Friday, October 13, 2000
By Vicki Smith Paluch
Karen Goodman isn't afraid to let you see her sweat. In fact she wants you to be close enough to her dancing and storytelling to feel it, as well as see the world from the dancer's point of view.
To accomplish this, the 52-year-old modern dance choreographer-dancer is tearing down the wall between herself and the audience by allowing the audience to share the stage with her when she performs her last full-length solo, "Close Dancing," at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex on Sunday.
"Close Dancing" is the first work to be performed at the Luckman's new Intimate Encounters series. The Luckman wanted to crate an environment where the audience could interact with the artist, explained Cliff Harper, executive director of the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State Los Angeles.
The inaugural season of Intimate Encounters will focus on dance. Next year, the focus will be on music. But in each season artists will be using various performance spaces from the spacious Luckman theater to smaller environment of the art gallery, he said.
While Goodman is creating a dance space and putting an audience of 150 to 200 people around it, another choreographer has voiced an interest in doing a piece in the art gallery with a very small audience. "It's all up to the artist," he said.
Goodman uses choreography, story, song and the seating arrangement of the audience itself as a way to impart her "dancer's eye view" of the world. The audience will be up close and personal with Goodman.
"They need not be afraid, I won't ask them to do anything," she explained during an interview from her Studio City home. They need only watch, listen and feel.
Goodman joins her choreography with her wry observations of when dance and life collide. How everyone she meets at cocktail parties complains that they don't "understand" dance, but how the fashion industry uses dance to sell jeans and politicians. Or how dance can be a threat. For example, the Khmer Rouge's Pol Pot killed dancers in Cambodia because it was believed they kept the ancient secrets in their dances.
She reflects upon the questions she has encountered in her 34-year career about the meaning and value of dance in American society.
Goodman grew up in Detroit and studied piano because her parents thought she could be a piano teacher. But when she went off to college - Wayne University - she discovered modern dance when she was a senior. Her parents couldn't understand the attraction or how she was going to support herself as a dancer.
She came to Los Angeles in 1972 to get her master's degree in dance at UCLA so she could be a dance teacher. While studying at Stefan Wenta's dance studio in Hollywood, a photographer named Harvey Edwards made some photographs of the long-limbed Goodman as she stood on pointe at the barre with her back to the camera. The diffused light from the arched windows created a very romantic image indeed. The photograph was made into a poster that sold like hotcakes, but she didn't make a penny
"Now, if I see a photographer I ask for the film," she joked.
She went to New York city and danced with Rudy Perez Dance Company. Perez centered his post-modern movement on her. She returned to Los Angeles to dance with Gloria Newman in Santa Monica and branched out on her own, running her own dance studio out of Wenta's studio on Melrose, where that famous poster was made.
"I never thought I would be a choreographer when I was at UCLA, I thought I'd teach," she said.
And teach she did, for 21 years. She also choreographed, creating works Los Angeles dance critics have praised for her control and depth, creating performance events rich in metaphysical implications.
She explores those big questions, the cosmic questions - life, aging and death - in "Close Dancing."
The very staging and placement of the audience in a semi-circle facing the empty theater that will allow them to experience the vastness of the space while scrims with cosmic projections are lowered and raised, Goodman explained.
Goodman dances and speaks during the 85-minute solo performance. Her movement starts with walking. She uses gestures with her speech, then only gesticulates. She also dances to the point of exhaustion.
When she first decided to combine choreography with writing, she thought it would make it easier to perform.
"The very great irony is the joke is on me. I thought if I used text that it would be easier, that it would create the transitions. But after dancing I have to speak," said Goodman.
With the help of her director, Winship Cook, who comes from a theatrical background not dance, Goodman is learning to pace herself for the one-woman show.
She said she is putting all she's got into it because "I see this as my last solo piece."