Joe Goode Performance Group (JGPG) promotes understanding, compassion and tolerance among people through the innovative use of dance and theater.
The three pillars of our current programming include: creating and presenting new dance-theater works; expanding movement education access to all people; and managing the Joe Goode Annex, an affordable studio theater in San Francisco.
In Goode’s words, “I want to make “human scale” dances. “By human in scale, I mean placing the emphasis on the unglamorized body, the body in more intimate moments, when it is fallible or agitated or inept. My intent is not to create merely pedestrian movement, but to make dynamic movement that is a combination of gesture and partnering.”
The company is committed to opening audiences’ minds to the limitless potential of where and how performance can be experienced. JGPG has incorporated spoken text, singing, video, and puppetry into its works.
“I am equally interested in the texture of the human voice and the effect it has on movement. Since my early days as a choreographer, I have been trying to forge some territory where dance and language/sound could co-exist… I want to liberate the dancer from his/her silence and create a total theater that is rigorously crafted but intimately personal.”—Joe Goode
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 was established as a non-profit organization with the mission of providing a support structure for the artistic work of Joe Goode. Over the past 30 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.
The challenge is to find the velocity and force in the movement and yet still retain its intimate, conversational quality. My interest in “human scale” extends beyond an interest in an expanded movement vocabulary, however. I am equally interested in the texture of the human voice and the effect it has on movement. Since my early days as a choreographer, I have been trying to forge some territory where dance and language/sound could co-exist.
I want each dance to be a “telling”; telling with the body (where have I been? where does my longing reside?), and telling with the voice (this is how I see the world). Far from being contradictory, I see these two ways of telling as innately linked. I want to liberate the dancer from his/her silence and create a total theater that is rigorously crafted but intimately personal. – Joe Goode