DISPOSABLE LIVES : Joe Goode Performance Group Tackles Inconvenient Issues in a Convenience Culture

Disposable tissues. Disposable razors. Disposable . . . people?

Maybe, says award-winning dancer-choreographer Joe Goode, whose “Convenience Boy” reflects his view about “our convenience culture and how we are disposable.” The full-length work will be danced by the Joe Goode Performance Group on Friday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“On some level, ‘Convenience Boy’ is about AIDS, gay issues--because those are big issues for us--and about women’s issues because there are three women in the group,” he says. “All those things get reflected in it. It’s very complex. It’s a big, big subject, and we certainly don’t cover it all.

“But our convenience culture has a very detrimental effect on the way we think about ourselves. We don’t have a deep sense of connection with place. We don’t have the same roots that we used to.”

A native of Hampton, Va., the 42-year-old Goode began studying dance as a kid because “I loved the music and the physicality of dance.”

But as he grew up, his view changed. “I became disenchanted with the mere sort of physical prettiness of dance, as I had known it up to that point, and wanted something more intellectually challenging, or some other levels.”

He found what he wanted when he began working as an actor after a move to New York.

“There was a whole movement of experimental theater that combined a deep physicality with an expressive sense of intellectual purpose. It could be personal and political. You could reveal great personal truths and at the same time be making a social commentary. That meant, for me, spoken words and text, combining that with the movement.”

He moved to San Francisco in 1979 and began working “almost immediately with other dancers who wanted to do that kind of work and were real excited about it.

“I formed a company in 1986 because we had so many dates and engagements.” The company’s members collaborate on any new works, he said.

“I bring in an idea that we are all interested in. Usually that’s not hard to do. Then, people all contribute material of many kinds--movement material, stories, written, more poetic. I shape it all, make all the decisions, how it’s going to be used, layer it. But the material comes from everywhere. It’s very much a collaborative process.”

To get material for “Convenience Boy,” Goode and his dancers talked to “a lot of street kids.

“One of the most disturbing things we discovered is that there is a whole class of children really, of runaways and abused kids, who have been disposed of, who live on the streets and feel disposable. They talk very casually about death. They don’t assume they’re going to live until they’re 30 or even 20.”

While the piece asks “a lot of hard questions and uncomfortable questions,” it offers few answers.

“I certainly wouldn’t take it on myself to offer antidotes to the society we live in. I don’t have that kind of vision or breadth of understanding of the society I live in.

“All I can do is say, ‘These are some of the things I have sensed or felt or perceived, and they affected me in those ways.’ And hopefully they can strike a common chord for other people and allow them to ponder these issues in their own lives.”