Joe Goode is a queer national treasure. He's won every dance award it's possible to win locally, not to mention a Bessie in New York, which is that city's highest dance honor. Over the last three decades, he's dramatized many aspects of gay life, from the explosive 29 Effeminate Gestures (which was televised on PBS a decade ago) to how rent boys live, to how the friends of a man dying of AIDS carry on with the tasks of caring for him. Goode has been able to take these shows on tour from Montana to Egypt, and win audiences over with the humanity of his material.
So his success has been great – but also, for a queer like me for whom coming out is a never-ending campaign, it's hard to be objective about him. As the first dance critic for this paper wrote 20 years ago, "Goode has always had a sizable straight audience, though I can't imagine what they see – for me, it's too close to home – any of the moves from this piece could get a rock thrown through my window."
Same here. And for me, it's necessary to see anything he does, no matter what – it is part of my own ongoing process of coming out.
His latest, Traveling Light, plays through August 9 in the astonishingly beautiful rooms and courtyards of the old San Francisco Mint. You should not miss it. From the press release, and from seeing an early rehearsal with hints of lighting and minimal costumes, the piece will be dreamy, alarming, sensuous, and beautifully danced. The Mint itself represents everything Goode is trying to dismantle – the alluring hope of achieving impregnable safety and success. Traveling Light is about being dis established, about being out in the cold: living amidst insecurity of all kinds, financial, familial, and of finding emotional, sexual familiarity in new places.
Insecurity is one of Goode's great themes, which he's dealt with directly and indirectly over the years – most explicitly in Convenience Boy, which was about the homeless prostitutes of Polk Gulch who'd been cast out by their families, and now had only their bodies to call home, and even those had to be rented out temporarily, for food. The threat of being disowned is one of the most serious that queer people face – what other minority is most in danger in their own homes? And we're up against it so young.
Many of the classic defenses that my generation of queers developed were overcompensations against the fear of disownment. I'll speak for myself: if I could be perfectly beautiful, or perfectly smart, or perfectly rich, had a big dick or big muscles, or a Ph.D. from Oxford, or a big house like Tara, a million bucks of my own, I might be able to live without my mother's love and could "tell them all to go to Hell."
Traveling Light is Goode's meditation on what's happening right now, how to live with the new Depression, global warming, etc. How can we live more simply, less greedily, without hoarding; could we reduce our carbon footprints and like it? Create less garbage? Save the polar bears? Manage our anxieties without frequent sprees at A&F?
The piece will comprise four simultaneous playlets, danced, sung, and acted, presented in separate parts of the Mint: in a salon, a hallway, the courtyard – all of which are spectacularly beautiful and unheated. Dress warmly, and be prepared for hallucinatory disjunctures of impressions. Some of the dancers will perform nearly naked, and you'll be sitting very close, and their grace and beauty will be in your face.
Nearly every scene will have someone speak in a Tennessee Williamsy dreamy/nostalgic tone, which will set the atmosphere and place – though it will dissolve quickly, as if by magic. Wendy Sparks' spectacular costumes in particular have a way of melting off the characters. The whole scene is spectacularly illusory, with Jack Carpenter's lighting being perhaps the most astonishingly theatrical he's ever created.
The Mint itself, with its vaults and massive iron doors, plays a huge role; it tacitly dramatizes the threat of being locked away ("in the closet") behind impenetrable iron doors, or freezing to death in the fear of displeasing a parent who must never know the truth. Those doors are real, and they need to be seen to be believed.
Did I say dress warmly? It's going to be cold.
Info: www.joegoode.org