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Ring of fire
By Roni Dori

Five years after first meeting at Puah restaurant in Jaffa - when he was a waiter and she a diner - they sit at a quiet table in the same eatery, gazing tenderly at each other. Occasionally one or both of them will laugh, as if amused by a long-running private joke. Artist Yochai Matos and choreographer Yasmeen Godder seem to exist in total harmony. The result of their artistic collaboration is "Love Fire" - a coproduction of the Theatre de la Place in Liege, Belgium and the Hebbel am Ufer Theater in Berlin. The work, which is as much an installation as it is a dance performance, will have its Israeli premiere at the Curtain Up Festival on November 27.

Matos and Godder have flirted with each others' work for several years now, as Matos describes it, until Godder launched a short-term project of "artistic experiments" and suggested that they work on it together. In the end, she was not able to obtain funding for the project, "but a channel for dialogue was opened with no connection to a specific objective and that was nice," says Godder. "There was no 'you do this and I'll do that,' only communication. It even sounds a little romantic in the context of the work, to talk about art. This doesn't happen often, and it's very special for me."
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"Love Fire," which in its first incarnation was called "Eran Solo" and was performed entirely to the music of classical waltzes, is performed by a man (Eran Shanny), a woman (Godder) and another man (Matos himself, in a brief appearance). Godder - who some have referred to as the Israeli Pina Bausch - presents the cliched love triangle with depth and in a surprising way, both as a choreographer and as a performer. The accessories used in the performance, from microphone to high-heeled shoes, from sequins to fluorescent bodies, come together to form an amazing installation, which combines Godder's chaos - including splashes of colorful jelly - and Matos' visual images into an artistic display that remains etched in my brain.

Yochai Matos, born in 1977, is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design's visual communications department. His works have been featured in respected galleries, but presumably most Tel Avivians are familiar with his work in urban spaces: he placed red heart-shaped ceramic tiles on the steps leading up to city hall ("I Love City Hall"); he's placed assorted images such as a telephone, toaster and banana behind neon street signs ("Street Signs"). His works have recently been displayed as part of the group exhibition "Inferno" at the Watermill Center in New York.

Yasmeen Godder, born in 1973, moved with her family to New York at the age of 11 and studied at the High School of Performing Arts, better known as the high school from the movie "Fame" (Godder: "I grew up mesmerized by the movie, and then it came true"; Matos: "If you need some kind of explanation as to why we work together, then as I far as I'm concerned that's it"). She earned a B.A. in dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and has worked as an independent choreographer since 1997.

Godder moved back to Israel in 1999, following her partner and dramaturge Itzik Giuli, where she was warmly embraced by the dance world. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Hasia Levy Agron Choreography Prize (twice), the Mifal Hapayis national lottery Landau Prize for the performing arts, and the prestigious Bessie Award in 2002 for "I Feel Funny Today." Reviews of her work have also been very favorable: "The choreography, the dramaturgy, the internal rhythm of the work - everything is done with wonderful talent," wrote Haaretz's dance critic Ruth Eshel of "I'm Mean, I Am." "A powerful experience, magnificently done," wrote Gabi Eldor in Ha'ir, of "Two Playful Pink."

The opening scene of "Love Fire," which takes Godder's careful language of movement to new heights, features dancer Eran Shanny - a creative collaborator on the work - half chasing, half being chased, half chuckling, half ridiculous, half confident, half scared. "This piece involves walking the very fine line between something very grand and impressive and something extremely violent," Godder said at the beginning of the year, when she showed one segment at the A-Genre Festival at the Tmuna Theater. "It's almost like looking at a certain object from the front... the same thing that looks amazing from the front may look miserable, pathetic and even desperate from the other side."

Godder and Matos embarked on a process of reaction and mutual productivity. "What intrigued me," she says, "is the way in which Yochai will respond immediately and instinctively to the work." Matos, who appears in a brief segment of the piece, felt comfortable on stage and regards the whole thing almost dismissively. "In my work and in my art, I use my body a lot. The movement exists inherently in the art. You tell me that I am dancing; I can tell you that Yasmeen is a visual artist to the same extent. My career as a dancer is not my objective in the end. I appreciate physical effort very much, and part of my dream is that my livelihood will be connected to my body." He sees a common denominator between him and Godder, he adds: "Yasmeen is a strange bird in the world of Israeli dance, and I'm also like that within the plastic arts. The collaboration enabled each of us to [stay true to ourselves]."

Godder: "This collaboration opened a kind of window for one to look at the process of the other and to see how each of us develops a concept. We saw that we both sometimes work in a similar manner without knowing in advance what direction we're heading toward. On the surface, in the plastic arts, the concepts exists before the performance, but it was interesting for me to discover through Yochai to what extent embarking on the road for him is not predetermined. There is room for change... This concept is of interest to me in my work as well and it makes very happy when I am asked how much improvisation there is in the work - even though in most of them there is hardly any - because that means it is happening now, and one of the most important things to me is that the performances feel as if they are happening now.

"I have to feel as if there is some slight danger, that the dancer or performer is struggling with something, feeling life," she continues. "That is something that is very complicated to create, because part of the approach to being a dancer is that he has skill and confidence."

Will they collaborate in the future? "God is great," Matos says with a smile. "Love Fire" is scheduled to make its European premiere in Belgium in February 2010. Apart from that, the plan is to show it at a contemporary art gallery or a museum. "These are precisely the places where I found myself in Yasmeen's [work]," says Matos. "The thought of Yasmeen presenting in a performance space - this is the exact kind of place where we cannot create without each other."
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