For San Francisco choreographer-director  Joe Goode, it meant building a work into the long-abandoned Old Mint, which was once the Fort Knox for almost all of America. It was a colossal challenge. Not exactly like the Metropolitan Opera House, the Old Mint is a huge and indestructible 1874 Greek-revival structure suggesting palace, penitentiary, bank---or something in between.
            But Goode is a master at amalgamated concepts---part dance, part theater, part song, part chorus, part narration. With his brief hybrid show “Traveling Light,” Goode has come close to striking gold, which, for the Old Mint, is right on.  In a myriad of scenelets, he weaves together themes of rich-poor snobbism, historical San Francisco, the liberation of women from 19^th-century confinement and, inevitably, boom-bust. The real story is always immersed beneath the surface, with just enough fragments to the fore in order to suggest wisps of meaning.
            To do this, the Joe Goode Performing Group has assembled some 15 versatile performers, many trained in multiple disciplines (theater, dance, singing), performing with discipline and close coordination. And he brings them close enough to touch, nowhere more arrestingly than when an imperious woman dancer ended her sequence about a foot from my nose, giving me a withering stare that was both hypnotic and intimidating.  It left you feeling that you could easily jump up, shake a leg, grab her around the waist  and strike up the invisible band, impromptu-style.
            Goode’s engaging choreography features unusual lifts of every sort, even with the woman doing some of the heavy lifting. The dancers often sprawl on the floor, a dubious neck-craning device in these chambers with the flat floors and no stage. His figures are fascinating: The corseted, confined 1874 single woman; the poor drifter in jacket and hat, but no shirt; and the vapid rich girl unresponsive to the greater society around her milieu.
            There are fine reception rooms with colonnades, a chilly prison-yard-like outdoor scene and, far down, bank vaults where a cashier dangles five-dollar bills just out of your reach. The performance moves from room to room every quarter-hour, each set piece shaped to the space at hand. (The movement is partly mandated by the 44-person limit to any one chamber, checked up nightly by the gimlet-eyed fire marshal. Not surprisingly, the nightly attendance  limit of 176 has been reached several times already.)
             Adding to the uniqueness is viewing other scenes through large windows, and savoring the dungeon-like basement in the tableaux of the “pre-show.”
            A particular highlight is the astute lighting (often behind windows) by longtime Goode associate, designer Jack Carpenter.
            All in all, this ambulatory exercise had strangers striking up chats with strangers---a rare imprimatur of success and stimulus in theatrical experiences---and performers mingled with the audience after bows. After 31 years doing dance-cum-theater, Goode continues to ride high in his unique medium, propelled by a well-knit ensemble that can do everything short of minting gold bars out of lead
            “Traveling Light” by the Joe Goode Performance Group, through Aug. 1 at the Old Mint, Fifth and Mission, San Francisco. An hour and a quarter, without intermission. For information: (415) 561-6565, or go online.
        ©Paul Hertelendy 2010
                                       #
           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
                      #
                     Return to main menu