The California State University Summer Arts festival likes to bring out one of its big guns for the opening night performance, and Sunday night's kick-off concert featuring the returning Joe Goode Performance Group managed to accomplish that goal in more ways than one. The group's first selection, the 1996 "Maverick Strain," was a cheeky riff on the lore of the American cowboy and this country's obsession with guns.
Goode himself came out before the dance started to sing to the audience a "cowboy song," and what a sight he was with his wildly fringed Western shirt. (Later in the piece he would don a pair of woolly chaps festooned with gaudy tassels in a look that suggested the stripping scene from "Gypsy" crossed with "The Magnificent Seven.") After showing off his flamboyant costume, Goode noted that a look such as his, which could seem so ironic in San Francisco, could be interpreted differently here in the hinterlands of Fresno, where the artsy/kitschy myth of the cowboy intertwines with a real-life working industry. I'd go as far as to say that the dance works even better in a place like Fresno.
I thoroughly enjoyed "Maverick Strain's" impudence, from its over-the-top campy razzle-dazzle (who wears short shorts? cowboys!) to its yee-haw pointedness. Goode is a true character, extremely charming, and his front-and-center ego just adds that much more brassiness to the experience.
After a pause, the company returned with 2008's "Wonderboy," a thrilling piece stuffed full of angst and laughter, in which the six dancers interacted extensively with a fanciful boy puppet. (With the dancers manipulating the puppet's limbs, it takes on a human quality, and I found myself thinking of it as just one more being on stage with its own volition.)
Using spoken word and song, including the words of such "wonderboys" as Sam Shepard, Thom Gunn and Christopher Isherwood, the piece overall has a dreamy, whimsical feel infused with a faint melancholy. Whether that sadness is specific, as the gay-male angst of the storyline seems to suggest, or if it's more diffuse, possibly touching the separation that we all feel, I'm not so sure, but the cumulative impact is one of tenderness and hope.
Goode notes in the program that some of the special people in this world are dazzling and wondrous, lit from within, but "at the same time fragile, fearful, ill equipped for the real world." What touched me most was the depiction of the moment when the "boy" is able to touch another person. We're all locked in our brains, of course, forever isolated, yet often we forget just how profound it is to be able to open up and share our hearts -- and our physical space -- with others.
I'd say I've seen a ton in my 45 loooong years on this planet, and I've certainly worked with oodles of dancers and dance companies.
Joe Goode and his group and his style and his combination of mixed-media ranks in my top 1 of 'all things combined' goodness.
His troupe shouldn't ever be missed (even tho I had to miss it myself this year).