DISASTER SERIES
You just can’t help laughing when you first see Joe Goode onstage in the Disaster Series. Goode solicits that response with placid exaggeration–a porkpie hat, big eyes, wide mouth, and drawn-out vowels. The work’s ten sections treat disasters large and small, private and public, shared and borne alone, blurring the distinctions between them and treating them as metaphors for each other. Laughter distances: for all its floods of angst and disappointment, the Disaster Series is never maudlin. And laughter heals: the Disaster Series chooses to view the inevitable chaos of life as a profusion of possibilities, not a void. This is, after all, a world where anything can happen.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In “#1 Inappropriate/No Wonder,” Goode delivers his monologue standing behind a miniature ceramic landscape (by James Morris) he holds in a small black tub. “Anything can happen,” he says; “Aaanything can haaappen.” Smiling, he tells stories of loss, aching diffidence, struggles both epic and everyday. He empties a watering can over the landscape’s houses and fields. “Anything can happen”; emotions and events are “Tooo big. Tooo many. Inapprooopriate.” He recalls afternoons lost under the dining-room table, his imaginings there equal parts childlike wonder and mature hallucination. His beatific smile vanishes in the recollection of his friend’s funeral: he wields a larger watering can this time, and the water washes him too.
Then Burritt’s voice turns plaintive: “I’m not the girl next door. I’m not the perennial virgin. I don’t have a positive attitude.” They blow brown dust off another of Morris’s exquisite small sets: “The yard’s blowing into the next state,” “Nothing is like I expected.” “Doris in a Dustbowl” encompasses both the failure of the Hollywood myth machine and our nostalgia for it; the frustration and ambivalence are as familiar as the smell of Nestle’s Quik in the lingering dust.
“#9 Tidal Wave” strings the dancers along a long diagonal. They move one by one, their black veils floating as they melt in gestures suggesting grief, mourning, and collapse. The movements are softer, grouped in more continuous phrases, and performed with more ease than in the other sections. Three simultaneous duets spread across the stage; they evoke different images and move at different tempi. For the first time all evening, the choreography encourages and exhibits rapport between the dancers. And that, more than all Goode’s words, creates the paradoxically affirmative vision of the Disaster Series. It’s a vision that enables one to see some good in any disaster–just as Goode warms his hands at the miniature forest fire of “#10 A Walk in the Woods.”
