Curtain Call
by Karen Macklin

Liz Burritt, a longtime dancer with the Joe Goode Performance Group (JGPG), is currently appearing in Goode’s first stage play Body Familiar at the Magic Theatre. Early on in rehearsals, over coffee in the Castro, Liz talked with us about her career and about the intersection of dance and theatre in this latest project.

Interviewed by Karen Macklin

How did you get started in dance?

As a kid, I did that garage sort of dance training, when you go dance for 45 minutes and have ballet, jazz and tap all at once. Then, when I attended Loretto Heights College in Denver, I initially thought I was going to be a music theatre star. But I soon realized that you had to be able to sing really well in order to do that, and that sort of freaked me out! (She laughs.) So I transferred to the dance department.

How did you get involved with JGPG?

I always knew I wasn’t cut out to be a ballerina or a "pure" professional modern dancer. Then, Joe did a residency at my college and I performed in one of his pieces called The Ascension of Big Linda into the Skies of Montana. He put the boys in lipstick and skirts, and the dancers spoke, and I gave birth on stage. It completely rocked my world and I felt hooked. After that, we took the piece to San Francisco. That was in 1986, and I’ve been dancing with the company ever since.

What’s it like to work with JGPG?

Joe’s totally focused and devoted to his journey of art making. He’s very interested in plumbing the depths of the human experience, in terms of what connects us and also what alienates us. A lot of the work we do is about "the other" and the outsider and how those people fit into society. It’s cathartic on a lot of levels, because everybody thinks about these things, but we get to physically work through them.

What’s Joe Goode’s first play about?

It’s loosely about an upper-class East Coast family, whose members are contained in this summer home and continuously bump up against each other in various ways. Two of the main characters are a tumultuous couple, Trudy and Bull; he’s basically a rage-filled, business-savvy alcoholic, and she’s a patron of the arts who is living on his money. Then his past love comes back as a ghost. A lot of the surreal movement comes from that.

Who do you play?

I’m Bull’s sister Catherine, who’s also deeply troubled, mostly as a result of having this overbearing actress for a mother. Sort of Mommy Dearest a bit. I’m pretty sullen, and Bull and I hate each other.

What’s it been like to work on a stage play with actors?

I absolutely love it. At first, I was nervous because we were working with "actors," and the three of us [from JGPG] who are in the piece aren’t trained as actors. I was hoping, and found to my delight, that there isn’t much of a disparity in the way we work. The actors were very open to going into the physical plane and combining the emotional texture with the physical texture and doing things that might seem awkward or strange or ugly. In turn, I felt personally challenged to try and match their abilities to go to the depths of the emotional feeling.

How does it compare to the work you typically do?

This is a play, so it’s completely different—-it’s very much character based and situational. What feels new is that there’s a through line of motivation; the character develops and then goes to all these places. But I think this play will also be sprinkled with enough abstract and surreal thoughts and movements that it will take you further on the emotional track than straightforward playwriting.

How collaborative is the project?

At rehearsal, we do physical exercises and then we write about them. So while Joe is the one writing the scenes, there are also little chunks of text that will be verbatim from other people’s writing. In that way it’s very collaborative. Joe’s not just writing and handing us the script; he’s getting input from six different places.

What do you think the actors are learning from the dancers? And vice-versa?

I think the actors are learning about our process, which is much more about the collision of things that don’t fit together; it is not necessarily linear or narrative. I think they’re also learning about generating text from a physical exercise. We’re learning the difficulty of writing dialogue that makes sense when people are actually communicating with it. We’re also learning about the emotional plunge into character.

Have you ever thought about moving from dance into theatre?

Absolutely. I would never stop being a physical type of performer. But you know, I’m 37, and I’m not going to be able to do the high kicks forever. The dancing is a wonderful tool and I wouldn’t trade that at all, but the theatrical stuff is what I love the most.