Are You Okay?

August, 2025

Are You Okay? 

Joe Good Performance Group

Co-created and Co-directed by: Joe Goode and Melecio Estrella

Performers:  Rotmi Agbabiaka, Felipe Barraueto-Cabello, Marit Brook-Kothlow, Johan Casal, B Dean, William Fowler, Damara Vita Ganley, Mo Katzman, Danny Nguyen, Wailana Simock, and Jessica Swanson 

Composer and Musical Director: Ben Judovalkis 

By Kristen Cosby

At the opening of the fall season, back in late August, the Joe Goode Performance Group staged an immersive dance experience in the Ricon Center in San Francisco. The “theatre” for which was a large, all-white, concrete room with various alcoves in which a rotation of different dance sequences –either solos or duets– were enacted simultaneously.  The audience wandered from “stage” to “stage” throughout this dancescape, as if we were in a museum of dance exhibits or an entire wonderland of strange experiences, each of which made some very real, real grim and earthly realities into something beautiful, absurd or surreal. 

Joe Goode Performance Group

One such “stage” featured a grove of tree stumps with the image of a deforested landscape cast behind it. The next was a sandbox and a third sported a huge illuminated futuristic spherical structure large enough to dance inside. Most oddly, in an offset room that the audience could walk through, actor Danny Nguyen sat belly-out and immobile while watching white static on a TV in an easy chair with a beer can at his fingertips. Outside his room, the grimmest stage displayed a crashed car, crumpled, windshield splintered, full of immobile bodies with their limbs askew and the radiator steaming. Halfway through the night, the corpses started to twitch and writhe and move within the vehicle. 

The impact was a through-the-looking-glass journey for the audience. We were ushered through the experience by the booming voice of actor Rotmi Agbabiaka, in his debut with the company, who launched the audience’s journey through this wonderland in the lobby of the Ricon Center. Audience members milled about interspersed with performers, who suddenly announced themselves by starting to sing, “Are you okay?”

Throughout the night this question would be repeated, binding the myriad mini-performances together as performers asked each other, themselves, and the audience. Two characters named Tom (Mo Katzman) and Top Dog (B Dean) began a slow, measured dialogue that always began the same way: “Tom, are you ok?” And the answer would shift from uncertainty, to loneliness, to despair, and then towards a flirtatious relationship. 

Once ushered through the doors from and into the wonderland of chopped down tree stumps, sandbox and futuristic glowing sphere and TV room and crashed car, viewers dispersed to different stations to observe. In a favorite sandbox moment, one dancer slowly and languidly drew half circles in the sand with his feet  before being joined by another. With their feet touching and her body leaning precariously far from his, they gyred in a maddenly slow spiral, creating a divot in the sand. The pair eventually tried to cup the sand in their hands and then let it run through their fingers like time. 

In the center of the space, was a small dance floor where the ensemble performed together in the round. This ensemble work united the room. The sequence incorporated stiff bodies, cold and distant and deliberately machine-like at times, and seldom facing each other, as if they were wind-up toys. Notably all bodies were rigid when lifted and limbs remained angular when people were held. Their black and white striped pants gave this moment a grim carnival feeling: We’re in a circus that isn’t fun anymore. 

From there the environment shifted, dancers pushed two giant rolling set pieces of white-painted scaffolding with differing heights into the middle of the room. Agbabiaka suddenly began to orate from a shelf lofted ten feet above the floor on one of the many pillars in the room. In front of these different levels the performers spoke and danced about all that ails our planet, i.e. news, weather and discord. We witnessed a snow storm, and thunder, “our planet is angry” one woman proclaimed while four dancers hooded in ponchos crouched around her and then rose and moved like floodwaters. 

At the piece's end, the audience travelled to another lobby where our narrator stood perched atop a two story gown, regally booming his closing words like a sci-fi Mother Ginger while the ensemble danced before him. 

If I had a complaint, it would be that it's impossible to absorb everything in Are You Okay? by seeing it just once. Each of the small pieces within the larger work was rich enough to have been its own performance. By choosing what you pay attention to, you miss out on other bits. That raises the questions: to what extent should a performance repeat the anxieties of life and to what extent should it supersede them? In a piece that effectively stares several grim realities in the face, there was laughter, whimsy, care, love, kindness and a heavy dose of the spectacular.