Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal: Contemporary Goes Primitive

Although its name continues to be Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal, the dance company that Genevieve Salbaing founded in the early 1970s has grown away from the limitations of the ballet-jazz idiom toward mainstream modern dance. Like Hubbard Street dancers, the Canadians can still snap their fingers with the best of them, but are just as likely to emphasize sophisticated deployments of weight and spectacular articulations of the torso over the execution of steps.

The company, directed since 1998 by Louis Robitaille, arrived Friday at the Alex Theatre with six strongly danced showpieces cultivating a rough contemporary edge. None proved more original than Patrick Delcroix’s neo-primitive “Sous le rythme, je ... “ in which five men danced propulsively on the forestage while five women on a platform behind them supplied accompaniment using various rattles, a triangle, a seed tube and wordless vocals.

After establishing this playoff, Delcroix staged a startling switch: the men pounding out a beat on the floor while the women forcefully danced in place on their platform. But, alas, when the sexes danced together (to taped percussion), he ran out of ideas and the piece ended in anticlimax.

Dominique Dumais’ duet “Lulling High” also lost power in the stretch, never developing the idea of two wasted lovers moving in a haze beyond some woozy partnering gambits for Susan Gaudreau and Youri de Wilde. However in “Two Dances for Jane,” Crystal Pite sustained an equally problematic concept--a woman seeking some sort of acknowledgment from an impassive man--through the quirky moves assigned the tireless Cherice Barton (opposite Robitaille).

Nicolo Fonte’s moody “Floating World” and Mia Michaels’ breezy “No Strings Attached” each depicted promiscuous and ultimately inconsequential relationships--the former using wooden boxes to put the women on pedestals, the latter flinging them in the air flamboyantly at the end.

In contrast, the excerpts from Trey McIntyre’s intense ensemble piece “Blue Until June” suggested that promiscuity has consequences and women have feelings even in tough, sexy Montreal.