Dance Review: Joe Goode Performance Group-Remember the Wonder...

Midway through the performance of Joe Goode's latest "Wonderboy" -- at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through June 15-- the dancers operating the titular puppet abandoned their charge and left him sitting alone in his window, awash in drifting filmy curtains. Such was the storytelling power of this fabulous creature, though, that I continued to stare at him for several minutes, ignoring the dancers downstage. Somehow I wanted to see what he'd do next-- I wanted to catch what his reactions to the unfolding dance would be--even though I was quite aware that as a puppet, he wouldn't...couldn't possibly move.

Goode's latest collaboration with the San Francisco-born, now New York-based puppeteer Basil Twist (they worked together on Paula Vogel's "Long Christmas Ride Home" for the Magic Theater) makes for memorable theater. If the execution is not entirely perfect, the wonderful boy at the center of the story is charismatic enough to carry the show, which plays on a double bill with an abbreviated version of Goode's 1996 "Maverick Strain."

As in "Christmas Ride," the style reflects a modern version of the Japanese bunraku puppet form, in which the operators of the puppet are not only visible to the audience, but play characters of their own. In a strange way, the parsing of Goode's choreography, with slightly self-conscious, inward-seeking movements, makes an excellent match with the range of motion available to the boy himself.

In fact, the dancers (Melecio Estrella, Mark Stuver, Jessica Swanson, Andrew Ward, Patricia West and Alexander Zendzian) have obviously lavished attention not only on their own solos and duets, but also on matching their movement to Wonderboy's choreographed phrases. Perhaps though, there is no one better suited to this danced bunraku style than movement professionals. Accustomed to working in partnership and projecting the lines beyond their own bodies, the human performers generously transfer "realness" to this latter-day Pinocchio.

But making "realness" is also Basil Twist's stock in trade. A master puppeteer, who can seemingly enable any object--puppet or not--tell its own story, Twist imbues his boy with endearing details, an enigmatic lift to the corner of his lips, a sparkle in his eye, that continually draw your attention back to him.

As Wonderboy observed and commented on the workings of the world from his spare metal window frame-- just as the audience was watching from outside our own proscenium/window-- I couldn't help marveling at the enormous empathy I felt for the little guy. When he left the stage, I was a little unnerved and disappointed, like a kid whose friend has moved away, and when he tentatively dips his foot into the flow of life, I sensed a rush of exhilaration at his jetes from place to place. If only we could have flown up the aisle with him at the end.

Visit joegoode.org for more information on the show.

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Joe Goode's Humansville

You have to hand it to Joe Goode. With “Humansville” --which the Joe Goode Performance Group premiered on Thursday night in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum in San Francisco— he breaks open the theatrical box with a highly effective dance theater installation with a style that few can pull off.

Presented as part of the Deeply Personal Series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the hour-long, site-specific work integrates live dance, music performance and video –both pre-recorded and live--with a dazzling complexity. From a purely technical standpoint, it is perhaps Goode’s most ambitious work, sectioning part of the open Forum theater into four living dioramas, some of which display Austin Forbord’s video projections against Erik Flatmo’s scenic elements. Jack Carpenter skillfully manages the tricky task of unifying the individual scenes with lighting, and the whole space is bound loosely by the ambient score by Joan Jeanrenaud-- a founding member of the Kronos Quartet-- who plays the cello from a mobile platform that can be wheeled throughout the performing area.

Dispersed among the tableaux are the members of Goode’s current group of performers. Marit Brook-Kothlow and Felipe Barrueto-Cabello sit silently side-by-side opposite a gargantuan projection of a woman gesturing “come hithers” at us. Around the corner, Alexander Zendzian and Melecio Estrella, each in a separate tiled cell, fling themselves in synchronized desperation against the grey and blue walls. Dressed in powder pink 50’s crinolines, Jessica Swanson chats with her beau—another giant projection on the side of her wall-papered room, while in a red fuzz-lined alcove, Patricia West appears through a small window to gripe about a restaurant reservation while employing gestures that eerily mimic a weeping woman projected on a TV screen just below her.

As with any installation art there are multiple layers and points of entry. You don’t have to start at any particular place, and you needn’t stay through the end of each of the 7-minute “plays.” In fact, there’s a passageway behind the walls where audience members are free to wander and peek through cut-out windows into the back of each scene, adding both interactivity to the work plus the disturbing sense that we are all peeping Toms, constantly trying to see what the neighbors are up to. Did the audience members who craned forward for a glimpse under the ruffled valance of Swanson’s window realize that their image was being projected larger-than-life on the other side of the wall?

The combination of video with live action is highly persuasive. There is the sense of being immersed in a moment, but as with the installations of Bill Viola or Julia Scher, you also have a slightly creepy feeling that you’re being played. This is a risky and fascinating way to present questions about human nature, voyeurism, our understanding of others and of ourselves. How willing are we to cross over lines and put ourselves out there? When a projected woman holds out her hand and invites us to “touch me,” it takes several minutes for the crowd to figure out that someone has to walk forward and touch the projection before the sequence will continue, but once it becomes clear, the invitation evokes a kind of delight too, as if we’ve been wallflowers who are suddenly asked to dance.

When the piece moves into a more conventional presentation style, however, the momentum wanes. After about half an hour of roaming and peeping, of intersecting with lives that are only partially observed and never fully understood, the lights in the Forum come up, signaling the shift to the second part of the show and the audience sits down obediently in bleachers facing the blank pair of angled walls.

From here, the action moves into episodic dance segments that offer a prismatic view of some of the elements seen in the installations. The dancing is potent--particularly intense duets for Brook-Kothlow and Barrueto-Cabello. Nevertheless, we glean no further information about the personalities in the boxes and even with a final series of text snippets that address empathy and human connection, it’s not clear how to tie it all together. Plus it’s not nearly as much fun as walking in and around the action.

