STAGE REVIEW : ‘Remembering’ Worth the Effort : Dance: Contemplation of death leads to revelations about life in Joe Goode’s Romantic performance artwork.

With a Romanticism so high it levitates, Joe Goode looks at death through the dark waters of doubt in his latest performance piece, “Remembering the Pool at the Best Western.”

He wonders at first “where it is exactly” that his dead friends go, and by the end of this 70-minute dance-theater creation, when the operatic impulses stirring at its center have quietly rippled away into hypnotic reverie, Goode has found his answer.

In the three parts of “Remembering,” the Bay Area choreographer and his five-member performance group enact several transformations--from denial and fear of death to acceptance, from an earthbound groundedness to release, and from the inertia of being “invaded by an overwhelming sadness” to the serenity of feeling “a part of a larger reality.”

Told visually, aurally and kinetically, this is the archetypal quest of the mythic hero or heroine, who journeys to the underworld and surfaces reborn.

With Goode as “hero,” however, the serious questions about death and afterlife are answered with more levity than gravity. Spectral chills and intense grief are defused with droll wit and a surprising capriciousness. Overall, “Remembering” is imbued with warmth and humility.

Presented Friday and Saturday at the Lyceum Stage, “Remembering” opens with Goode in pajamas and robe sitting at a table sleepily wondering aloud about dreams, dream entities and a dead friend.

As he muses, he is joined by a “spirit” (Elizabeth Burritt) in silly fright wig and cat’s-eye glasses, who adroitly parallels his every hand gesture--perhaps representing an alter-ego or a psychological projection.

Whatever she is, she nudges him with questions about the “other world.” As he rejects and resists, two ragged ghouls (Suellen Einarsen and Peter Rothblatt) dance sombre images of loss. Eventually, touched by the memory of his dead friend, Goode “crosses over,” leaving this “straight-ahead world” where there’s “no sideways movement.”

The work swells into full-blown Romanticism in Part Two, titled “Raft: The Rides We Never Intended to Take.” Goode and dancers talk, sing, wail, swoon and snarl like macabre demons. They toss, roll, are lifted and fall; they grimace and twitch as though dying; they twist like the entangled bodies of Gericault’s epic painting, “The Raft of the Medusa.”

In coral-toned costumes and under Jack Carpenter’s ethereal lighting, Burritt, Einarsen, Rothblatt, Jean Sullivan and Christian Giorgi--all sensitive interpreters and skilled dancers--seem emotionally shipwrecked, adrift and distressed, riding a “life” raft into death.

Goode could go overboard with windblown Wagnerianism, but he doesn’t. He comically flails onstage with a life preserver slung over his shoulders, caught in the eddies of his own skepticism. He wants “to be safe, warm, held, loved and alive .”

Eventually the horror and anxiety evaporate. This passage, after all, can, “like a dance, be a quiet ride.” From the floor, the dancer’s legs rise up and hover like the tendrils of seaweed. Goode is taken by the waves, becomes a wave, and departs, humorously waving his goodby. Death’s frightening monumentality has become small, and very human.

Finally, in “Pool,” a monologue delivered poolside, center stage, Goode reveals the source of his awakening. In swim trunks and goggles, he describes an out-of-body experience, in which he floats above himself in the pool at the Best Western motel in Burbank.

“This is a big moment,” he recalls thinking, an experience he was determined to remember, one that made him a mere speck in the scheme of things, but also made his dreams real, his connection to his lost friend unsevered, and his vision of life and death suddenly, comfortably “clear.”

Dramatically, “Remembering” is intelligently wrought. Goode’s expressionistic choreography, with both tender and aggressive partnering, is cleverly integrated and is as poetic as his writing. His vocal control and pacing are exceptionally smooth. Long after he finished his mesmerizing conclusion, the aftereffects, as if koan-induced, resonated.

Yet the staging of this work had problems at the Lyceum. The theater may have provided excellent sight lines in general for the 200 or so in attendance Friday, but for Goode’s purposes, the fully exposed stage was cavernous, and added unnecessary visual distractions.

The dramatic impact of “Remembering,” particularly in the opening segment, was diminished, and certainly the sets suffered: What might have seemed ingeniously simple otherwise . . . came off as dinky. And although Goode didn’t get lost in the other world, some of Erik Ian Walker’s wonderfully understated score did. This was something to lament.