Joe Goode Performance Group @ Ohio Theater 2/24/07
From Cool Cleveland contributor Susan Miller millerbowenATadelphia.net
 

Real human beings dancing... no fairies, no princes or princesses, no tutus, no tiaras; you couldn't smell greasepaint. Joe Goode Performance Group unwrapped like gifts, two stories on the stage of the Ohio Theater that may well have changed the way many Cleveland audience members view dance. Just the word, 'dance,' for many, summons images of half clad strippers not unlike the ones you might see while changing channels on your TV during primetime, the standard fare of music videos, or little girl ballerinas in black and pink with their hair in buns, or grown-up ballerinas in grown up ballerina costumes with their hair in buns. Dance is so much broader, so much deeper, and Saturday night, a midsized Cleveland audience was treated to a genre of dance not often available in our town. Thanks to the efforts of Cuyahoga Community College and the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center of Greater Cleveland, with a few stragglers who got the show as an "add on" item on their Dancecleveland subscription series, Cleveland's dance audience was educated. There was not a grand jeté, pirouette, or battement to be seen. Instead, bodies were put to good use, telling deeply felt, personal stories.

So, Joe Goode is apparently a gay man, but for straight me that was not the point of the evening; these are not dances or stories that are about gay life specifically; these are stories about life and the things that happen to all of us. In the opening of Stay Together, we see a woman seated in front of a camera, her face, larger than life, is projected on a large screen located upstage. An off stage voice gives her direction, "Lift your shoulders, look to the side, break your neck..." she talks back to us, telling us how it feels. She begins to reveal ever more deeply, with movement and words, until she is confessing her disappointment about never really being close, her loneliness in that she has tried to become close, but has instead concentrated on her work as the go between, the manager if you will, for the "artist," the one who "falls in love," the one who allows himself to feel deeply, to give himself over to passion and commitment. Another live video frames other dancers with close-ups while the omnipotent voice conducts interviews.

The dancers confess, reveal, touching parts of us that ring true, sting, slap and resonate with memory, or the reality of similarity to a moment remembered from past or current relationships. Throughout the work, other characters are invaded by the cameras; one woman confesses her enjoyment of "playing with" lovers as if they are objects, reversing the stereotype that it is men who play with hearts as toys. After we have felt sufficiently invaded by her shocking confessions, the black and white video of her face is manipulated in collage, reminiscent of Edward Steichen's portrait of Gloria Swanson's face covered in black lace; the vixen, the siren, an abandoned icon. In the end, after the issues of relationships have been laid out for our consideration, it is not the "big stuff," the usual milestones in relationships that are essential, but rather the little things that make relationships. Goode evokes the fragments of feelings and the awkward moments we share with others; not just lovers or life partners, but also colleagues and family members; those we choose and those we don't.

This is not the 1950's Ozzie and Harriet Hollywood mythology that our government promotes as "family values." The work raises questions for the viewer about commitment, sharing time and sharing simple things like toast in the morning. There are stretches of beautiful movement sequences throughout to give respite to the brain. Joe Goode or one of the multi-talented, singing, speaking, dancing members of his group has just delivered a wallop of poetry, and it is buoyed and carried along by a video projection braced with partnering, or a pedestrian movement pattern that is performed with complete ease, as if it had evolved in the moment. The work has a fresh feel as though we are witnessing a life revealed, poetry writing itself, thoughts given voice for the first time, and they are accurately aimed straight at the heart of each viewer. The work is crafted with such reality as to seem like a story told to us by a longtime friend very late at night, a confession of want, of want for companionship and commitment; a plea to stay together.

After intermission we return for more impact. Deeply There (stories of a neighborhood) is a work that the group has been performing for almost a decade. Joe Goode gets it even more right here, where he accesses his own drawer of personal experience to walk us through the advent of accompanying the dying. In the beginning, a very young girl and Joe perform a duet. She climbs on him, and he tosses her and playfully twirls her while relating a description of a landscape where one can rest and do nothing, "where mud seeps up through your toes and moss grows on your face." This landscape is at once revealing of a natural cycle of death and rebirth, of resting in the acceptance that one can find comfort on the stillness of swamp-like primordial ooze, while at the same time it is the sort of story that intrigues the imagination of the child. The work is not morbid, nor graphic in the way that we are made to think of death by our popular media, but touching in a way that anyone who has lost a loved one can feel. Goode combines choreography and text, singing and set changes, home movies and the subtle use of props, into such a well woven and seamless fabric, that the action ceases to be a stage production and begins to pour over the audience like life itself.

A projection of a window with the curtains blowing outward toward a blue sky completes the effect, and we are drawn deeper and deeper into the reality of the events. There are issues with other family members, in this case, the estranged sister of the dying man. There is the advent of death experienced not just by the waiting partner, but also by the dog, the neighbors, a community of friends. Each character is so fully developed through movement and text, choreography and theater, that they share with each of us some aspect of what we have experienced as we sat by the bed of one who would leave us shortly, or felt so deeply after they were gone. Each character has their way of asking us to be OK. They are actually coping themselves by helping Joe, and us, to cope as they say repeatedly, "You will be fine." Joe passes through the stages of grief; set pieces are moved on and off stage to create a sense of time passing; horrible, unkind words are hurled at Joe by the anguished sister; there are moments of heart wrenching tenderness; there is a hilarious send up where every cast member is dressed as "Jackie O" replete with Joe in the 1960;s widow's black Coco Chanel garb, pillbox hat, veil, straight-cut mini with a boxy jacket, dark glasses and flats. At the end of the work, autumn leaves fall quietly onto the stage and Joe emerges, saying it has been six months, and speaking to his departed partner tells him, and us, not to worry; he "will be..."

In Cleveland, where audiences still subsist on dance as mere athleticism and expensive evenings fraught with physical tricks and the sort balletic technical prowess that has its roots deep in the nineteenth century European tradition of elitism, it is refreshing to see powerful and accomplished dancers who are real human beings, revealing themselves in the masterful storytelling theater of the Joe Goode Performance Group. Kudos go to Tri-C for bringing us this most amazing opportunity to see where dance is today. If we could see more work by artists who are eagerly and successfully pushing the envelope of dance traditions, Cleveland might indeed find a way to cultivate a larger audience for dance.

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