Joe Goode - Paul Parish

Left-wing Christians

"Grace @ Grace"
Joe Goode Performance Group
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
Friday, Nov 3, 2006, 7:30 PM

by Paul Parish
copyright 2006 by Paul Parish

In twenty years, Joe Goode has gone from being the Bay Area's foremost dance theater subversive — the gay iconoclast — through obsession with AIDS, to being established as the most honest choreographer/poet of relationship in our anxious era. He's always worked your nerves: the uneasiness used to be in the seductiveness, now it's in how to be sure you've found what you're looking for. All along the way, he's been developing themes of longing; he used to use pop imagery (Doris Day and Rock Hudson, the power of ad-men to stimulate desire — "Eternity, Infiniti, Lexus") to dramatize a hysterical ambivalence about swallowing the tempting bait.

But in the early AIDS era, when grief was the climate we all lived in around here, his work became more earnest — "29 Effeminate Gestures" laid down the gauntlet, after which homosexuality itself was never again the issue, and then "Remembering the Pool at the Best Western" enshrined an out-of-body experience he had while tending a friend dying of AIDS, and the work made it clear there was no denying the fact of transcendence — grace comes to you when you don't expect it but it's as real as the water in the pool, and the change is that you're going to have to alter your expectations.

His latest spectacle, "Grace @ Grace," is in fact a restaging of a piece he made for the College of St Benedict (St Joseph, Minnesota) shortly after the millennium. "Grace" was installed like a small holy circus in various parts of Grace Cathedral, which is the seat of the Episcopal Bishop of San Francisco and sits atop Nob Hill facing the Pacific Union Club and the Mark Hopkins Hotel and is literally the pinnacle of the social structure of this region. Grace Cathedral is also in many ways the west-coast equivalent of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, home to non-literal-minded, left-wing Christians, home of astonishing concerts and serious liturgical dancing. (Grace does not host anything as outrageous as St. John the Divine's mass for cats, dogs, donkeys, giraffes and elephants on the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, but it does aspire to gaiety amidst solemnity, and it's totally fitting that the cathedral should present a gay choreographer's work.) "Grace @ Grace" had two sold-out shows (at 7:30 and 9:30 PM) a week ago Friday night and succeeded in the most part because the deepest hidden threads in his usual tapestry turn out to have profound structural importance and they come to unusual prominence when the work is installed in the vast cold spaces of Grace Cathedral.

"Grace" continues themes from Goode's "The Ascent of Big Linda into the Skies of Montana" of nearly twenty years ago, which featured Goode as housewife Linda in a blue dress and a blond wig getting carried away like St. Teresa in the Bernini altarpiece; it was likewise an installation: its several modules occupied the lobby, main stage, and several other parts of Theatre Artaud.

"Grace" had a prologue in the Nave, down by the front door, and three little scenes in side chapels, and a group dance in the choir (up by the high altar). The finest things were the little scenes. The first I saw (I was in the yellow group, we were divided up by color-coded programs, and each group followed follow a verger carrying a banner with your color to the next viewing station) began with fabulous floating upside-down lifts, performed in the deep recesses of a bay that was at the end of a tunnel of arches, fantastically lit, like a baroque altarpiece come to life in modern clothes — though the sublimity turned sour rather fast and the support got fractious, and as the couple moved towards us, first one then the other actually got fed up and dropped out.... but then came back sheepishly, like half of a married couple who can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

The second one I saw was the peak of the evening for me — we were put in front of a chapel to the Magdalene barred by a massive wrought-iron gate, like those at the Spanish royal monastery, the Escorial — austere stone, colossal gate, comfortless as a prison, and the female dancer behind the bars was holding onto them in the posture of one who's given up hope. She collapsed in extreme slow motion, sliding down the bars to the floor as if all the spirit had gone out of her, whereupon Goode himself and another male dancer appeared behind her, approached in ambiguously threatening manner, stood over her imposingly, and suddenly Goode pushed the gate open and walked through (as if this were a prison of the mind, not just an imaginary one but one that only had force to hold you if you let it). Mind-forged manacles seemed to be the theme of this one, especially when the two remaining began a dance with a diagonal lunge, hand touching the floor, that looked like Blake's famous painting of Urizen inscribing the limits of the horizon on the heavens.

The third one showed Elizabeth Burritt, who often functions as Goode's alter ego, in angel wings on the altar of the interfaith chapel, and gave her a monologue" if I were, if I really were [the creature I'm pretending to be], would it inspire you, do you need more of me, if there were fifty of us, a HOST of us, would you believe?" This is a special case of Goode's usual seductive manner, which abuses you mildly for the investment you've already made by coming to the theater, and mocks you for wanting illusions (which derives of course from Brecht) — she complains about our wanting her to blast us like a thunderbolt — would you believe then, would you change your life? Sadly she folds up, wrinkling her brow apologetically, "I'm not a thunderbolt."

The finale in the Cathedral's walnut-paneled Choir (which for some reason Grace Cathedral spells "Quire") worked least for me, but then I have very strong associations with church spaces from my childhood (when I was a rather religious child and actually considered becoming a priest until adolescent sexuality made a feverish mess of my life). The three duets, performed amidst Goode's evocative monologues and Mikel Rouse's affecting music, did not gain anything from the space. Goode's sense of heaven is like a great living room in the sky, where domestic life will be happily free of crumbs on the table and the curtains will be always fresh and the people you're familiar with will not reproach you. It stages best under the same conditions prevailing in a good production of "The Fantastiks." The dancers were uniformly marvelous, especially the core group of Marit Brook-Kothlow, Felipe Barrueto-Cabello, Melecio Estrella, Ruben Graciani, and Elizabeth Burritt.

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