The historic Rincon Center in downtown San Francisco near the Embarcadero stands at the collision between the onetime Rincon Annex Post Office, with its stunning Art Deco lobby and New Deal murals, and a 1988 glass-and-steel modern commercial building and residential towers with a lofty atrium. It is the perfect spot to meet up with choreographer Joe Goode, to see the space where his latest site-specific installation Are You Okay? (runs Thu/14-August 31) will be performed. Also, to delve into his process. That being said, however, our turbulent times suggest that Is Anyone Okay? might be a more apt title.
Although Goode has been one of San Francisco’s mainstay creators since the founding of his Joe Goode Performance Group in 1986, my writing about Goode’s output only began in 1998 with Deeply There, a story about a man whose partner is dying of AIDS. My most recent was last October for the Gush festival where he premiered a deeply touching duet with longtime collaborator Melecio Estrella.
This was the embryonic beginning of Are You Okay?, an exploration of how we, both individually and collectively, cope with a world that metaphorically sifts and twists under our feet. It was the first step on the path towards developing an evening-length piece that was to be shown the following summer. Goode’s goal then and now is to show that collaborative embodied creativity is essential for survival.
We sit in two padded armchairs in the atrium while the tech crew noisily moves pallets and gigantic boxes of equipment into a large adjacent space that will be transformed into the scenic environment for the performances which begin August 14. Looking through the doors, I can see the dark grain of wood for the nearly completed sprung dance floor, a trashed-out car dumped rudely in the middle of the floor with its detached doors and hood leaning against a wall at the back. Next to them, tall windows reveal the buildings across the street.
When I recall the duet from Gush, Goode responds, “You’re not going to see that.” Hopes that it might at least be partly incorporated into the new piece are dashed when he explains that, “partly because this is such a big show in a big space,” it wasn’t possible. “We [along with co-director Estrella] really felt we had to be in a directorial role with an overview and we couldn’t be worrying about our own performance. Also that was a very intimate little piece that worked well in the Annex [JGPG’s home studio], but there’s nowhere to put that here.”
He continued, “It has so many interesting aspects that we wanted to exploit and so many limitations that we needed to overcome. No one is going to sit down and be quiet. It’s going to be a wander-through experience and you’re not going to have groups as you’ve had in the past at my shows. Things are going to guide you if you’re willing. You’ll be able to say, oh, I see where the action is happening now, and I can migrate towards it, but [the sections] are not going to be on repeat, as we’ve done in the past where different groups are seeing different things at different times, which I’ve loved, but we’ve [already] done it.
“This is just two big spaces. The indoor one that used to be retail space, and this atrium. I thought, let’s work with the architecture the way it is. There are a lot of points of elevation, so many of the performers are up high on platforms and perches and that will draw your attention.”
The cast is comprised of a dozen dancers and one actor who Goode says is “playing the role that I sometimes play—the narrator, the glue—and he, Rotimi Agbabiaka, is much better than I am. It’s so fun for me to hear my writing. I write from my own voice and my own sense of irony and drama. To hear someone else articulate that in a very different way is so lovely.”
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Asked how much input all the performers have into what’s happening or if they are just filling out Goode’s own structure, he emphasizes that “I do all the writing. But when I give somebody something specific, like ‘Does this line feel like too much for you or too angry or too sentimental?’ We discuss it, so little changes get made. And sometimes I don’t offer that because I’m very attached to the way it’s written.
“But with the movement, the process is very much a response to prompts. I very rarely teach steps. I might start with wanting the arc of the movement to be slow and curvaceous, then ask you to take that quality and maybe learn these 12 counts [of movement] I’ve made up. Next, I’ll ask you to take that quality and extend it to 20 counts and using a specific part of your body pull your partner into it. I’ve worked with the same people for so many years, because they understand my prompts. They also understand the transition from language to movement. I have both Marit and Felipe in this show who have literally worked with me since the ’80s. And I also have composer Ben Juodvalkis collaborating with me for the past 15 years.”
Goode began the genesis of Are You Okay? a “few years ago when Biden was president and his health czar produced a study that said we’re in a mental health crisis in this country. Young people are anxious and depressed and isolated. Old people are isolated and lonely and depressed and pretty much everybody in between. One of the most disturbed populations for a developed country. The actual statistics showed 86 percent of youth are stressed out and anxious. That’s when I decided to do Are You Okay?
“I started interviewing people, a little bit of that you’ll hear in the piece. But then the government changed and the title took on a whole new meaning,” he says. “Am I okay with my country? With my sense of safety in my own country? And are my rights going to be removed? Are my friends going to lose their citizenship because they’re immigrants? A whole other set of questions came up around that question. It’s been a very timely.
“We can’t cover that all in the piece. You don’t want it to be just a list of complaints, because we all know what those complaints are. We try to take a poetic approach, but there is an edge, and we’re all feeling the edge of the cliff and we’re precariously standing on the edge,” Goode concludes.
JOE GOODE PERFORMANCE GROUP: ARE YOU OKAY? runs Thu/14-August 31. Rincon Center, SF. Tickets and more info here.
