and Dikla, is a sophisticated, sensual, and exhilarating display of the choreographer’s unique movement style.

For a moment in “Love Music (Now!)”, the joint evening of Yasmeen Godder’s company and Dikla at the Israel Festival, it seemed as if the eight dancers were swallowed up by the vast stage of the Jerusalem Theater. They accompanied Dikla with movement not typically seen in a music show, yet they tried not to divert attention from the charismatic performer at the center. One of the dancers even announced that throughout the evening, we would listen to a reworked version of Dikla’s first album, which she would perform in its entirety with nine musicians on stage. But in hindsight, this moment reveals itself as a ruse, leaving the audience unprepared for what would follow—a sensory storm and true elevation that swept them out of their comfort.

Godder doesn’t play by the rules. She adheres to conventional stage boundaries of center and periphery at the beginning, only to dismantle them later. She engages with the definitions of a dance performance and a music performance, only to break them down and create a space where there’s room for everyone. Even when it seems that the accompanying dancers are taking over the stage and the periphery becomes the center, this isn’t the case. In reality, the center disappears entirely, and the stage fills with music and choreography blending together, like oil and water swirling around one another—not mixing but creating a stunning, dense, and surprisingly shifting composition.

At the start of the piece, the dancers emit guttural sounds from their throats, as if testing the voice as raw material before it becomes words. This rawness, this tangible primitiveness, continues to characterize their movement even as it becomes organized into clear formal gestures, with sequences that flow surprisingly simply. Whether the dancers charge across the stage or remain rooted in place, there is no small movement in this piece. Even in the simple gesture of a hand trembling beside the face or a palm striking an elbow, a scream swells. Sometimes they literally shout; sometimes the movement itself screams from within their quivering muscles—love, music.

The performance is a sophisticated, sensual, and electrifying display of Godder’s unique movement style, with its strange yet captivating, unsettling quality. Like Dikla’s raspy voice, the movement is scratched, sharp yet jarring, always “almost right,” biting at the edges—arms elongated but fists clenched, heads tilted to the side abruptly. The gestures are dense, weighted, and physically bursting. Though not many, they accumulate and naturally form sharp, intensely expressive dance sections.

Love Music (Now!) The feverish choreography is powerfully and deeply executed by eight bewitching dancers: Inbal Aloni, Ilana Sara Claire Balson, Nour Garabli, Mor Damer, Anat Vadia, Ofir Yanai, Dor Frank, and Tamar Kish. It’s a celebration of magnificent femininity: when they leap fiercely, it’s clear these are not weightless nymphs but flesh-and-blood women, no less miraculous. They appear like marionettes cut free from their strings, wild, frolicking girls or fierce Amazons, never “good girls.” Dikla herself is not a “good girl” either. Her intense rock energy charges every delicate feminine image the choreography subversively, fiercely interacts with.

In a breathtaking solo, Kish’s body contorts and stretches in different directions as if being swept by underground currents. In a movement that alternates between explosive and sustained, as she reclaims control of her body, Kish allows herself to be absorbed into the eye of the storm she has become and emerges from it, wide-eyed and disheveled, as strong as steel and as delicate as silk, exposed and moving. She ends in a fall, her head resting in Dikla’s lap, who sits waiting at the side of the stage.

Godder makes full use of everything the stage has to offer. The stage (designed by Ofer Laufer) and lighting (designed by Nadav Barnea) allow each number to look different, the dancers to frequently change costumes (designed by Shahar Avnet), and Dikla to emerge again and again from different parts of the stage, like a larger-than-life diva. But most impressive is Godder’s preference for the singularity of each performance and the individuality of each dancer, rather than the unifying power of the choreography. Almost miraculously, all the dancers respond to the same formal structure organizing them in time and space, yet it seems as though none of them is expressing an external form but rather herself. It feels like the movement rises from the ground, from the depths of their bodies, from their unique scars, channeling wild energy into form, binding them together.

Towards the end of the piece, as applause unites the audience and the performers on stage, the dancers also gather together, repeating the circle with which they opened the work, holding hands, one foot stamping, the other leg lifted in the air, and their torsos diving down—reminiscent of the women in Henri Matisse’s “The Dance.” The musicians leave the stage, the applause subsides, and only the dancers remain, swaying side to side in a close huddle. I was moved. I wanted to get closer to them, to be infected by that vitality, to share in the intimacy of that pulsating life force that doesn’t fade when darkness falls.