"Poetics of Space"
Joe Goode Performance Project
Joe Goode Annex
San Francisco, CA
October 3, 2015
by Rita Felciano
© copyright 2015 Rita Felciano
Wandering through Joe Goode's labyrinthine "Poetics of Space" felt like looking through a kaleidoscope where with every turn your perspective on some unseen object changes. While it was somewhat disconcerting to be herded around--even though theoretically the audience was free to chose its travel path through a multitude of differently sized spaces-- this latest of Goode's musings on who we are, struck with a resonance that only can come from a talented experienced artist who has done his homework.
Felipe Barrueto-Cabello and Marit Brook-Kothlow
Photo: RJ Muna
Gaston Bachelard's book of the eponymous name offered Goode the theoretical basis for this installation in which concepts of space -- in time, human, created and natural, architectural, individual and communal-- found expressions in vignettes that were humorous, puzzling, wistful and anguished. Often, said Goode, we recall events only in the context in which we experienced them. For me it was watching the sun rise right after the birth of our son; my mother at 85 slithering down a playground slide, and holding hands with a stranger on Civic Center Plaza the day of Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination.
Guest artists Caroline Alexander, Molly Katzman and Kevin Lopez joined Goode's dancers (Felipe Barrueto-Cabelleo, Melecio Estrella, Damara Vita Ganley and Patricia West). Most welcome was the return of long-time Goode dancer/alumna Marit Brook-Kothlow, funny, pathetic and tough as an aging, man-eating Hollywood has-been.
Goode, looking like a corpse in a tuxedo, first introduced the show from a space next door to the theater ("not owned, just rented"). High above the ground, he talked about a never-to-be-seen man called Logan "who fell from a tall space." But Logan wove through the evening, perhaps as Everyman, perhaps a victim of foul play, perhaps, as his name was explained, as a place with a small hollow.
Sean Riley designed movable shape-giving curtains and an L-shaped catwalk that divided the 25 foot high room into cubicles open to sound but not to view. Peter Paschke fashioned the effective musical collage. The choreography -- solos, small groups, at the end a big chorus of piled up bodies -- was both athletic and based on pedestrian gestures. This is where these fine dancers, singers and speakers made their essential contribution. Given their immaculate timing of the scene shifts, you felt that the theater itself had become a choreographed space.
"Poetics" opened with a jungle diorama and Lopez and West in hands-up positions encased inside a display window. My first movement encounter was with an insistent Estrella claiming innocence for Logan's death. You almost believed him until a "drunken" Ward burst in and accused Estrella of murder. Their slow-motion fist fight evaporated like a bad dream. Scenes like this were heated with ambiguity and emotion, the more so because the audience at any time was but at arms' length from the performers. West lined up three volunteers against a white canvass. From where I stood they had been reduced into a two-dimensional design. Ward in anger and agony knotted himself into positions from from which he couldn't extradite himself until audience members lent a helping hand. A large group of us also stood shoulder to shoulder under a parachute listening to Brook-Kothlow's spitting monologue. I thought it oppressive.
Two favorite moments came with Estrella's remembering that as a kid in a Sears store he would huddle and hide between soft clothes, feeling happy and secure. In another incident, tall and majestic Alexander and Barrueto-Cabello leaned out from the catwalk as if about to fall while Goode on the sideline talked about how people communicate very well without verbal language. It felt a like an inside joke since in his nine years of performing with Goode, Barrueto-Cabello is the only one who has never uttered a word on stage.
For the finale Goode returned to the cat walk one more time. We looked up at heavy boots, hairy legs, a plastic blue wig, a tattered gown -- in short a disheveled drag queen who wistfully mused, as only Goode can, about memory, loneliness and aging.