In CLOSE DANCING, choreographer/writer/performer Karen Goodman has created a unique and intimate 80 minute one-woman dance-theater piece about the pure, necessary, ridiculous and tragic ways dance lives in us all.

Dancing on a stage with the audience seated onstage as well, or in a studio or gallery space with audience also on three sides, she holds up the prism of her dancer's-eye view and experience in a bold, funny, moving meditation on the human comedy, divine and otherwise. Goodman's distilled and distinctive choreography is joined with stories of how life and dance intersect in unlikely ways ranging from humorous to tragic, from sacred to commercial, as well as an original fable of how the body came to signify the importance of "questions and unforeseen possibilities."

Her stories travel from the marketing of jeans through dance on L.A.'s trendy Melrose Avenue, the murder of dancers in the killing fields of Cambodia, the only surviving ancient Hebrew dance, to a satiric, millennial "vision" of dance and its future if it were to be included in the Olympics. This ultimately brings dance back to its origins and to her concluding dance. With movement ranging from the opening's simple walks and gestures to full-out virtuoso dancing, and her delicious fictional or closely observed true stories, Goodman and theater director Winship Cook weave a seamless whole of dance, gesture, word and song, speed and stillness, sound and silence, irreverence and passion. It is an enticing, thought-provoking doorway into a dancer's world, one that anyone can enter.

CLOSE DANCING is meant to bring dance into context, into close-up focus, physically and thematically, to allow the act of dancing to be experienced and identified in the many ways it appears and is used in our present culture, and in the perspective of cultures from other times and places. This work is available for staging in three formats. As in the video, it can be presented on a large stage with the audience seating arranged onstage on three sides with Goodman, leaving the proscenium arch side of the stage as the new "upstage," enclosed by a black scrim, allowing at two key moments in the piece, the audience to look out onto the empty theater house, as though gazing out into the universe. This concept generated significant press and audience interest, and created an specially involving and exciting event. It can also, with a few changes, be presented in a smaller theater with traditional theater seating, or in a black box or studio space, again with the audience seating arranged on three sides of the performing space.

Uniting the forms of expression of our instrument bodies-movement and voice-to sing, think out loud and dance (moving out loud), she threads seemingly unconnected dance forms and experiences as far flung as politics, the New York subways and school dances to connect dance to everyday life, our inner lives and the cosmic questions we all seem to wind up asking. Serving as punctuation, are phrases Goodman sings from such songs as "Do You Wanna Dance," "Land of a Thousand Dances," and "The Nearness of You." "Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance)," is deconstructed and rearranged to ask the central question of what dance is for.