Wonder Boy

One of my favorite works performed by the Joe Goode Performance Group is "Wonder Boy."

It's a story about a puppet boy with super powers. The super power of sensitivity. Afraid of the real world, he falls in love with a boy and makes the journey from his window sill to finally join him in dance.  

wonderboy full video

Click to read a review of Wonder Boy 

Topsy Turvy Technique

Joe's choreography is full of partnering lifts and weight sharing. This is very appropriate for showcasing relationships within dance. The majority of his dancers are very strong in the upper body area. This is useful because as you have seen in sample videos, there are lots of inversions going on. The strength of his dancers give the appearance of defying gravity within lifts and partnering sequences. 

                                      

So what's it all about?

As modern dancers and choreographers, it is not necessary to tell a story with every piece you create. Joe creates pieces that are a fusion of dance and theatre, utilizing props and the dancers as actors musicians and singers as well. Like many of the artists in the 70's and 80's, Joe was very heavily influenced by the aids epidemic in the dance community. His pieces are in turn influenced by this too. He effectively shows the vulnerability, sensitivity and sometimes comedy of relationships we carry.  He makes connections with his audience not only through movement, but through our most commonly identified way of communication..speech.



EXCERPTS FROM 'GRACE'. Grace premiered on June 3, 2004 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

It was commissioned by the College of Saint Benedict-Benedicta Arts Center, St Joseph, MN.

Grace zeroes in on particular moments in time and events that reveal the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. Goode collaborated with composer Mikel Rouse to tell the characters' stories and circumstances through epiphanies in movement and sound.

Background

 Goode earned a B.F.A. in drama from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1973 and subsequently moved to New York City to become an actor, director, and choreographer. In New York he studied dance with Merce Cunningham and Viola Farber before relocating to the Bay Area in 1979, where he danced with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for four years.

  The Joe Goode Performance Group was formed in 1986 under the artistic direction and choreography of Mr. Goode himself. Joe's unique approach of combining movement with song, poetry and visual imagery have earned him numerous awards and fellowships including The American Council on the Arts, the New York Dance and Performance Award(Bessies), The Isadora Duncan Dance Award, John Simon Guggenheim and the United States Artists Glover Fellowship. 

I want to make “human scale” dances. By human in scale, I mean placing the emphasis on the unglamorized body, the body in more intimate moments, when it is fallible or agitated or inept. My intent is not to create merely pedestrian movement, but to make dynamic movement that is a combination of gesture and partnering. The challenge is to find the velocity and force in the movement and yet still retain its intimate, conversational quality. My interest in “human scale” extends beyond an interest in an expanded movement vocabulary, however. I am equally interested in the texture of the human voice and the effect it has on movement. Since my early days as a choreographer, I have been trying to forge some territory where dance and language/sound could co-exist.

I want each dance to be a “telling”; telling with the body (where have I been?  where does my longing reside?), and telling with the voice (this is how I see the world). Far from being contradictory, I see these two ways of telling as innately linked. I want to liberate the dancer from his/her silence and create a total theater that is rigorously crafted but intimately personal.

-Joe