Two women stand gripped in each other's arms, their eyes flickering warily in their frozen faces. A man hangs upside down, his limbs jerking and thrashing in protest. These are the images of trauma and terror beamed daily around the world, and they are also the building blocks of Yasmeen Godder's Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder from 2004.
Godder is a young Israeli choreographer who has grown up through one of the most violent eras of her country's history, and this piece marks her attempt to map the effects of war on her generation. While she doesn't try to make sense of the Middle East conflict, she does show graphically and inventively how the rhetoric of brutality has become a learned reflex for her nation. Girls in a club pepper their moves with gestures of gunfire, a guy on the pull automatically adapts the posture of a military guard, arm extended and thumb cocked as he hefts an imaginary rifle.
Modern Israel is for Godder a brutalised world in which hilarity and nightmare are barely distinguishable. A woman laughs, gustily, but her guffaws have been forced out of her by a man pressing on her abdomen. Another woman moves joyfully to embrace a lover but finds his fingers thrust into her mouth like a pistol. Reality is in constant slippage, and while Godder endows some of her imagery with a bruising visceral power, some has a deliberate make-believe quality as if underlining that the real damage done to Israel has been at the level of its collective imagination.
Godder has without doubt started her work from thoughtful premises, however the disappointment is that they remain premises. Godder rarely pushes her choreography beyond stark poses or jangled, repeating motifs, and she rarely offers us more than a sketch book of ideas. The dynamics of narrative or character - the radical shift in pace that could have turned this into powerful dance theatre - were out of the picture.
· The Godder season ends tonight. Box office: 020-7387 0031.
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