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“With wry self-assessments, ever so charmlngly askew, they make you laugh and wince and pine for a life in which pining would always be so poetic…” |
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“In a particularly stunning scene, the dancers, clad in red bathing suits, seem to literally swim in a sea of passion…” |
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“He's one of the few choreographer-authors who can grip and move you even when you're not sure what he's saying…” |
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“For all the theatricality of Goode's dances, he truly is one of this country's most original choreographers. And, just as his unsettling little spoken texts carry echoes of Sam Shepard's early works, his dance syntax is for all its casualness as complex as the best of Merce Cunningham. The way Goode trusts chance relations to illuminate the geometries of the human heart continually enriches the American dance tradition.” –San Francisco Chronicle 2003 |
“Joe Goode and his group are legendary for combining energetic movement with sung and spoken text--and for being funny. We're not talking sweet funny, this is squirm-in-your-seat scary-funny, how-does-he-know-that-about-me funny, stop-please-stop funny.” –thestranger.com |
“Joe Goode isn't so much a dancer as he is a mesmerizer, an environmentor. Like any good speaker or teacher, he arranges the setting so you can listen and learn. So it was no great surprise when audiences rushed to the S.F. Mission District, gobbled dinner, fought for parking, charged up the stairs, and came to a full stop in the lobby. Dancers' Group Theater – for those who haven't been there yet – has all the edginess of a New York loft space, but with upgraded electrical wiring. This is theater not in the round, but on the square, on the level so the audience is neither above nor beneath the performers. When every chair was filled, Goode clicked across the stage space with his country boots, sat at a bar upstage, picked up a glass, and began his lazy, smokey tribute to "Sweet Silky Sauce." Was that a hint of Willie Nelson we heard? The JG Performance Group all sing – not Sing-ging classically trained, deep in the diaphragm, but with clear, open-throated, true voices. The tunes resonate with familiarity, but the words are new.” –Dance Magazine 2000 |
“In private, so as to preserve their comfortable diffidence and not appear too worshipful, SF performance artists tell before-and-after stories about Joe Goode. Before they saw his group, they felt torn between using the methods of traditional theater, on the one hand, and hauling onstage the mess of their undigested experience, on the other. Afterward, they could see how to work like a collagist, creating characters and conflicts from whatever was close to their urbane West Coast hearts, without the obstacles of a story's through-line. They could see how to break into lush, partnered dancing without its resembling a corny interlude from a musical; how to speak powerfully, without being an actor, and sing like a diva, but a different kind of diva making a different kind of art, where the rude phenomena of millennial life – convenience boys, unavoidable personal and geographic catastrophes, enlightenment in the pool at the Best Western in Ventura – could command center stage. Given the sophistication of his methods and admirers – and every year for the last 15, there's been a new crop of both – it's surprising how much Joe Goode loves the simple, what he calls ‘the childlike part of me, naïve and beautiful." –Apollinaire Scherr, Dancing Fool |
“Goode’s range of emotion is wide. He hoists himself up to the steering wheel of a truck, but a moment later, the laughter sticks in the throat. There’s a kind of art in that.” –Voice of Dance 2003 |
“Their stories are told in a multi-dimensional syntax of movement, song, language, video, props, and stage effects. Rather than experiencing each work as a unified environment, like some magical ballet world, I found my attention shifting from one level to another. At one moment, the dancing seemed more prominent; at another, I’d notice the music or the text, or I’d get interested in how the props worked. What I came away with, in addition to these flashes of theatricality, was individual stories and the performers at the center of them.” –Boston Phoenix 2004
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