GUSHing Stories, Joe Goode Performance Group’s Virtual Platform Experience

By Garth Grimball

 

Imagine a platform. What do you do on it? What is your body doing? Does it feel spacious? Or is it contained?

Imagine a virtual platform. What do you do on it? What is your body doing? Does it feel spacious? Or is it contained?

May 26-31, 2020, in the era of COVID-19, Joe Goode Performance Group produced the virtual festival GUSH. Originally meant as a 3 week live-in-person experience, GUSH transformed into a physical-distancing adherent weeklong Zoomfest featuring works and discussions by Joe Goode, Gerald Casel, and NAKA Dance Theater. GUSH is a “scaled-back, virtual platform,” the festival site informs us in bold. Expectations adjust accordingly. Like all virtual platforms we are subject to the limitations of the frame. Those four angles that democratize access and dictate content.

I attended 7 of the 10 festival events. I missed a movement class led by Goode, the opening virtual dance party and the closing feedback session with local artists. This is my first review since the coronavirus pandemic; my first review of an online dance experience, or, an online experience made by dancers. This assignment came from my editor with an interest in what audience engagement feels/looks like in shelter-in-place. In two of the seven events I was able to see the number of attendees. The in-time barometer of engagement that translates either interest or internet connection. The loneliness of my solitaire engagement is the foundation for my perspective on audience engagement. 

Two of the events were performances in the way we conceive of live dance, NAKA Dance Theater’s BUSCARTE and Joe Goode Performance Group’s “Queer Realities.” BUSCARTE is an ongoing research and performance project contemplating the 43 forcibly disappeared students from Ayotzinapa Teachers’ College in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico in 2014. The version performed as part of the festival utilized the limitations of a virtual platform intentionally and unintentionally. Performed by NAKA Dance Theater’s co-directors, José Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, the duet exists in a space-time collage. Navarrete and Kajiyama’s bodies move across backdrops and backgrounds from the reality of where they stand in their respective physical spaces to the irreality and surreality of a virtual void. Their use of texture and depth is painterly in perspective making. Navarrete moves behind a semi-translucent plastic sheet. He’s a shadow bleeding through another layer of separation. Photography and visual imagery fill the screen. There is music and voice over. For the voice over there are sign language interpreters (present in every festival event). In Zoom you never know where your box is in proximity to the tetris of shifting action and attendance. During BUSCARTE the visual primacy of interpreting was in flux. Sometimes at the top of the screen, other times at the bottom, the screen relationship between the “performance” and the “interpretation” became a meta commentary on translation. Within a virtual platform there is less control of the relationship between the viewer and the performer. Yet, there is an added opportunity to expand what it means to see and define performing. The limitations in format support creating new visual languages and meanings in dance making.

Joe Goode’s “Queer Realities” is an anthology of excerpts highlighting his mission of exploring queerness and queer lives. Each lasting a few minutes, Goode selected monologues and a dialogue from his archive (2002, 2009, 2012, 2017, respectively) and repurposed them to fit the digital medium. Archives take on new meaning in pandemic realities. Rather than being reproduced as a strict re-creation, archives are activated as a supply to meet the demands of the virtual experience. Goode is known for his subtle humor, and I appreciated the physical comedy present in the quartet Traveling Light. Each of the four performers begin hyper close to the lens; a mishap or misinterpretation common to video communication tools. A blur of epidermis abstracting bodies. The final monologue, When We Fall Apart performed by Goode, is an inventive interplay of weight. As Goode speaks, a framed bust in front of a photograph of clouds, he places sticks and stones (again, humor) in front of him obscuring our view. Within a digital landscape we must imagine the tactility of the objects for they could be as mutable as the clouds.

The majority of the festival was conversation based. Casel led a workshop as part of his ongoing project Dancing Around Race, addressing systemic racial inequality and discussions on alternative futures. He also moderated a behind the scenes look into creating Not About Race Dance, sharing clips of rehearsals and insights from the collaborators and performers. NAKA Dance Theater hosted two conversations: addressing femicide in Mexico with Rosa-Linda Fregoso and members of Mujeres Unidas y Activas and a dialogue with Omar Garcia, a survivor of the student massacre of September 26, 2014 in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. Goode, Casel, Navarrete and Kajiyama all shared letters written to their respective aesthetics. GUSH was a storytelling experience. Ethnography, interview, conversation, dialogue all present as living qualitative research on being and moving and embodying. Storytelling necessitated by a global pandemic. Dialogues on and within the context of racism and racist murders destroying black and brown lives and spirits. Within the many Q&A sessions there was the tension of a desperation to connect, to share and be together again, and questioning the value of a performance festival when we are taking to the streets to demand and enact justice and change.

Language is critical. Language is limiting. One of the things I love most about dance is its separation from verbal language. A way to be and express without talking. Words are necessary to galvanize, to inspire, to build movements. Words are monetized, branded, stripped of their original intent, hollowed out by repetition. I missed the final session of the festival to attend a march for George Floyd. Before the march students from Oakland Technical High School stood on a physical platform, shared their stories, demanded justice and led 15,000 bodies in a peaceful protest against police violence. A platform, real or virtual, is crucial for connection, for change.

 

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, CA.

 

 

Several GUSH events and dances made for the festival are now available on demand on Joe Goode Performance Group's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuLoZ40ELMMEmzfw6QJK0EQ.