Yasmeen Godder and Iris Erez in Godder’s Two Playful Pink. Photo by Tamar Lamm.
More than a year ago, I had the opportunity to take a week-long repertory workshop at Yasmeen Godder’s studio. I found the intensive enriching both as a dancer and as a dance researcher, and I recounted my experience on The Winger on April 4, 2008; that article is posted below.
Now another batch of advanced dancers will have the chance to sink their teeth into Godder’s meaty material during a brand-new, year-long intensive. Hosted by ActSearch and held at Godder’s studio in Jaffa, this program will build participants’ physical and expressive skills through a mix of technique classes, repertory workshops, and sessions with dramaturge Itzik Giuli.
Besides preparing for this exciting endeavor, Godder has been touring one of her latest works, Singular Sensation. Want to watch some of her work and see what’s in store for her new students? There are lots of upcoming performances in several locations. After one more performance of Singular Sensation at Suzanne Dellal on October 1, the production is traveling to Prague and Bern in October before touring Germany and Belgium in November. For more information on the intensive workshop and the tour, check out the links at the end of this article.
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Yasmeen Godder’s Repertory Worskhop (April 2008)
It’s been more than seven months since I have learned new repertory, and while I’m loving my dance classes and improvisational projects, I do miss the process of absorbing and living in a piece of choreography. So even though my body feels a bit tired now, my spirit is extremely happy after tasting a bit of Yasmeen Godder’s work!
I just finished a five-day workshop at her studio in Jaffa (at the south of Tel Aviv – technically, the city is Tel Aviv-Yafo). Yasmeen is currently on tour in Europe with her production Sudden Birds, so two of her dancers led the intensive. Each day began with Eran Shanny’s technique class, which was very similar to Yasmeen’s with its influences of release technique, yoga, Feldenkrais, and more.
After Eran helped us absorb the principles of Yasmeen’s movement style, Iris Erez took over for the repertory segment of the workshop. We did improvisational exercises like those Yasmeen uses in her creative process, and we learned solo and duet material from Two Playful Pink. Yasmeen’s choreography is meaty, both in its movement vocabulary and its emotional content, and Two Playful Pink – a piece originally performed in 2003 by Yasmeen and Iris – is no exception. The dance concerns attitudes towards femininity and the body, and the movement often shifts a conventional expression of sexuality into more unfamiliar (or unaccepted?) territory: a hand seductively placed on the upper thigh soon insistently clutches the crotch; the slow fixing of messy hair is paired with a sudden spank-like slap to the hip; a smile is distorted by tucking in the upper lip or tugging the cheek into a sneer.
Yasmeen Godder and Iris Erez in Godder’s Two Playful Pink. Photo by Tamar Lamm.
There’s so much I could say about what I gained through this experience – in fact, my stream of consciousness free-write in my notes file was enough to make Word send me a few error messages last night – but I’ll try to keep my post here manageable . . . If you haven’t noticed yet, I tend to be a bit wordy!
I’ve found myself explaining recently that yes, I am both a dancer and a researcher, so I’ll write a bit about how these two activities are complementary. Quite wonderfully, this workshop reinforced my belief in the value of physical research. My experience in technique classes this year has provided me with important information about the physicality used in Israeli contemporary dance. Yet with repertory, there’s another level of experience and analysis to be found; instead of simply dealing with the raw material of technique – some of the building blocks of a finished dance – learning choreography allows me to explore issues of composition and content along with the movement itself.
This week I got a physical sense of Yasmeen’s partnering work, which epitomizes an intricate, aggressive style employed by many young Israeli choreographers. Actually attempting to dance excerpts of this duet gave me a deeper appreciation of what I had admired from afar because I myself got to experience (or, well, try to experience) the speed, precision, and trust involved in this kind of partnering. I was also reminded that in the hands of the right choreographer (and ultimately in the bodies of the right dancers), movement can be wonderfully loaded with meaning. In the duet excerpts from Two Playful Pink, each tug, shove, jerk, drop, fall, and look is a challenge from one woman to the other, a chance to manipulate, dominate, taunt, display . . .
Yasmeen Godder and Iris Erez in Godder’s Two Playful Pink. Photo by Tamar Lamm.
Learning repertory also provides an extraordinary opportunity for me to recognize and question the assumptions I make as a spectator of choreography. As I realized this week, what you perceive when you are an audience member does not always get at the truth of the matter from the performer’s perspective.
What I often see in Israeli contemporary dance is power – but it’s not always a controlled power or a power composed of force. In my experience with Yasmeen’s choreography (and specifically thanks to the feedback Iris gave me), I understood that this power is at times a matter of energy unleashed by giving into momentum and gravity. Having trained primarily in ballet and older modern dance forms such as Cunningham technique and Graham, Taylor, and Limón-influenced styles, I find working in this released-influenced mode quite challenging – but also quite necessary for my growth as a dancer. You can bet I’ll be back in Yasmeen’s classes after she returns from her tour!
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Related Articles on Dance In Israel
- Close Encounters Series: Yasmeen Godder
- Dancing Through the Intifada: Yasmeen Godder’s Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder
Related Links
- Yasmeen Godder’s website (including calendar with tour dates)
- Information on Yasmeen Godder’s yearlong workshop (2009-2010)
- YouTube Video of Two Playful Pink