The Joe Goode Performance Group took hold of the Ina & Jack Kay Theater of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center Friday, May 1st, 2009. With visible strength, they controlled the stage, catching each other and catching my attention.
I expected the strength and radiance due to an exploration of the company’s website before the show. I watched a portion of a piece that became a pas de deux of sorts, with one performer situated in, but hardly confined to, a wheelchair. The pair utilized every aspect of the wheelchair, the handles, the brakes, the wheels, the leather seat. Even through the short snip-it, I got a powerful feel for a message of equality regardless of a perception of handicap. There was no disability, only capability.
The first half of the performance I saw in person, was made up of snip-its as well. Maverick Strain, a 1996 reincarnation of The Misfits, a screenplay by Arthur Miller, was highlighted in excerpts. I did not get a solidified feel for the mood of the piece, possibly because I had no background knowledge of The Misfits, however I was still captivated by the way the performers moved on the stage. Initially, I was slightly distracted by the costumes: lilac-crushed-velvet pants, fringed vests, royal blue sequin waistbands. Their tops (those who wore tops) didn’t match their bottoms, and no dancer’s get-up matched another’s. The costumes disappeared when the movement picked up. As one of the male dancers brought his leg from back to front, his foot high off the ground in an informal ronde de jambe en l’air, I didn’t need to strain to see the definition on his quadriceps . It was not his physical form that I found so captivating though, it was the way he moved past himself, taking up more space than his personal volume. The force and exertion was so close to visible, those are what I was straining to see.
One section of the overview gave the impression of a saloon. First, two women engaged in conversation, moving from pose to pose, on and around chairs in unison. The poses varied from casual and everyday, to contorted and inverted. I couldn’t help but recall the poses held on top of the wheelchair wheel that I had seen just hours before. The women were joined by two men, who came prepared with chairs of their own. The two parties went back and forth, then surprisingly switched roles entirely. They replayed the scene, complete with dialogue and body language. It was an interesting play on gender, the grotesque pelvic thrusts seemed far more foreign on the females, even as they played the same role in the situation as the men had.
The most emotive section of Maverick Strain, to me, followed the staged death of one of the dancers. Soft woodwinds set a tone that the dancers embodied with sighing movements. In three sets of partners, two male-female sets and one male-male set, the dancers draped over, melted into, pushed and pulled each other. Each lift moved seamlessly into another and no set of partners had a dominant or controlling person. In each set, the partners seemed to hurt and comfort one another, lift and drop, hold and release. Even the women lifted the men. Their lifts were not modified versions but a calculated balance of forces. When the women lifted the men, it reminded me of the previous day’s class when we had done some experimenting with partnering and lifting. I knew then that the success of the lifts was fully dependent on total trust and total commitment to the action. Timing too proved crucial in the lifts, but I think the timing of our experimentation with them in reference to my seeing the performance was crucial as well for my full respect for the section.
The second half of the performance was the Joe Goode Performance Group’s 2008 piece, Wonderboy. The piece had an element of magic to it. The puppet proved to be no more vulnerable or susceptible to manipulation than any person, the dancers conducting his extending arms and expressive head nods faded away and he has his own performer. The piece opened with the puppet situated in a window-frame structure, with long, flowing white curtains expressing (through the voice of the performer on the microphone, stage left) his passion for the world he sees, not lives, through his window. Of course, the puppet sat unmoved when the dancers left him but he didn’t seem vacant.; he established his presence and kept it. A synthesized voice told his story of eye contact with a boy, innocently naughty. The encounter came across as confusing, frightening. A woman in a bright red dress took the stage and with her motions she emitted the emotions that lay in his tormented voice as he asked Who can stand these things? answering, I can’t, I can’t. She spun with the initial force of a top, with the keen ability to top on a dime, dive to the floor and recover as if it she’d been standing still the entire time. She exploded through the space, overshadowing the partners who occupied upstage. She was grasping for anything, unsatisfied with the air around her and settling with her own body, holding it tight. She stood out, but looked lost; she cried out, but remained unrescued.
At one point, the puppet sat with his back to the audience, watching the dancers perform a contrived cheerleading routine. They made stiff Vs with their arms, topped off with pompoms and shouted vulgar insults at him. The insults overlapped each other, but never drowned each other out, instead the scene increased in volume and malice.
Eventually, the puppet leapt from his window. He was able to mimic the movements of another male dancer, helped by eight hands. He gained acceptance and confidence through this process. Symbolically, two sheer, white pieces of fabric extended from the ceiling, transforming the stage into a much bigger window for him not to view the world through, but to get to the world through. And he did exactly that, flying over the audience and into darkness.
The bildungsroman of the young boy gaining comfort with his sexuality and self was clearer to me in Wonderboy than any message I must have missed in Maverick Strain. In either case, with or without storyline, the Joe Goode performers kept me wide-eyed and holding my armrests to keep from getting up, getting closer, and seeing more.
Photo: http://www.maryellenhunt.com/artsblog/labels/Joe_Goode.html
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