Dance : Precise Percussive Footwork Propels ‘Joe’

Identically dressed in fedoras, overcoats, baggy pants and boots, 31 dancers march across the stage of the Luckman Theatre at Cal State L.A. and up a ramp at the back, their steps pounding out a rhythm that suggests soldiers on parade, but can change to simulate Busby Berkeley tap hordes or the mechanical brushing of windshield wipers with startling suddenness and precision.

This is “Joe,” a one-act, 1983 dance-spectacle on tour in America for the first time. Created by Jean-Pierre Perreault, it calls up the mysterious satisfaction we feel watching large-scale union movement at a time when we’re lucky to find even two dozen swans or Wilis onstage when the big international ballet companies come around. And its percussive footwork--supplemented only occasionally by solo harmonica and group vocalizing--reaches us on a deeper level by turning the stage floor into an enormous tribal drum.

Performed Friday and Saturday by members of Montreal’s Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault and Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers, “Joe” can also be seen as a statement about contemporary urban conformity--but here it doesn’t compete. For instance, Martha Graham’s 1936 “Steps in the Street” endowed its rebel-against-the-mass with inspiring weight and purpose, while Perreault’s whimsical outcasts serve mainly to vary the group patterning.

When dancers periodically run up the ramp toward the grid on the back wall, it seems less a bid for escape than a strategy of choreographic design, for they remain bound to the group by step-rhythms. Indeed, Perreault uses counter-rhythms only briefly and polyrhythms not at all, leaving “Joe” a relic of the insular Euro-American postmodernism that existed before such artists as Mark Mendonca and Savion Glover brought new worlds of rhythmic innovation to the party.

You can even think of “Joe” as the Hollywood version of Twyla Tharp’s “The Fugue,” a seminal 1970 trio in which percussive, unaccompanied footwork, formalist movement design and unisex costuming also fooled some people into seeing it as a social statement. Perreault expanded the scale, length and personnel of “The Fugue” to great effect, but the central experience remains the same: making the stage floor a sounding-board for modernist expression.