Dance : Goode Alters ‘Whisper’

An injury to one of the dancers left the Joe Goode Performance Group scrambling to rework “Whisper It to Me in My Ear” less than a day before it received its West Coast premiere Saturday at the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach.

It may be an unanswerable question, nonetheless, whether the presence of Suellen Einarsen, who had torn a ligament in a workshop for students on Friday, would have made enough of a difference.

Danced (and spoken) by choreographer Goode and his San Francisco company members Marit Brook-Kothlow, Elizabeth Burritt, Miguel Gutierrez and Wayne Hazzard to an original score by Beth Custer, “Whisper” is concerned with an effort to find or define a sense of acceptable “place.”

Action is confined to a large square outlined on the floor or else to isolating circles lit from above. Traversing the space, sometimes in mirror images or in fluent partnerships, the dancers occasionally hold branches in front of their faces as if spoofing Martha Graham. But Goode, speaking in the guise of an exotic Romantic poet, apparently is serious. Even so, the quarter-hour piece remained fragmentary and obscure.

Goode reportedly also reworked his hourlong theater piece, “Convenience Boy” since it was seen last year in Irvine and Los Angeles.

Many of the witty, superficially giddy but dark-toned morality vignettes apparently have been retained, but heroin and sex-for-sale references have been deleted. The result: The work is perhaps more simply entertaining than it was in the previous version.

When Goode attempted to get too overtly didactic, the piece turned heavy-handed indeed. Miguel told a story of how he lost his unbounded expectations as he got older. This was presented as a kind of sad, cautionary tale. But, as he said, children don’t merely just get bigger. Most of them grow up.