Seeing Joe Goode’s new work Humansville at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is like wandering through a psychiatric ward and medically observing individuals who are severely self-involved, experiencing physical pain due to psychological damage, or have an intense anxiety to take action. You can watch two scantily clad men convulsing in identical sterile chambers, a woman in hysterics, or two poor souls so timid they cannot even leave their chairs.

Humansville is divided into two parts, the first being an installation and the second a multimedia performance. In the first half, viewers have the opportunity to interact with the performers, choosing how close to get and how long to linger, while navigating their way through an installation composed of four chambers. However, few brave souls take the opportunity to get up close and personal, and instead there is a strict line that divides the audience from the performers. Humansville appears to be expressing the importance of connection between individuals and whether outward connections necessarily lead to inward ones. However, although Goode tries to connect audience and performer, through the projection of unsuspecting viewers on a wall of the installation and the gift of giving viewers free range to explore and choose their own viewing paths, Humansville is too over-saturated with material and disjointed to truly connect viewer to performer. Which raises the question of whether the audience can connect with Goode’s message at all if we are unable to break the barrier and meld with the performers, thus becoming performers ourselves.

Individually the separate parts of Humansville are gems. There is something for everyone. You have:

A quirky 1950s high school girl flashing her underwear and rambling about the history of Virginia (check)
An interactive and polite touch-screen video (check)
Two hot men tormented in cells (check)
Fabulous live cello music by Joan Jeanrenaud (check)
Fuzzy walls that you can rub and leave your mark on (check)
Stunning choreography (check)
And a hilarious monologue about a guy being spied on by two old gay men (check)

But when you combine all these elements together you end up confused and wondering what the hell Pocahontas has anything to do with a guy dressed in only a little pink terry-cloth towel.

Still, Goode is able to shed some insight on human connection despite the perplexing amalgamation of so much disparate material. In the second seated-half of the performance, Felipe Barrueto-Cabello and Marit Brook-Kothlow’s duet is a beautifully honest representation of the difficulty to connect with someone. Brook-Kothlow’s desperate rubbing of the back of her head on Barrueto-Cabello, searching for her fit in his body, was the most moving part of the night, particularly due to the juxtaposition with the contrast of their melded silhouettes projected on the wall behind them. Although their combined silhouette appears so easily united, the actual movement of their bodies before the audience portrays the harsh truth that the appearance of connection can deceive, and that real human connection is a struggle. Here, the dance speaks for itself and there is no unnecessary text to hinder the communication and expression through movement. And here is where Goode as a creator shines most, offering a sincere moment that is oh so human.

Joe Goode’s Humansville is running June 7-9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts