Editor’s Note: In this column artists are invited to share how a special experience has informed their thinking and their work.

     In 1979 Joe Goode began synthesizing a genre of dance theater that combined text, gestures, and humor with his own deeply physical, high velocity dancing. In 1986, Joe Goode Performance Group (JGPG) incorporated as a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a support structure for the artistic work of Joe Goode. Over the past twelve years the company has performed annually in the San Francisco Bay Area and has toured extensively throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Africa.

     Joe Goode has been recognized as an innovator in the development of contemporary dance theater. He has been awarded fellowships from the national Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. In 1995, Goode was one of only ten U.S. choreographers to receive a prestigious National Dance Residency Program grant, an award for artistic development. In 1998, Goode was awarded one of the first Irvine Fellowships in Dance.

     His dance works have been commissioned by Pennsylvania Ballet, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Ririe Woodbury Dance Company, Axis Dance Company, Center for the Arts at University of California Berkeley and Zenon Dance Company. The M.H. de Youth Memorial Museum of San Francisco and the Capp Street Project have commissione4d his performance/installation works. Goode receives frequent teaching appointments and choreographic commissions from universities including Berkeley, Stanford, and Harvard. Goode and company members teach extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area, and also provide outreach services to underserved populations including gay and lesbian teens, low-income, at-risk youth, juvenile offenders, and senior citizens, as well as pre-professional and professional artists.

By Joe Goode

Artists are driven. We’re crazy. We are. Evidenced, of course, by that guy who cut off his ear and all of the ones who offed themselves with excesses of various kinds. We’re madmen and women. But maybe we don’t have a choice. Maybe we are born larger than life with a zest for the unruly. And so it’s nature, not nurture, to blame. So leave us alone, I say. Some genetic mutation made us the way we are – obsessive, impulsive, willing to confront the dark recesses of our own souls. It’s not a decision that we made. We can’t help it.

I, for one, am coming out of the closet. I am what I am. (No La Cage Aux Folles reference intended.) I won’t hide anymore. I must finally declare the truth that has dogged me all of these years: I am passionate. I am also (and this is a truly painful disclosure) colorful. I am certainly driven. These traits are embedded down deep in my DNA. I’ve tried changing over the years to no avail. And though it’s taken me years to get here, I am finally ready to accept that I am a person who feels things deeply. The world affects me in ways that it seems not to affect others. I shudder and quake when they might simply raise an eyebrow. I’m “sensitive.” I guess this is a word I dreaded as achild. I was constantly being chided not to be so “sensitive.” And yet today, after forty some years of living with the moniker, I am finally ready to wear it with pride.

After all, my sensitivity, my emotional transparency is what makes me an artist. And if there is one thing that has given my life shape it is art making. It has saved my life really. It has been a survival technique that has brought me back from the edge on several occasions. Perhaps because of this “sensitivity” to what’s going on around me, the world often seems a noisy and chaotic place. I often feel like I’m on the outside looking in at it. Making art has been a way of ordering the messy world, and a way of giving my strong feelings a place to reside. In fact, the dance theater pieces that I make are literally places that I can go. Each on is a place of solace, a respite from the isolation and the feeling that I’m a disengaged observer. When I’m making art I am engaged. I am busy in the laboratory blending language and movement, alchemizing human gestures into dance. I forget that I’m outside and so I’m not.

So why should I care if others view me as crazy or disturbed? I’m alive. And I’ve been lucky enough to stumble onto a pastime that nourishes me and surprises me and takes me places I didn’t think I was brave or smart enough to go. I remember once, years ago, traveling in a car with Spider Kedelsky from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. I think we were traveling from or to some conference and spider asked me if I had to do my work in complete isolation, if no one wanted to see it and it was doomed to obscurity would I still make it? The answer was immediate and simple. Yes. It keeps me in the world. It keeps me in the conversation. My art making is me at my most porous, generous,receptive. Through the process of doing it I manage to create an appetite for living that I’m not sure would otherwise be there.

So, for me, art making isn’t a profession or even a calling. It’s a necessity, like eating. Without it, I become malnourished and the world gets fuzzy, my grasp on it weak. So, clearly, the craziness of an artist’s life is an easy choice when the alternative is starvation. If this all sound a bit theatrical, excuse me – that’s my nature. But, it feels good to let it out, to indulge the wild untamed, theatrical impulse that separates me from the rest of the crowd. Actually, I would assert that most of the crowd has impulses. Most people, (even “normal” people) are longing to live out their impulses – to make a leap of fait, or trust a blind intuition, or cast themselves into the throes of love. Secretly, we’re all crazy. It’s just that in our society, it’s the artist’s role to follow these impulses (albeit in the relatively safe confines of the theater, gallery, or recital hall). And by following these impulses, and allowing them to grow and flourish, we end up expressing a kind of bravery, a belief in the unknown, in the ungraspable thing that is a source of courage and inspiration to our fellow humans.

So when do we go too far? When is an impulse beyond the realm of the acceptable? Well, many know me as the dancer with the chainsaw or the guy who recreated a 1930s dustbowl on stage or the tall Peggy Lee impersonator with fire baton, so I feel eminently qualified to speak on the subject. First of all, I think theatrical gestures that are made for an effect usually fall pretty flat. It’s important that the impulse is a true one, that it emanates from some personal desire on the part of the artist to get at something, to reach beyond his normal methods in an attempt to plumb new territory.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for a way to upset the statues quo of what I think I know about a subject or idea. I’m deliberately trying to set myself off balance, to create a precipice on which I can stand and risk seeing myself or my material in some new light. Ultimately, I want to look at some aspect of my world and try to understand it better; but first I have to get free of all my assumptions, and that sometimes means turning everything upside down.

But I must also admit that I enjoy nudging the boundaries of acceptability. As a child growing up gay in America I was constantly reminded that my same sex attractions were ill conceived and inadvisable. I was warned that these feelings (or impulses, if you will) would make me prey to ridicule and scorn. How confusing that is for a kid; to be told that what feels innate and natural is wrong. How then, if we can’t trust our feelings, are we ever to ascertain what’s right?

Luckily, I was tenacious in my pursuit of what “felt” right. Even now, in my collaborative process with my company of performers, we work to generate “felt” materials that are personal and charged with thepossibility of risk. We are constantly looking for a way to “take the ride” in the material which is at once a way of feeling its pleasure and taking ownership and responsibility for it.

So if this is what it means to be crazy, count me in. This crazy life has afforded me friendships with real depth and meaning. It has allowed me to taste the pleasure of teaching and being taught. And recently, I’ve brought my crazy, transgressive methods to young high schoolers many of whom feel (as I did) like interlopers on this planet. I have the pleasure of offering them a way to shape their experience, to turn their big feelings into something that they can use. Mostly, it’s just very exciting to offer them the new terrain of creativity where their feelings of being odd or different can actually be an asset.

So ultimately it’s the legacy of passionate, crazy art making that I’m passing along. For some it may appear too risky, but for many it will feel like coming home.