PERFORMANCE ART REVIEW : A Subversive With Watering Can

“Anything can happen,” Joe Goode says softly, looming over a tiny ceramic hillside that’s displayed on a table top at the Sushi Performance Gallery--and then flooding the landscape with the contents of a giant watering can. “Ennn-eee-thing can happen.”

San Francisco-based choreographer Goode likes to blur the boundaries between modern dance and theater, and in “The Disaster Series” he also erases any distinction between personal and natural calamity, with uproarious results.

“The yard’s blowing into the next state,” Goode cries as a dust storm descends on another of sculptor James Morris’ brightly painted miniatures.

“I can’t keep a boyfriend,” Liz Burritt wails in reply. By shrinking external threats and inflating emotional crises, Goode keeps these facets of vulnerability equal.

At Sushi on Thursday, where his playfully cataclysmic suite was given its premiere as part of Neofest (the seventh annual Festival of New Arts), Goode and his six-member Performance Group sometimes evoked a sense of peril through somber, pure dance imagery: Suellen Einarsen buffeted by a hurricane, for example, with the eye of the storm imaginatively suggested by a bank of spotlights mounted along one wall.

Elsewhere, Goode placed text and movement in counterpoint, as when Jean Sullivan perched on a stool, agonizing over the idea of jumping to her death, while four others danced behind her wearing blindfolds.

Or when Goode and Burritt provided ironic narration about a doomed relationship (“love is a landslide”) while Peter Rothblatt and Liz Carpenter executed a punishing duet against a wall.

Ultimately, Goode made the greatest disasters in “The Disaster Series” sociocultural: Burritt trying in vain to measure up to a standard of womanhood defined by Doris Day movies or Goode himself detailing the consequences of feeling emotions that are deemed too big or inappropriate.

“You can be a real outsider,” he warned us, “like certain members of my family . . . .”

No wonder. By daring to make human helplessness his theme, Goode challenged the central assumption of dance in most of the world. Think about it: As an art, dancing has always exemplified the idea of perfect control, but here comes this Bay Area troublemaker with his watering can to remind us that we’re forever at risk, that control and safety and a happy ending are just pathetic illusions--that anything can happen.

Clearly, Joe Goode is a major subversive and must be watched. The only question is how soon we can watch him again.

“The Disaster Series” concludes its run at Sushi tonight at 8.