SHELLING

SHELLING is a solo work based on a physical exploration of inner fragmentation, vulnerability, and collapse. The title evokes concepts like shell, but also impact and collision, focusing on the body as both a protective shell and a site exposed to and shaped by external forces.

The piece departs from narrative and any form of “representation,” instead listening to a quiet inner voice that arises through contradiction, repetition, and disruption. Influenced by multifaceted personal and generational histories carried within the body, movement unfolds through intuitive impulses, breakdowns, and repeated attempts to reconfigure – only to collapse again.

At the heart of the work is an encounter with a reality that feels beyond one’s control, and with the bodily and psychic effects of living inside it. Rather than illustrating specific memories or events, Yasmeen Godder inhabits the accumulated tension, helplessness, and opacity they leave behind: an aching response to devastation, both one’s own and that of others.

In her solo, the body emerges as a living archive – porous and unstable, absorbing impact, losing its ground, gathering itself and falling apart again.

Co-produced by Theater im Ballsaal / Tanzgenerator Bonn, Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main and The Yasmeen Godder Company

The strength of “SHELLING,” leaving goosebumps and tightening the throat: the piece is anything but a simple commentary. What is shown is the struggle of a body to continue moving at all under the violence of an overwhelmingly complex and politically distorted situation. Maren Nöding, Tanznetz