There’s No ‘Place’ Like Home : As Choreographer Joe Goode Sees It, Where We Are Now Is Not Necessarily Where We Belong

At 43, choreographer Joe Goode wants to settle down, to have a home with a little garden, a big tree and friendly neighbors all around. But from his vantage point on the Infobahn, that won’t be any too easy.

“The days when people grew up and died in the same house with the same oak tree in their back yard are gone,” Goode said. “We now live in a totally mobile network, the superhighway of interchangeable reality, where as long as you have a computer modem in front of you, you’re connected. Well, are you? That’s my question.”

Goode raises the conundrum in “Take / Place / This Is Where I Am Now,” a new full-length work that he and his six-member San Francisco-based troupe, the Joe Goode Performance Group, will perform Saturday at Orange Coast College.

The “music-theater-dance piece,” as he calls it, will be performed to a taped original score by composer-clarinetist Beth Custer. Dancers also will speak and sing Goode’s lyrics, such as the following:

“The place I want, it’s a long, long ago place, with no scolding and never any conflict, and it’s about one million miles from here,” Goode recited by phone from his studio.

“The work is about our collective desire for a sense of belonging somewhere,” he said, “a sense of connectedness that is very hard to find in an increasingly media-influenced, very mobile community.”

The trouble, he said, is that “we think we can claim a place by putting our house there, by raising our kids there, by speaking our language and practicing our religion there.

“But that way of thinking has brought us to a time where no place is really sacred. They are all interchangeable parcels that can be bought and sold. What is our connection to the land? Is it something you can buy, and once you have the deed, it’s yours and you get to feel connected to it and whoever else was there before gets kicked off?

“That’s pretty much the history of the Americas, if not the world,” said the dance maker, whose works have explored such other topical issues as drug abuse and AIDS. “But what would happen if the place had a voice, who would it claim as its own? What language would it speak? What religion would it practice? I feel I need to ask those questions even though I don’t have the answers.”

To personalize “Take / Place,” which received its premiere in November in Vermont, several segments of the non-linear narrative are presented in fairy-tale fashion or otherwise draw on fiction. Goode briefly assumes the character of Little Lord Fauntleroy from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 19th-Century children’s book.

“Little Lord Fauntleroy wants to be happy and have a sunny disposition,” Goode said, “so he looks at things through rose-colored glasses and thinks, ‘This place and can work for me if I do this, if I just make this mental adjustment.’ But eventually he becomes so confused by his own mythology that he can’t really function. He no longer knows what his place is because he’s changed it so many times, he’s looked at it so many different ways, that he’s robbed the place of its reality.”

Goode was born in Hampton, Va., and spent his 20s and early 30s living in tightly knit gay communities in New York City and San Francisco. He “felt like a hothouse orchid that could only exist in a very specialized, safe kind of environment,” he said. More recently, his horizon broadened as he toured America’s heartland to perform and teach.

“I’ve found out that I’m really a citizen of the United States and maybe the world, and as such, I have a responsibility and a connection to those places.”

Still, he holds the desire to own a home, “a place with a garden growing things I’ve planted and where I can go out in my underwear and get the morning paper.

“I want to be there,” he said, “I’m telling you, and I feel I deserve to be there, I deserve the comforts and safety. But I keep thinking: ‘Don’t the people in Bosnia or in Palestine or in Somalia deserve to be standing in their back yards in their underwear too?’

“If so, how do we determine who gets what? Am I entitled because I’ve been fairly successful? Because I can buy the land and kick out the tenant who lived there before? If it’s simply a matter of greed and economics, then we’re in a sad state of affairs. . . .

“Wealthy people who have worked hard all their lives move into gated communities where they can be safe from the rest of the world and live with people like themselves. That seems to me a very artificial sense of community, totally based on income, not based on values, not the heart or the soul or the mind.”

* The Joe Goode Performance Group dances Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Robert B. Moore Theatre at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. $17 to $23. (714) 432-5880.