Common Emotions

What makes us participate? How do we enter an unknown emotional world? How does the performance, as a social ceremony, impact the way we relate to each other? What determines our involvement in it and what control do we have over our emotional self during this act? In her work Common Emotions, Godder was interested in tapping into these questions in relation to how we connect to each other in groups, and how these common emotions which arise out of this interaction, infiltrate our individuality. By challenging the formal separation between spectators and performers, Godder allows the audience to experience their emotional and performative selves during the show. This proposal suggests an intimacy with the performers and impacts the way by which the work unfolds in real-time. All of this raises questions in regards to communal-emotional connectivity and infectiousness and echoes social and national behavior which we may encounter in our daily lives. One decides whether to watch an aesthetic phenomenon or to experience it with one’s own body.

The work Common Emotions was created and researched as part of a larger project called “Störung/Hafra’a” in collaboration with Theater Freiburg. “Störung/Hafra’a” was a unique collaborative interdisciplinary project that brought together scientists, professional dancers and choreographers, physicians, as well as people with Parkinson’s from Israel and Germany, to explore different aspects of human movement and movement disorder. The project influenced Godder’s process of creating  Common Emotions in that it opened the door of her studio to different people and communities and used the medium of dance as a means of coming together in a common space. This kind of unexpected intimate meeting in the studio with different communities – through the body and through different methodologies of movement and improvisation– created a desire to offer this experience in a theatrical setting. In her previous work CLIMAX a community is built by the end of the 3-hour durational performance, as the public interacts with the performers and with each other, noticing one another in intimate and intense moments and slowly developing into a group– consciously and subconsciously. In Common Emotions Godder wanted to continue exploring this notion of how we connect in a performance, by proposing different kinds of tasks or actions which happen in real-time on the stage in a kind of “secretive area” where the audiences and performers meet. And by then give further emphasis to the process the audience goes through in real-time.

Partners and Collaborators: COMMON EMOTIONS is co-produced by Theater Freiburg (Germany), Centre chorégraphique national de Rillieux-la-Pape (France), director Yuval PICK and The Diver Festival (Israel). COMMON EMOTIONS was supported by ״Störung/Hafraah״, a project by Theater Freiburg and Exzellenzcluster BrainLinks-BrainTools of the University of Freiburg, funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and Stiftung Deutsch-Israelisches Zukunftsforum.