Artist / Student / Senior: $35 Get Tickets
Ada Slaight Hall @ Daniels Spectrum
585 Dundas Street East
Venue Sponsor
Nuit
Jean-Pierre Perreault
Citadel + Compagnie
Nuit (1986) is a piece in which nine performers, grappling with the hurly-burly of everyday life, interact in a “story without a plot.” During this harsh night, the characters push themselves to their limits, different types of interaction take shape and areas of tension emerge among the various materials, masses, volumes and configurations. Dance becomes a “sculptural material endowed with mobility.”
This demanding, fiery piece, performed in half-light, expresses a troubling, subterranean vulnerability. The singular materiality of Nuit and the interpenetration among the multiple components that Perreault created make this a major work not only in Perreault’s legacy but in the history of Canadian choreography.
Remount
Approximate run time: 80 minutes, no intermission
Meet the Artists
Jean-Pierre Perreault
Choreographer
Jean-Pierre Perreault was a dancer, choreographer, artistic director, teacher and designer whose legacy boasts a large body of choreography and a career of international distinction. Although Perreault initially intended to pursue the visual arts, he began training in dance with Jeanne Renaud and Peter Boneham at the age of nineteen. When Renaud formed Le Groupe de la Place Royale in 1966, both Boneham and Perreault were founding members.
Read more +Perreault studied classical and modern dance, and by 1968 he was teaching at Le Groupe’s school. He and Boneham became co-directors of the company when Renaud left in 1971, and the 1970s became a time of great choreographic development for Perreault. By the time he left Le Groupe in 1981, he had produced over twenty works for the company. He returned to Montreal in 1984 creating his own company, La Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault, and teaching at the Université du Québec à Montréal until 1991. It was here that he mounted his signature piece, Joe, a seventy-minute work that has since been remounted several times and celebrated worldwide. The 1980s and 1990s saw the creation of many of Perreault’s other renowned works such as Stella (1985), Nuit (1986), Les Lieux dits (1988), La Vita (1993), Eironos (1996), Les Années de Pèlerinage (1996), L’Exil-L’Oubli (1999) and Comforts of Solitude (2001) for The National Ballet of Canada. Always questioning the relationship between the spectator and performance, Perreault also created choreographic installations such as L’Instinct (1994) and Les éphemères (1997), challenging these relationships by isolating spectators on the edge of the scenic space, and creating experiences of great intimacy.
Perreault’s works often began as drawings and paintings and, accordingly, he is also well known for his designs, which have been given solo exhibitions all over the world. In total, Perreault produced over forty-eight choreographic works in his lifetime. In 1990 he won the Jean A. Chalmers Award for Choreography, in 1996 the Jean A. Chalmers Award for Distinction in Choreography, The Grand Prix of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal in 2000, and the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award in 2002. Jean-Pierre Perreault died of cancer in 2002.
Photo credit: Michael Slobodian