Celebrating Life And Dance

Eleven people in various street clothes stand on a bare stage, with only ballet barres around them. They seem to range in age from 20s to 60s, and don’t all look like dancers. They step to the audience, one by one, and state why they dance:

   “Sometimes I dance to a hundred percent of my possibilities,†says a grey-haired woman in glasses and a silk suit. 

   “I dance to stop the misery in the world,†says an impossibly tall blonde. “But it doesn’t work.â€

   They begin to dance and it is immediately clear that some of them indeed are not dancers. Stooped, or awkward, they all nonetheless project joy in their movement, until the music stops, and, confused, they wander off stage.

   The Groupe Emile Dubois, from Grenoble France, is named after someone who might not exist. He is a sort of everyman, someone the group’s founder, Jean-Claude Gallotta, describes as “on the fringes of the dance world.† “Des gens que dansent†(“people who danceâ€) is Gallota’s tribute to the ephemeral nature of dancing as an art form that disappears as soon as it’s been done, and to the people who need to dance whether or not they are dancers. 

   After this beginning, the ballet barres crash to the ground, as if to liberate the dancers from any conventions, and indeed the stream of consciousness that seems to drive what comes next is not bound by any rules.  A pair of middle-aged men sing a snippet of opera. The older woman, Francoise Bal-Goetz, performs a gentle duet with portly Martin Kravitz. When he shouts, “I love..†she puts her hand over his mouth before he can say “you.â€

   Their costumes seem to evoke different everyday personas — an accountant, a bookseller, a shopkeeper. Christophe Delachaux, in tweed jacket, Birkenstocks and a white skull cap, could be an assistant professor of theology.

   Gallota acts as something of a master of ceremonies. Dressed in black with a black cap, he sings, raps, and mutters as part of the shifting jazz and rock (interspersed with what sounded like bugs being zapped) score.  Pedestrian sections with the non-dancers are interspersed with fast and fluid partnering and pas de quatres with the beautifully trained “real†dancers, notably when three short women, Ximena Figueroa, Cécile Renard and Camille Cau, dance with the tall rangy Theirry Verger. He picks each one up and puts them in a pile, one on top of the next, and then lies down and wraps his arm around them all — as though he’s made a single partner out of the three.

   Midway through, a screen descends and we see a snippet of an interview with Henry Miller, apparently on his deathbed. He explains that he regrets nothing, that love was more important than all the “clutter† of fame, and that, though he knows he’s dying, “I’m alive ’til the end.†His words set the tone for the loving duets that follow: Bal-Goetz with Renard, as if mother and daughter; Warrand with Darrell Davis, dancing sensually a slow pas de deux while the other dancers wander on and off, watching them or not. When the two older men do a sweetly awkward duet together, one remarks to the audience, “the difference between a duet and the two of us is not exactly clear.â€

   Plotless, confusing, sometimes even frustrating, but in the end a humane and generous offering that celebrates the urge to live and to dance.

For information about performances and events

at Jacob’s Pillow, call the box office at 413-243-0745 or go to info@jacobspillow.org.