Yasmeen Godder . Dikla

In recent years the choreographic works of Yasmeen Godder have focussed on empathy. She sees “acknowledging that other people are also in the room having their own experiences“ as the starting point for social interaction on an equal level. Her focus on the contradictions and ambivalences of life in her Israeli homeland has motivated Godder to collaborate with the Egyptian-Iraqi singer Dikla: a co-operation that began at the time of the nationwide protests against the planned legal reforms in Israel in early 2023 and has continued since October 2023 under the more polarised circumstances of the war against Hamas. Dikla, a star of the Israeli music scene, grew up in a traditional Jewish Egyptian family. Her debut album Ahava Musica (“music of love“) revolves around the search for love of oneself: “I wrote this album while wandering through the streets of Tel Aviv. The endless search for love and acceptance gave me the strength to write it without judgement or self-criticism.“ Combining rock with classical Arab instruments and rhythms, she sings in a linguistic mix of Hebrew, Arabic and English about personal themes such as intimacy, loneliness and fantasy. Yasmeen Godder takes the album as her starting point to create a performance event between a dance piece and a pop concert together with a live performance by Dikla and the dancers and musicians. Through the viewpoint of the respective other, they succeed in extending where their art is located within society and in enabling the audience to appreciate the manifold facets of a culturally diverse society. Another source of inspiration for Godder is her company’s project Na’ot Ma’Ba’ad (“moving together“), which brings Palestinian-Arab and Jewish women together every week to dance, to find new ways of communicating, to share joy and to encounter conflict directly. In Shout Aloud Yasmeen Godder appropriates seemingly fixed body images with her raw and playful movement vocabulary and transforms them into extremes. In this way she creates space for dialogue and empathy and to unsettle linguistic and cultural boundaries: a dialogue that is not confined to the stage but also searches for a sonic and physical connection between the audience and the performers. This results in intense connections with fascinating potential for resistance and resilience: a blow for liberation that could not be more necessary right now.