Dance Review: Storm End Come

Godder herself has a unique presence with powerful, intense and inimitably assured, playfully wicked stage persona.

By ORA BRAFMAN
Storm end Come dance 311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Storm end Come dance 311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
In Storm End Come, choreographer Yasmeen Godder and Itzik Giuli, her partner and co-artistic director, invest in movement investigation, not for movement’s sake, its diversify or uniqueness, but as a reflection of inner processes that leave traces on the body and face like emotional residue.
In contrast to Godder’s recent creations, this time the stage is bare and she uses no props such as masks, dripping paint or an alarming pair of scissors to perpetuate dramatic moments. Storm End Come may seem more abstract than her more theatrical pieces that were lined with narrative, but in fact it is still quite expressive theater.
Godder herself has a unique presence with powerful, intense and inimitably assured, playfully wicked stage persona.
This time she stepped back and left the stage to a cast of six dancers. Yet unmistakably, her unique signature, her idiosyncratic lexicon was tightly anchored in the work by all her dancers, particularly Dalia Chaimsky and Shulamit Enoch, her best interpreters that evening.
They maintain the more assertive female role, typical of Godder; assured of her powers, physical needs and at ease with her predatory instincts, in contrast to her male roles, which tend to be insipid, there to be toyed with.
The evening started with a dancer on all fours, slowly sliding backwards, contracting her torso as she makes each move. There is an animalistic quality to her moves. With sinewy sway of hips, she lazily rotates her upper body, than sprawls on her belly, knees apart, basking in corporeal pleasure. Slowly the other five participants enter, each with a unique set of phrases.
The work process and lexicon choices enabled the dancers to find their own animalistic instincts and touch their inner spheres yearning for spiritual rejuvenation through passion. There was shuddering and eye rolling in climactic ecstasy, occasional licking of one’s limbs or emitting sounds, self-induced combustion and bodies clinging urgently, disregarding all else, including the partner, which worked well in fragmented structure and multifocal activity.
As time passes, those fleeting moments of what seem to be isolated, arbitrary impulses acquire some sense by evocation rather than reason.