In the end, bewilderment triumphs. The victim, a young man in his underwear, sits alone at the edge of the ramp. All those who tormented him for a good 60 minutes, dragging him around, battering him, contorting him, forcibly uniting him with a woman, and nearly killing him in the process, leave the scene of the horror one by one, as if a normal event had ended. Only one woman had tried to comfort him for a time in a desperate embrace. While six performers are already taking their bows, the victim is still trying to come to terms with his situation. Although strawberry cream wasn’t actually administered, “Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder” symbolically oscillates between the banality of everyday life and a perfidious stage of violence, as presented in the evening news. This contrast is all the more striking in a country like Israel, the home of the young choreographer Yasmeen Godder and her group Bloody Bench Players.

Still images, like animated photographs, form the starting point of this evening at HAU 2. On a scene laid out in a parquet pattern with strips of brown linoleum, a woman bites her hand as if trying to stifle her scream—a recurring motif throughout the performance. A dead man is paraded upside down like a trophy; others blankly cover their eyes or stuff their hands into their neighbor’s mouth. Gradually, the images blur, overlapping, the victim-perpetrator dynamic becoming indistinct. Ever faster, with transports, rough liftings, and draggings, snapshots of physical abuse follow one another. The powerlessness of the victims, their disbelief, defenselessness, and lack of will, bounce off the indifference of the perpetrators. Even solidarity among the victims cannot stop the rabidly escalating violence. The latent threat deforms the figures into objects to be kicked and dog-like creatures, their spines bent like electric shocks by the live onslaught of guitar chords. The personality, deviating from the norm, seems to have become the human measure. At times, the motorically self-perpetuating action congeals again into poses of dullness: praying, shooting, being beside oneself, trembling with fear and maniacal laughter.

Godder reduces humanity to the essence of its instincts without denouncing it as inherently evil. Play and seriousness, guitar and rifle remain points of constant tension. For this tightrope walk of emotions, she finds touching, memorable, and moving images. “Traumatized Bodies” is also the theme of the other guest performances in the second edition of CONTEXT, as the title suggests. The “platform for contemporary dance” offers events until February 27th in all three venues of Hebbel am Ufer: further choreographies by Yasmeen Godder, the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué, the Canadian Dave St. Pierre, the Scandinavian artist Mette Ingvartsen, as well as various lectures.