 |
 |
|
| |
|
|
| |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
| |
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Joe Goode is a choreographer, writer,
and director whose first concern as an artist is to provide
a "deeply felt, profoundly
human experience" in the theater. He is widely known as
an innovator in the field of dance for his willingness to collide
movement with spoken word, Goode's work has been commissioned by dance companies across America and his performance/installation works have been commissioned by the Krannert Art Museum , the Capp Street Project, the M.H. de Young Museum, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The Joe Goode Performance Group (formed in 1986) has toured throughout the U.S. as well as in Canada, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Africa. Joe Goode is known as a master teacher; his summer workshops in "felt performance" attract participants from around the world. Goode has recently joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in the department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. Living Mission Statement This is the essence of the ever-evolving mission of the Joe Goode Performance Group The mission for me, in the work that I'm doing, is to pierce the veil of toughness that we all have in our lives and to uncover the vulnerable center, the confused, flailing human part of us that we conceal and avoid. I don't care how this is achieved, through dance, voice, sculpture, gesture; the how is not important. It's the experience, the tactile, that matters, that's my main mission - Also, to make the world a more compassionate place, to toss my penny into the well of tolerance, to help us at least look at each other without so much fear and disdain. The main thing is to shake loose and jump into this experience. To experience the big feelings and the big thoughts that don't get the air time they deserve. Also to be sensual, to juice the body and the voice - To have that kind of tactile sensate experience, I think it is important. I think that we need to feel that juice. And let's face it. We need to laugh at ourselves, at our condition. The key to both the pathos and the joy is in the laughter. I think some of my prime interests are gender: what is defined as male and what is defined as female. To observe that and enter into that convention & poke into it and see what can shift. And also to ponder this cultural queasiness about death and dying and whether or not living can fit into the continuum of death and dying. In other words, how do we approach life with zeal and still have a knowledge of the death that is coming. This has lead to a headlong encounter with AIDS and the issues it has brought into our culture. I'm also interested in what roles we all play to be appropriate and what can we do…what can we hope to learn by occasionally being inappropriate. By occasionally exploring that inappropriate side of ourselves. And to acknowledge how alienated we are. At the core we all feel inappropriate and inadequate. And yet we persist in this quest to be adequate and functional? The important thing is conversation. I want to enter into a conversation with an audience. I want them to feel like they're being asked intimate questions, that the material is asking them to think more deeply. If I can entertain them too, then that's a way that I can seduce them to take a deeper ride with me. The ride is all important, not just a magic carpet ride up and out of our humdrum lives, but a ride into the mysterious inner terrain. –Joe Goode A Brief History In 1979, Joe Goode began synthesizing a genre of dance theater that combined text, gestures, and humor with his own deeply physical, high velocity dancing. In 1986, Joe Goode Performance Group (JGPG) incorporated as a non-profit organization with the mission of providing a support structure for the artistic work of Joe Goode. Over the past eighteen years the company has performed annually in the San Francisco Bay Area and has toured extensively throughout the U.S. JGPG has appeared in Canada, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Africa, most recently at the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater, September 1999. Joe Goode has been recognized nationally and internationally as an innovator in the development of contemporary dance theater. Mr. Goode was awarded a New York Dance and Performance Award, a “Bessie”, for the 1998 creation and choreography of Deeply There (stories of a neighborhood). Additionally, Mr. Goode recently premiered a commissioned play, The Body Familiar, at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco to critical acclaim. Goode and JGPG have received numerous grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and San Francisco’s municipal arts funding agencies, as well as from major foundations, corporations and individuals. In 1998, Joe Goode was awarded one of the first Irvine Fellowships in Dance. In 1995, he was one of only ten U.S. choreographers to receive a prestigious National Dance Residency Program grant, a $100,000 award for artistic development, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by NY Foundation for the Arts. Joe Goode has received two Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (Izzies) and has been recognized for artistic excellence by the American Council on the Arts and the Business Arts Council/San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. JGPG has been named the Best Bay Area Dance Company by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Goode has also been a frequent panelist and program consultant for the NEA and the California Arts Council. In addition to a dynamic stage repertory, Joe Goode is known for its innovative performance installations. As Beauty Subsides was Mr. Goode’s latest installation performed as part of the From the Verandah: Art Buddhism Presence project, performed at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History October 2003. The Krannert Museum at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign commissioned and produced Joe Goode’s installation work, About What’s Underneath, October 1999. In 1998, JGPG premiered Deeply There (stories of a neighborhood), a collaboration with Seattle composer/lyricist Robin Holcomb at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Other installations have included a major commission by the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum/M.H. de Young Memorial Museum for World AIDS Day 1991, and a 1989 commission by San Francisco’s Capp Street Project. Joe Goode is a permanent faculty member at University of California Berkeley Center for Dramatic Arts. Additionally, Goode and company members teach extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area, including annual summer workshops for choreographers/dancers, and on-going technique classes. Goode receives frequent teaching appointments and choreographic commissions from universities including UC San Diego, Stanford, Harvard and dance companies throughout the U.S. In 2002 JGPG taught a two week summer workshop for CSU SummerArts at the Cal State University Fresno campus and is invited back in 2003 for a performance and a two week residency. JGPG is committed to providing outreach services to populations that are often the least likely to have access to the performing arts. JGPG offers classes, workshops, and lecture demonstrations to gay/lesbian/transgendered/bisexual teens and young adults, low income and at-risk youth, juvenile offenders, senior citizens, and battered women, as well as pre-professional dance artists.
|
song, and visual imagery. His work
has been recognized with numerous awards and prizes including
a New York Dance and Performance Award (a "Bessie"),
and several Isadora Duncan Dance Awards ("Izzies").
Goode has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the California Arts Council and the James Irvine
Foundation. He has been honored with awards for excellence
by the American Council on the Arts, the Business Arts Council/San
Francisco Chamber of Commerce and, most recently, with the "Heritage" award
from the California Dance Educators Association. In 2007 Goode was named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He is one of only five choreographers awarded the prestigious fellowship for 2007-2008.