E-Mail This Article to a Friend Goode folks What the ‘simple people’ from San Francisco know BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Joe Goode likes us to think of him as an ordinary guy from Middle America, sort of a Garrison Keillor in bare feet. Or as one of his characters says, "We’re just simple people doin’ our simple dance." Not quite. Returning to Northeastern’s Blackman Theatre last weekend, the San Francisco–based Joe Goode Performance Group showed two works of sophisticated dance theater. I don’t know whether they want us to infer that the average person is more complex than he or she appears to be or whether the idea is that these seven artist dancers are, deep down, no cooler than thou.

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.

For What the Body Knows, videographer Douglas Rosenberg interspersed films of clouds, trees, and rippling water with live close-ups of the main narrator, Elizabeth Burritt. The viewer’s perspective went from the distant, natural world to Burritt’s intense, almost grotesque display of inner feelings. With every few words she uttered, her face registered a different tone and vocal emphasis, flickering through a virtuosic repertory of mouth shapes, eye crinkles, laugh lines, rearrangements of forehead, cheekbones, and brows. This stream of expressions, too big to be real, fascinated me in the same way as those animals who talk like people in animation movies.

I have no recollection of what she was talking about. Instead, I seemed to be watching an extended meta-commentary — an external display of how she wanted us to think she felt that masked whatever she did feel. A final video projection, a rolling expanse of gentle curves, began to resemble sections of the skin of three people’s torsos. At that point Burritt was talking about bone-deep feelings. Was this irony or sincerest truth — or self-delusion?

Episodes in the dance carried this idea of superficial communication into the realm of relationships. In one, blue-haired Marit Brook-Kothlow sat at a table and sang about how desperately she desired her partner, Felipe Barrueto-Cabello, who stood next to her, rigid and stony-faced. When she finished the song, he threw her onto the table, and after some brief but lusty preliminaries, they swept into a tango. Every time he grabbed her, a powdery substance poured off her and rose into the air. After the music ended, they separated and sat at the table, staring into their everyday silence.

The stories in What the Body Knows are solo confessions. Although they’re sometimes backed up by a singing or dancing chorus (music was by Beth Custer), the speakers are solitary, talking into the mechanical ears and eyes of microphones and cameras, or rehearsing what they’ll never be able to tell an unresponding partner.

Folk was aimed more directly at the audience. Burritt was once again the narrator, the tough-talking, live-and-let-live proprietress of a café stuck out in the high desert east of Los Angeles. She knows when the locals will drop in every day, how they take their coffee. She figures nothing much is going to change around there, even though everybody is living on the edge most of the time. One of the waitresses (Brook-Kothlow) spends her spare time up in a windmill tower sending desperate ham-radio messages to the outside world. The Mexican cook (Barrueto-Cabello) is in love with her but too shy to say so. Then there’s Snake (Morozumi), the half-crazy dropout, who makes portraits of dead people’s faces by some arcane process involving pieces of cloth. Goode as an artist from LA who’s come out to the desert to have a nervous breakdown and is communing with the color green tries to get Snake to exhibit his necrophiliac art. Turns out what the artist manqué has really wanted all along is a job in retail management.

I loved these refugees from civilization, but toward the end, the gritty eccentricity melted into sentimentality. Snake boarded the bus, Goode continued what was obviously going to be an endless monologue about the meaning of his life, and the piece began to feel like the finale for an Off Broadway show.