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Fondation Jean-Pierre PerreaultAugust 2004 Edinburgh, Playhouse © Jeffery Taylor Former dancer, Critic and an Arts feature writer for the |
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It looks and feels like a gimmick. 32 ordinary Joes dressed like LS Lowry’s matchstick men in fedoras and raincoats moving across space in aimless unison. The only accompaniment the tap of their boots, the only scenery a ramp at the foot of a giant office window.
Perreault, who died two years ago, conceived Joe in 1983 as a teaching aid for dance students and he certainly cottoned on to the value of repetition. He takes this tool into religious realms, the mystic area where Buddhist monks become so numbed by the reiteration of their chant, they levitate. Or worse. Unfortunately Perreault does not allow such fun in his Wellsian depiction of the doomed lemming notion of humanity. The piece is 90 minutes long, an eternity for such limited resources, but in place of choreography Perreault substitutes floor patterns. His phalanx of bodies splinters like a kaleidoscope, regroups then in unremitting despair, hurls itself up and down the ramp like flotsam in a hurricane. Individuals break away but suffer for it like the Tiananman Square students under the tanks; the women start a chant which spirals into hysteria then a harmonica player hints at ultimate hope. Wrong. The pounding feet trample all before them.
 © Douglas Robertson The dancer’s quality is impossible to assess as they do so little, but their profound belief in what they are doing, and saying, fleshes out the dry skeleton of Perreault’s structure far beyond, I suspect, his original intentions. Their honesty and the hypnotic power of the relentless beat focuses the attention and drives home the gloomy message and as the curtain falls a couple break away from the mass, but walk into oblivion. I hurried to the nearest crowded, noisy and smoke filled bar and banished the chill from my blood. Joe comes to London in October, hip flasks recommended.
 © Douglas Robertson |
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