It seemed like an ordinary shopping expedition: two gay men wandering the aisles of a San Francisco Baby Gap in search of a neo-preppy look for their tousle-haired tyke. An adorable attention-grabber, the little fella with the thin neck and long arms didn't prove the easiest of fits, however.
That's because this wide-eyed boy with asymmetrical features happened to be . . . well, a puppet. Dubbed Wonderboy, he is the offspring of a collaboration between veteran San Francisco choreographer Joe Goode and New York-based puppeteer Basil Twist. The 40-minute show, also called "Wonderboy" and featuring the six-member Joe Goode Performance Group, will receive its Southern California premiere this week at UC Riverside and the Irvine Barclay Theatre on a bill with Goode's 1996 piece "Maverick Strain."
"I never worked with a puppet before," Goode explained recently by phone from his home in Berkeley, where he is a tenured instructor of choreography and performance at UC Berkeley. "I thought the puppet was going to make the piece more theatrical and less dance, but it's the most dancerly piece I've made in the last 10 years. There's something liberating with the puppet that allowed us to move very extravagantly, even romantically, and come to a new place with the body."
That reversion to movement drew raves when the work premiered in the Bay Area last June. On the website Voice of Dance, Allan Ulrich wrote, "The news, praise be, is that real, unambiguous, sinew-stretching choreography has returned to the center of Goode's creative universe."
Now 57, Goode founded his company in 1986 and for the two decades since has been tackling some of his generation's hottest-button issues, including AIDS and drug abuse. The San Francisco Bay Guardian once dubbed him "the poet of anxiety, pain and uncertainty." Over the years, though, his highly personal works had grown increasingly theatrical and text-driven.
Which should come as no surprise: Although he studied dance while growing up in Virginia, where he graduated with a theater degree from Virginia Commonwealth University, he moved to New York in his 20s to become "a star -- an actor slash writer slash dancer."
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Discovering a niche
Celluloid and Great White Way fame eluded Goode. But he did find a niche -- in experimental theater -- and in 1979 he relocated to San Francisco. "I thought I was going to write the great American play, but somehow I slipped back into the studio," he recalled. "I took some of my writing and experience as a dancer and started putting it together in a way that made some sense."
