Choreographer Joe Goode’s performance group celebrates its 30th anniversary.
Anniversary show will feature revival excerpts, U.S. premiere of piece involving loss, identity
One evening in 1983, Joe Goode made Bay Area dance history.
During a concert by the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company at the New Performance Gallery, Goode, then a member of the ensemble, stood up in the center of the room in his white undershorts and ranted in a laconic manner that made you listen intensely, True, words had been uttered previously on local dance stages, but postmodernism then frowned on psychologically keyed speech, especially speech celebrating gay identity and this guy, the eponymous “Stanley,” who was a fascinating mess.
Goode, who had danced with Merce Cunningham in New York before arriving in San Francisco, founded his own performing organization three years after “Stanley.” Freelancing paid some bills, but, said Goode in a recent conversation, “I wanted to dance with language and theatricality and I wanted to make personal statements. I had always been up-front about my gayness. I couldn’t do that in somebody else’s company.”
This week’s 30th anniversary engagement by the Joe Goode Performance Group should reaffirm his artistic achievement in developing a new, humane brand of dance theater. Audiences may expect a North American premiere, “Nobody Lives Here Now,” and a few wellchosen revival excerpts.
They will all display Goode’s artistic style, but he demurs when asked to describe it. “That development
has been incremental,” says the choreographer. “I usually don’t like dance that uses speech because it is used so badly. It sounds like recitations piled upon each other. Yakety-yak! I am repulsed by it and feel very cautious about using speech and language. They have to come from a place of necessity. I am a rigorous editor. I often take away material and then take away more. On the other side of the studio, they’re practicing lifts. So, I bring them together. What happens in that collision is what interests me. You don’t know what’s going to happen.
“Liz Burritt, who was a member of my original company, is a natural actor, and we found out that the members of an ensemble can infect each other with these skills and the desire to work in this way. This is something a pickup company cannot do.”
The commission for “Nobody Lives Here Now” (2016) came from a French dance festival. The inspiration came from some old photographs Goode chanced upon in Europe. “They depicted a French village in which the entire population had been obliterated during World War II,” said the choreographer. “The town had been preserved as a monument. Originally, I thought I would make a piece about such an act of cruelty, but it was too sad a subject to go on. So, I thought of other sorts of things that disappear. I wanted to make it more personal.
“I’m noticing now that I’m past 60,” adds Goode, 66, “my identity as this strong dancer person is shifting. Loss of youth is a real issue. I think that artists try to make themselves into magicians who crack open revelation after revelation and stun the public with their dazzling insights. The effort to make oneself infinitely interesting is a trap for the working artist. My goal is different now, and that’s another element of the new work.
“Finally, I have a lot of students at UC Berkeley who no longer identify easily or comfortably as entirely male or female. They identify somewhere on the spectrum and it’s very fluid. They are in a challenging arena where they have to create themselves. That is a factor in the piece, too. It
sounds complicated, but it’s really quite simple.”
“Nobody Lives Here Now” (slightly altered for American consumption) is unusual for another reason. It is accompanied by live classical music, performed locally by the Thalea String Quartet. “I am setting myself a big challenge,” says Goode. “Classical music already has a story in it; there are many shifts of narrative and energy built in. How do you approach that layering? Fortunately, I had help from the quartets here and in France.”
It was the need for challenge in his life that led Goode to the Magic Theatre, where he met the brilliant puppeteer Basil Twist, which led to their 2008 collaboration on the affecting “Wonderboy.” And he bowed in the opera world by directing Conrad Susa’s “Transformations” in 2006 after the San Francisco Opera Center’s Sheri Greenawald informed him the libretto was by favored poet Anne Sexton. Goode’s site-specific hit, “Traveling Light,” at the Old Mint in 2009, was a miracle of split-second timing.
But one gets the impression that teaching has made the profoundest effect on this artist. Thanks to UC Berkeley’s David and Marnie Wood, Goode was hired in 2001 as a tenured professor in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. The experience has been a life lesson on both sides.
“The students are interested in technology. They are interested in what is spontaneous and improvisational,” said Goode. “Here, suddenly is a new idea, we’re going to run with it. They’re confident, they have been told they can do anything, and they believe it. They have awakened me, and I didn’t think I needed additional awakening.”
The past three decades have treated the choreographer kindly. He has won innumerable dance awards, received a host of commissions and had the inspiration to lease the Joe Goode Annex, an Alabama Street rehearsal and performance space that, according to the landlord, is always rented.
But if you ask him to sum up the past 30 years, the reply is complex, nostalgia-free and directed toward the future:
“I think what I have always wanted to learn was how to go deeper; that has always been my goal,” said Goode. “I like to think that a performance is a little window into someone’s very truthful experience. I’m not talking autobiography, which doesn’t interest me at all. But I think the world you and I inhabit is so specific to each person. If you can provide a glimpse into that point of view, that is really fascinating. And I like to meditate on projects like isolationist American iconography and out-of-body experiences. There’s a never-ending pile of topics I haven’t gotten to yet.”