The Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault wished you Happy Holidays and a splendid New Year! Please note that our offices will be closed from December 21 until January 6 inclusively.

From December 5 to 16, 2011, 18 dancers participated in a Jean-Pierre Perreault repertoire internship thanks to funding from the Regroupement québécois de la danse and Emploi-Québec.

Over the course of this forty-hour internship - under the direction of Ginelle Chagnon, who worked closely with Jean-Pierre Perreault, and assisted by the dancer Sophie Breton - participants donned costumes, in most cases discovering the work for the first time, to learn a variety of choreographic sequences (both solo and group) from some of the choreographer’s works of the 1980s.

By stressing ideas such as the authenticity of the dancer, the rigour required by the movement and the dancer’s relationship with other dancers, listening, space, rhythm and time, participants were able to take up the numerous challenges posed by performing this rich body of contemporary dance.

The Fondation is very pleased with the experience!

From 21 January to 18 February 2012, the Roger Bellemare and Christian Lambert galleries will be hosting a retrospective exhibition of thirty paintings by Jean-Pierre Perreault. These works, often created in advance of a dance piece, illustrate the artistic path of this major choreographer. This is a chance you won’t want to miss to see these works, or see them again, because they are rarely exhibited in public.

It will also be possible to acquire one of these works, following standard procedure in the art community. The Fondation is dedicated to maintaining a link with Perreault’s paintings and to keeping track of them for future events. An exhibition catalogue in PDF format will be available in early January 2012.

To receive an invitation to the opening or for any other question, send an e-mail to info@fjpp.ca.

It is now possible to follow the activities of the Fondation on Facebook (Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault) and Twitter (#FondationJPP).

Since 2008, LADMMI (Montreal), the School of Dance (Ottawa), the School of the Toronto Dance Theatre, the School of Contemporary Dancers (Winnipeg) and the École de danse de Québec have been presenting, in collaboration with the Canada Dance Festival, an ensemble piece directed by a Canadian choreographer. For its 2012 edition, the Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault has been given the stimulating challenge of devising a program for the sixty or so dancers who will graduate this year.

Under the direction of Ginelle Chagnon, assisted by Sophie Breton, the students will work on choreographic material from the works Joe and Rodolphe, as it was improvised under Perreault’s direction in 1983. The group piece, bringing together dancers from each school, will be performed at the Dance Canada Festival next June. It will be interesting to see the subtle differences between these two characters: one austere, wearing boots and a hat, and the other, his predecessor, in bare feet without a hat.

With December 2012 marking the tenth anniversary of the death of Jean-Pierre Perreault, this will be a moving opportunity to revisit a few months beforehand these so well-known characters in contemporary dance!

The Fondation is pleased to announce that it has created a web page about its documentation of activities around the Soirée Jean-Pierre Perreault held in the fall of 2009 at the initiative of the dance department of UQAM. See the press release.

The Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault is proud to announce that it is taking up the invitation extended by five professional Canadian contemporary dance schools and the Canada Dance Festival. See the press release.

The Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault wished you Happy Holidays and a splendid New Year! Please note that our offices will be closed from 22 December until 3 January inclusively.

The Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault is pleased to announce that it is beginning work on its project Jean-Pierre Perreault, Architect of Space, a virtual experience created in partnership with Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) and HexagramUQAM, with funding from the Ministère de la Culture, des Communications et de la Condition féminine du Québec.  See the press release.

Theresa Rowat, director of the McGill University Archives and member of the Fondation’s board of directors, organized a panel entitled “Archiver l’éphémère: réalités et défis”. Sophie Préfontaine (executive director of the Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault), Manon Oligny (choreographer, Manon fait de la danse) and Frédéric Moffet (videographer, interdisciplinary artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) participated in a discussion of the issues involved in preserving our dance heritage.

The Fondation also shared the experience it has acquired over the past few years by describing to the thirty or so archivists present the major legal and administrative challenges involved in working with our dance heritage.

Here is an excerpt from the 39th Annual conference’s official program:

“Over the past few years, the dance community has become aware of the issues raised by the ephemeral nature of its art. The capacity for dance to endure is compromised by insufficient documentation and lack of primary archival sources, limiting the possibilities for analysis, historical research and the reconstruction of dance works.

Given that archival preservation is focused on the record, how can dance be made ‘archivable’? If our goal is to preserve our dance heritage, what are the determining features of archival materials which will reflect the essence of a dance piece or the vitality of a performance?”