O. C. DANCE / CHRIS PASLES : More Than ‘Convenience’ at Stake in Joe Goode Work

Joe Goode was getting tired of being typecast.

“I was constantly taking my shirt off to be the noble, wronged whatever,” the dancer said during a recent phone interview from his family home in Hampton, Va. “But that just wasn’t contemporary with my life, who I was. . . .

“I didn’t feel noble. I felt other, complex kinds of things. Hopefully, I’m now bringing those issues, those feelings, to my work.”

Some of those issues--personal and social--are evident in “Convenience Boy,” a full-length work dealing with hustlers and drug addicts in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Joe Goode Performance Group will dance the work Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Goode, 42, began studying dance as a kid because “I found dancing a safe harbor. I loved the music and the physicality of dance, and it was something I could do, really excel in and enjoy.” He took everything at dancing school--”including baton and hula”--and got all his classes free. “I was a boy, and they needed boys for recitals.”

As he grew up and moved to New York, his views changed. “I became disenchanted with the mere sort of physical prettiness of dance, as I had known it up to that point, and wanted something more intellectually challenging. For my own exploration, I needed something more human. . . .

“I also was struggling with my identity as a gay man. I was looking for a way to express that and be all right with that. There was no room for that in modern dance at that time, which didn’t talk about it. But it didn’t talk about anything. Context was regarded as inappropriate.”

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Only after working as an actor did he discover a way out of the dilemma.

“There was a whole movement of experimental theater that combined a deep physicality with an expressive sense of intellectual purpose. It could be personal and political. You could reveal great personal truths and at the same time be making a social commentary.” He started combining movement with spoken words and text.

Goode moved to San Francisco in 1979 and a year later found his new “voice” in a solo work, “Yukon, Oklahoma,” which was “loosely based on some letters I had received from an ex--in a very painful affair with a cowboy. It was very charged emotional territory for me, a very bloody work on that level, and full of my own self-loathing, probably, and confusion about how I was going to have a responsible, good strong relationship in the world.

“That’s an interpretation of it now. I couldn’t have said that at the time.”

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Much to his surprise, audiences in San Francisco “absolutely embraced” the piece and he began working “almost immediately with other dancers who wanted to do that kind of work and were real excited about it.”

In 1986, he formed a company. Since then he and the troupe have won numerous awards including two “Izzies” (Isadora Duncan Awards) for outstanding achievement in choreography and company performance. His “29 Effeminate Gestures” has been shown on the PBS television series “Alive From Off Center.”

Living in San Francisco and having “so many colleagues and friends die (from AIDS) opened my eyes to whole other ideas about healing and living and awareness of death as a reality, which I had never thought of before the AIDS crisis.”

He made several AIDS-based pieces including “The Disaster Series” and “Remembering the Pool at the Best Western,” which was about his “best friend dying and the whole kind of journey we took together.”

“He had everything: CMV (cytomegalovirus), pneumocystis, Kaposi’s Sarcoma. He had a very long and tortuous illness. Eventually it got to the point that he just couldn’t breathe. He had lesions on the inside of his throat. It’s sort of irrelevant what he died of. He had been so near death for so long.”

After these and other works, Goode felt he wanted to look at some other issues because “I began to feel like Johnny One Note. I decided (to focus) on convenience culture, and how we are disposable. Our convenience culture has a very detrimental effect on the way we think about ourselves. We don’t have a deep sense of connection with place. We don’t have the same roots that we used to. . . .

“On some level ‘Convenience Boy’ is about AIDS, gay issues--because those are big issues for us--and about women’s issues, too. All those things get reflected in it. It’s very complex. It’s a big, big subject and we certainly don’t cover it all.”

To get material for the work, Goode and his dancers talked to “a lot of street kids. One of most disturbing things we discovered is that there is a whole class of children, really--of runaways and abused kids--who have been disposed of, who live on the streets and feel disposable. They talk very casually about death. They don’t assume they’re going to live until they’re 30 or even 20.”

Goode noted that while the piece asks “a lot of hard questions and uncomfortable questions,” it offers few answers. “I certainly wouldn’t take it on myself to offer antidotes to the society we live in. I don’t have that kind of vision or breadth of understanding of the society I live in.

“All I can do is say, ‘These are some of the things I have sensed or felt or perceived, and which have affected me in these ways.’ And hopefully they can strike a common chord for other people and allow them to ponder these issues in their own lives.”

* The Joe Goode Performance Group will dance “Convenience Boy” on Friday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Tickets: $22 to $28. (714) 854-4646.