Jean-Pierre Perreault's Joe - as in "your average Joe" - was made 20 years ago, but its crowd of 32 men and women, all identically hatted, suited and booted beneath their long overcoats, makes you think of the 1920s and 30s. They evoke a gangster mob, perhaps, or an army of Charlie Chaplin clerks, or the robotic citizens of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The only sound is generated by their steps, and their deadening footfalls are the flipside to troupes such as the Tiller Girls: where those showgirls were shiny with production-line glamour, tapping away like squadrons of eager stenographers, the mass-produced rank and file of Joes are slaves to their own lumpen, laboured rhythms.
The choreography manouevres groups around the stage as if they were in a parade-ground drill, and it is constructed from deliberately limited building blocks of movement - strides or runs, heads bowed or chests lifted, exaggerated silent-film poses. The effect is of a regimented, boot-camp conformism; of ants, or sheep. A man breaks off on his own and jumps assertively on to the ramp at the back of the stage, but this individualism is eroded as his action is simply copied by another, and another. One Joe manages a tense face-off with another, but he is no match for the faceless crowd, who simply trample him, oblivious to his defiant posturing. There are odd moments of cartoonish humour, and just a glimpse of inner life when a man sucks a few plaintive chords from a harmonica, like the wheezing breaths of his forgotten soul.
The ideas that Joe suggests are more interesting than the material it presents - but perhaps it is the very absence of development and variety that creates its institutional, prison-yard ambience. In one scene the dancers repeatedly run up the ramp, reaching skywards in a lemming-like bid for freedom before they topple back down, like soldiers felled the instant they go over the top. The sheer inevitability of it all is powerfully dispiriting.
