Groundbreaking Joe taking a new look at life with Digidance
There are very few Canadian contemporary dance shows that can match the impact that Joe had on Quebec audiences back in 1984. Montreal choreographer Jean-Pierre Perreault’s show featured 32 dancers in trench coats and work boots, with their hats pulled down to just above their eyebrows. A writer for Montreal-based Voir declared that the pulsating presentation, with work boots creating the beat, could be “compared to a film by Jarmush or Wenders, a Beatles album, a book by Kundera or an Andy Warhol print”.
Starting on March 17, Digidance will present an online version of a 1994 remounting of Joe, first broadcast on RadioCanada in 1995.
Dancer and dance educator Ginelle Chagnon began working with Perreault in 1987 and participated in the 1994 version of Joe as the répétiteur.
“Joe is about life,” Chagnon told the Straight by phone from Montreal. “It’s about society. It’s about resistance.”
In Joe, the dancers all look the same, despite their differences. She noted that throughout the whole piece, dancers are trying to climb a ramp.
“You can interpret that as you want,” Chagnon commented. “I think it’s a basic human statement.”
The 1994 presentation of Joe included dancers from Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers, Dancemakers, and Perreault’s company, La Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault. He handed the reins to Chagnon for that performance after she spent a week with him in the studio along with another dancer who had performed the show in the past.
To learn more about the piece, she donned the costume to know what it was like for the dancers. A week later, she was teaching Joe to the 32 dancers; five weeks later, they were performing it on-stage.
Looking back, Chagnon described what
Perreault did as a “huge compliment” to her.
Perreault blazed his own path, Chagnon said, in part because Quebec’s contemporary-dance scene had little exposure in the 1970s and early 1980s to the Graham, Limón, and Cunningham techniques, which were taught more extensively in Toronto, Vancouver, and Edmonton. According to Chagnon, it took Perrault many years to develop the signature style that allowed for a show like Joe to appear.
Chagnon compared his working style to that of a painter or a sculptor. The dancers were the “material” that he would rely on to create his work.
“If it was a duet, he would take one of the two people’s places and he would demonstrate,” Chagnon continued. “Then he would step away again and look at it and see if that corresponded to what he had in his vision.”
Perreault, who died in 2002, once said that “choreography is the expression of space as dance is the expression of the body”.
“So he always thought about the bigger picture,” Chagnon concluded. “It’s not just about the dancer and what they’re doing. It’s about where they are, the tension that they create in the space, and the space that they live in.”
Joe is about life. It’s about society. It’s about resistance. – Ginelle Chagnon
Joe will be available online from March 17 to 23. For tickets, visit DanceHouse.ca.