Even so, “Humansville” is a compelling journey. The overall look is beautiful, melding together all the production elements masterfully and if Goode’s aim is to provoke, to invite us to think, then he succeeds at that-- admirably.

This review first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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KQED Profile: Basil Twist

“Puppetry is much deeper than people give it credit because it’s about life and death and what is the frontier there.”

-- Basil Twist

A San Francisco native, Basil Twist first became interested in puppetry through his mother, who was president of the San Francisco Puppeteers Guild. After stints working with designer and Broadway director Julie Taymor and the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater in New York's Central Park, Twist became the first American to study at France's École Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette.

He lives in New York's Greenwich Village, where he dreams up his shows and constructs puppets in a basement workshop. Spark caught up with Twist in San Francisco, where he was collaborating with dancer Joe Goode and playwright Paula Vogel to stage "The Long Christmas Ride Home" at the Magic Theatre.

Twist first made a splash in 1995 with "The Araneidae Show." Since then, he has won a Bessie Award for the show and been nominated for a Drama Desk Award for "Tell Tale." Though well versed in traditional forms, Twist often creates his own blended styles, pushing boundaries to adapt them to new theatrical expectations.

Read more on the KQED Spark website.

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Dance Review: Joe Goode's "Stay Together"

Joe Goode Performance Group
“Stay Together” and “Deeply There”
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
through June 11, 2006

Given the polished intellect and sheer professionalism that the Joe Goode Performance Group gives to maverick theater, it’s a little bit surprising that the company has never before paired up with that other maverick leader in town, Michael Tilson Thomas. But if the success of Friday’s premiere of their first collaboration “Stay Together” is anything to go by, this won’t be their last joint effort.

At twenty years old, the company is something of a San Francisco institution and the articulate Goode himself is well-deserving of his reputation as one of the most intriguing and offbeat theater masters around. And given how strong and carefully assembled his shows always are, it’s not a heavy criticism to say that the music has always been the weakest element. But the singsong tunes often seem to imply that this is a group of dancers not wholly comfortable with singing onstage, and the musical interludes scores were more often than not stitched together from a variety of sources.

Inspired by one of Tilson Thomas’s offbeat songs, and with an original score by the maestro, however, “Stay Together” knits concept with musical execution in a satisfying way, and at last, we feel that the wit of the music matches that of the theatrics.

And theatrical it is, blending video with stage and recorded with live, in a seamless and yet quirky and thoughtful way.

Suspended over the stage are two large screens, mirrored by a pair of small television screens to one side that display rotated versions of the same images. Strong dark lines run across a wash of red in the back of the space -- almost like a screwy horizontal hold on a TV screen broadcasting a Mark Rothko painting. And below in the darkened space, the dancers seem almost dwarfed by their surroundings.

In “Stay Together,” Goode plays Bob, a visual artist whose relationships loosely tie together the characters – notably his lover Bertie (Melecio Estrella), a manager played by Liz Burritt. It’s never quite clear what kind of artist Bob is. Perhaps an avant-garde video artist like Bill Viola, or a Mark Rothko sort of painter -- though the occasional voiceover intoning instructions to the dancers as they appear on the screens seems to indicate the former.

It’s a fractured view of existence, reflected in the fractured video effects and the zany episodes scattered throughout the work.

Goode’s ever-talented mainstay, Burritt creates yet another disarmingly neurotic character as she mugs in front of an onstage camera with her face projected in IMAX proportions behind her. Lines that could read as banal, are instead in her hands droll and amusing.

“I tell myself, ‘Stay together, listen deeply and something good will happen,’” she drawls, “I don’t know how that’s going to work out…” Meanwhile, four dancers move beside her slowly, like architectural exclamation points to her monologue.

As always, Goode’s monologues are wordy, and the work as a whole comes in many layers, like a neatly packed portmanteau. But the pleasure of it ultimately is in our mental unravelling of the imagery. Occasionally, the words pass us by, barely registering as we focus on disembodied heads running through a gamut of expressions as they floating over the space. Curiously, this has the effect of magnifying small moments and snippets of the monologue, without ever bringing them clearly into focus. Then just as you begin to get a grip on the deeper meaning of what a character might be saying, the faces melt away into storm clouds drifting lazily across the screens leaving behind a ghostly echo, a mix of taped and live effects that happens seamlessly.

The second half of the program is given to “Deeply There,” a work created in 1998 and trimmed here from evening length to fifty minutes. It is probably Goode’s best known work and to many, his best work.

The setting takes us back to the height of the AIDS epidemic, which coincidentally began twenty-five years ago. But anyone who’s ever kept vigil at a dying person’s bedside will instantly recognize the scene. Relatives and friends tiptoeing quietly about a house and warning newcomers not to be shocked by the fragility of the person in the bed.

There is truthfulness in the duet for Goode and the young Joshua Rauchwerger, who show that in essence, Goode’s choreography and drama is really about getting back to what some might call child’s play and others might call simple honesty. The silly comic moments -- a Jackie O dance led by Ruben Graciani, the rising hysteria of Burritt’s musings on the gay lifestyle – are interposed with tender poignant ones, such as the affecting Marit Brook-Kothlow’s turn as the family dog who considers what it means to be left alone.

Compared to the elegantly assembled “Stay Together,” “Deeply There” can seem wordy, even fussy. The video effects are less experienced and the transitions are less graceful, but there is a core of rage and raw feeling that suffuses this particular piece, and leave a deep impression of the bittersweet experience of saying farewell.

This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

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