Joe Goode troupe to peform

The Joe Goode Performance Group brings its contemporary dance theater to Wisconsin Union Theater Friday, March 1, 8 p.m.

Goode’s performances are not pure dance. Dancers talk, make noises, move in a landscape they have created to music they have put together. Humor and self-deprecation contribute to the experience.

As for content, Goode looks at gender and gender roles, based on talking to people in the San Francisco Bay Area about the role models who influenced their perception of what it means to be a woman or a man. The stories he collected were translated to powerful, touching story dances, “Gender Heroes,” which will be performed at the Union Theater. Other dances include “Doris in a Dustbowl,” a loopy duet about the broken promises of Hollywood dreams as distilled in the personae of Doris Day and Rock Hudson.

Goode has been honored with a New York Dance and Performance Award and a San Francisco Isadora Duncan Award, and his art installations grace a number of public buildings. Joe Goode Performance Group has, over 13 years, toured extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, most recently at the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater.

While in Madison, Goode and his group will offer free workshops at Lathrop Hall, including one for the LGBT community. Goode appears at the Wisconsin Union Theater under the sponsorship of the Wisconsin Union Directorate Performing Arts Committee and the UW–Madison Dance Department.

Tickets: $28 general, $27 Union members, $13.50 students, Union Theater Box Office, (608) 262-2201.