Back Dancing to their own Drum

Tamar Rotem
14.11.2003

Two Playful Pink is an entire evening by Godder and Iris Erez, comprising three pieces, three comments on the same theme. Here Godder abandons the use of fascinating props that had characterized her also the stories ahe wove in her previous works. The theatricality and narrative aspects of Hall or the defined space that creates a frame as in Sudden Birds her two most recent works are absent here. Here there is only the body and movement. And this is rich and sufficient.
Godder and Erez are ascetic, beautiful-ugly in the style of heroin chic. Seductive and repulsive. They play around with the image of femininity. One moment they are little girls playing with the ends of their ponytails and putting their fingers in their mouth in embarrassment, and the next moment they are seductive women using the same gestures strong characters or manipulated like marionettes. In the last part they dance with large sculpted breasts tied their chests, which distorts the significance of the female chest and makes it ridiculous.
Godders language of movement which was already seen in Sudden Birds, where the four dancers danced very close together as if each wanted to be swallowed up into the others body continues in the new piece. The self-hatred, the repressed violence and the hurt accompany the complex relationships between the two women. When one wants to get closer, the second repels her, over and over. They clasp each other in reconciliation out of closeness only when they have exhausted themselves to death, but then it is as though they are cripples. The is no joy in Godders performance, only distress. And when the women finally smile, it is a chilling, frozen and scornful smile.
Godder refrains from explaining the work and giving it a concrete interpretation because, she says, she has consciously refrained from following a structured narrative. However, she does say that this work emerged from thinking about the female political dimension a kind of reflection of the reality in the female context.