By Joyce Nishioka

SOMETIMES GRACE APPEARS from nowhere. A gentle song stirs your soul. A stranger reawakens your passion. An idea flashes through your mind like an answer to your prayers. And in the case of Joe Goode's Grace, a chair rises and hovers above your head.

For its 2005 home season at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Joe Goode Performance Group reprises Grace and premieres Hometown, the second and third installments of a trilogy meant to reveal the extraordinary dimensions of ordinary people. By fusing movement with text and song, Goode has been creating this genre of abstract storytelling for the past 20 years. In most of his pieces, he develops his characters but lets viewers delineate the plot.

Unfortunately, Hometown leaves nearly nothing to the imagination. Next to Grace, a profound and original work, Hometown, though entertaining and at times poignant, is mired in cliché. How many ways are there to say, "Home is where the heart is"?

Set to an arresting score by Beth Custer and video art by Teaching Intermedia Literary Tools, or TILT (Bana Dirar, Ansel Kehrlein, Jacinta Uperesa, and Chris Valtierra), this latest work explores the meaning of home from the viewpoints of suburban transplants, a sassy streetwalker, and an inner-city couple. Stretching their arms and twisting their waists as if gliding, Elizabeth Burritt and Felipe Barrueto-Cabello are "two little birds looking for a nest." "Wait, I know what you need," Burritt chirps. "Something familiar, soft and warm. You need a home, you need cooking, you need context." Later, when disagreement disrupts their bliss, Barrueto-Cabello exclaims, "I don't want the white picket fence. I just want you."

Dressed in a glittery red micro-mini, Marit Brook-Kothlow is thankful for anything she can get. In a solo raw with sexual innuendo, she violently jerks her body into a frenzy, falling to the ground and rising with equal momentum. Is it pleasure or pain? Even she may not know, but once she puts her foot inside a plastic grocery bag, a bag filled with her belongings, she exclaims that "this is a good place to live, as good a place as any."

Rachael Lincoln and Melecio Estrella are urban hipsters whose idiotic rap – "damn ... shit, shit, shit, shit, damn ..." – is meant to convey their tough exteriors, as is their tightly paced and synchronized duet. But inside, Lincoln sings, "I have a soft center.... The only hometown is here, something away from the hard outside."

Unlike Hometown, Grace nuances the characters with less literal text and more evocative dancing. The idea that grace can be found in nothingness echoes throughout the 45-minute work. The dancers' clothing (dark tank tops and stretch pants, designed by Wendy Sparks) conveys the ordinariness of the characters. The dialogue is humorously familiar. The music, by Mikel Rouse, is equal parts avant garde cool and American twang. The pace, for the most part, is achingly slow.

Throughout, the dancers contort their bodies, balance on one another, and execute complex lifts, all in lyrical slow motion. They float above the music, without any show of strain.

In one of the most touching moments, Brook-Kothlow hears Rouse strumming the guitar. "Your playing is so quiet and deep, you must be pretty deep too," she says out loud. On chairs arranged in a diagonal line, she slinks like a cat and moves closer to Rouse, chair by chair, until they meet in the middle. Moments later, the chairs start to rise above them. Extraordinary.

Joe Goode Performance Group appears Fri/17-Sat/18, 8 p.m., and Sun/19, 7 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF. $20-$38. (415) 978-ARTS, www.joegoode.org.