Goode Humor Man : Stage: The mastermind behind the Joe Goode Performance Group took an out-of-body experience at a Best Western motel and made it into his latest dance-theater work.

Life can pose its big questions in unexpected ways and unlikely places. For Joe Goode, mastermind and heart of the San Francisco-based Joe Goode Performance Group, there’s humor in that--and inspiration.

“So there I am in the pool at the Burbank Best Western having a transcendental cathartic experience . . .” he said during a phone interview from Santa Fe, N. M., where he was performing and teaching last week. His unfinished sentence brimmed with “of-all-places” irony. The situation--the collision of absurdities--is prime material for a Joe Goode twist.

The experience in the pool, actually an out-of-body experience, triggered an interest in a spiritual realm Goode had previously regarded as “ooky-spooky” or too “precious” to sway his skepticism. The actor-dancer or dancer-actor (he makes little distinction between the two for himself) decided to investigate this fertile territory, creating, with his five-member company and the collaboration of Bay Area architect Stanley Saitowitz, “Remembering the Pool at the Best Western.”

Goode and company will perform the work at the Lyceum Theatre on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., in performances presented by Sushi Performance Gallery.

Goode is known for blurring the boundary between theater and dance in “heartbreaking and life-affirming” ways that reflect humanity’s struggles. An out-of-body experience, Goode believed, would be rich for dancers to explore in terms of movement. Immediately, though, the subject revealed its philosophical potential. “What we found was that there are a lot of similarities (between) near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences. They’re almost identical . . . floating, being above yourself. . . .”

When he began work on “Remembering,” a close friend was dying of AIDS, “and it seemed like a correlating event that couldn’t be ignored, so I let it enter into the process,” Goode says, “which was painful, but I think it was very profound finally for those of us who were making the work--and hopefully, too, for the people who see it.”

“Remembering” has three parts or transformations--both internal and external. “I wanted to do something on an operatic scale,” Goode explained. “I have this proclivity for the personal, the inner monologue, in my work, and I’ll never forsake that, but I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose that against a big visual field.” Consequently, Saitowitz designed a mutable set for “Remembering,” which opens with a room, a contained space that “represents the resistance in my life to highfalutin ideas about spirituality and death,” Goode says. In this room he ponders these ideas, and his words are enacted by members of the ensemble. The set then changes into a raft, on which Goode and the dancers take an “incredible ride” to visit his dead friend, and a final transformation turns the set into a miniature swimming pool, a la Best Western.

“The piece really exploded a territory I was skeptical about,” Goode explained, “and that skepticism runs through it providing a lot of the levity in the work, and, as usual, there’s no small dose of that.”

Anyone who saw his successful suite “The Disaster Series,” which had its world premiere during Sushi’s 1989 Neofest, knows what a dose of Goode humor can be. “Disaster Series” was described by critics as “an antidote to dread,” “antic, incisive, focused, coherent, enlightening and, for all the despair that boils through its cracks and crevasses, sublimely cool to the touch.”

“I use humor,” Goode says, “(because) it’s a life view that’s important to me, and I think it really helps people to enter into what I’m doing--not that all the pieces I make are funny, but they’re all affected by a sensibility that wants to laugh at itself.”

Goode’s sensibility is not easy to define in catchy buzzwords. “People aren’t quite sure of what I do. It’s a combination of performance, dance and poetry--all the things I like.” His work is definitely guided by the principles of dance, he says, “as a whole visual way of thinking, but there’s a tradition of theater; the work is very content driven.”

He studied acting in New York and then danced for several contemporary dance companies there, including Merce Cunningham’s, but became dissatisfied with “feeling like some specialized little creature” and also with craving a form of expression that deals with the important social issues and the “big life questions.” In 1979, he moved to San Francisco, danced with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, and soon after started making his own “human dances,” as he calls them. He and his company have received numerous grants, won two Isadora Duncan awards in 1990 for “Disaster Series,” and have appeared on PBS’s “Alive from Off Center.”

Goode says he never set out to create a new art form, only to but wanted his interests to converge. But he wanted to have some impact; “to carve out a little corner that makes sense to me, that’s aesthetically beautiful, deals with issues in a way I feel need to be dealt with, and says the things I feel need to be said.”

“There’s contemporary dance that’s difficult and obscure, that refers to itself. You basically need to know contemporary dance to enjoy it. But there’s a new movement in contemporary dance that I see myself as being part of, that is more interested in being accessible to a wider range of people. People who have feelings can understand; they don’t have to be educated about dance particularly.”

Goode’s use of language, the dramatic aspects outside of dance, helps that accessibility. “I love sound. To me it’s as rewarding as making a wonderful rush of kinetic movement. The voice is a powerful thing, and I always found that it was something greatly missing in the dance work I did before.”

The premise of his work is a felt experience, an emphasis on feelings and internal resonance, he maintains. “Some of my work in New York in the experimental theater movement taught me to value the internal experience, the turning out of me what’s inside me, making it a cathartic experience for others, too. That goes back to Aristotle--the definition of theater is catharsis.”

Joe Goode Performance Group in “Remembering the Pool at the Best Western” is presented by Sushi Performance Gallery at Horton Plaza’s Lyceum Theatre at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.