6 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: If you're not OK right now, ‘Are You Okay?' is the show for you
A poet friend once told me that her art form was all about pacing. Break that line, and the reader has to slow down, reconsider. The everyday becomes strange and new.
Dance does that with motion, plucking a moment out of time to probe, stretch or overturn our familiar ways of occupying space. Sure, dance says, you could get from A to B as you always would, but why, when the canvas is infinite?
The two media have long found synergy in the work of choreographer Joe Goode, whose dancers don't maintain the genre norm of silent, vaguely quizzical expressions. They can talk. Throughout his oeuvre, you hear him picking out and finding the syncopated rhythm in the banal, often inadequate ways we try to connect through words. Linger on something deceptively simple like 'Are you OK?' for a moment, and it seems to bore to the soul and encompass the whole universe at once.
That's the title of his latest piece, created and directed with Melecio Estrella of Bandaloop. 'Are You Okay?' is balm for anyone who doesn't always know how to answer that question except by gesturing vaguely at the state of the world — as well as for anyone who's asked it of someone else then felt guilty afterward. Is it not OK to be OK? When you ask it, are you forcing the ask-ee to discourse on climate change and politics, sociology and public health? Did an act of care just become an imposition?
Joe Goode Performance Group's production, which opened Thursday, Aug. 14, at the Rincon Center, understands from its opening moments that at a time when a seemingly straightforward question is so fraught, we both need to laugh at ourselves and receive genuine comfort — and that those needs are not contradictory but complementary. There we are, in the post office lobby of the building, with its jade green Art Deco finishes, when barefoot performer Rotimi Agbabiaka stands atop a cube, mic in hand. Forget about polite intros, he bids us. Instead, pretend the show's already over. We were provoked and nourished, confused at times but cleansed. As audience members, 'You did OK,' he tells us, in the godlike tone of a parent tucking a child into bed, and in that moment, you remember: OK actually is enough.
The bulk of the show takes place in a showroom where, at first, performers enact solo or duet tableaux, like living exhibits in a museum that you stroll through at your own pace. Voiceover weaves documentary-style excerpts from people in various states of OK-ness: 'I wanted to make sure my kids have at least one living parent.' Two dancers explore a doll-strewn sandbox, sand sifting between fingers in a long stream. Another pair, behind a wrecked car, have the building's window pane between them. As the inside dancer (Molly Katzman) wafts a hand past the torso of the outside dancer (B Dean), you might remember the lonesome childhood lark of lying in bed at night and hoping-slash-fearing that a friend, alien or princess could creep across your sill.
In immersive theater, perennial problems include directing spectators' gaze and making sure everyone can see everything in a space not built with sightlines in mind. Here, Joe Goode Performance Group dispatches those obstacles with the economy and elegance of sound and light (including one handheld LED light that has the feel of putting on a show in an attic), as well as with rolling platforms. They're mini elevated stages, but they're also like boats adrift at sea, emphasizing characters' isolation and need to connect.
If the dance moves themselves are more muddy than crisp, occasional sequences break through. A knot of bodies expels one upward, in a motion akin to giving birth. Kicks use dancers' feet to skywrite.
Lighting designer Jack Carpenter, combining hues of blue orchid and red, suggests the cool center of a flame as performers intone, 'I don't know why I have water falling from my eyes.' Costume designer Sara Estrella outfits three performers in yellow rain jackets, helping them become climate change's floods that send a wide-eyed worrywart (Jessica Swanson) down current with her downward spiral.
It's OK to not be OK for small, selfish reasons, the show implies. It's also OK to ask someone how they're doing when you're really just wondering if you yourself will be able to make it. Even in pits of despair, dreams and wonder are still possible. Glitter confetti could fall on you, a partner could metamorphose into a princess and a dress could stretch into a work of architecture. It's possible. Fantasy is the flip side of fret.
