Who is Joe?
Joe is everybody, and nobody.
He is everyone, and he is no one.
He is someone you have met,
someone you are going to meet,
someone you have yet to meet,
someone you have dreamed of meeting.
Joe.
Who is Joe?
He is your uncle, your sister,
a stranger, your best friend.
He’s an average Joe.
Who is Joe?
He is clear. He is elusive.
Joe is all of us.
Joe is none of us.
Joe is Joe.
In 1999, choreographer / dancer Louis Kavouras created the eponymous everyman character Joe, as a means of exploring the human condition and what makes each of us strikingly unique and yet startlingly universal.
The original production, JOE, a series of 8 solos, premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2000.
The second, Joe In Winter , showed us the pain and dislocation at the end of a love affair. After receiving a rejection letter we find Joe plunged into the depths of an emotional winter. This hour-long work premiered in Edinburgh in August 2001. The piece was called "the perfect fringe show... it's intimacy is its strength."
Joe…This Infinite Universe, the third in the series previewed at the Monaco Dance Forum in December 2002, then later premiered in Edinburgh, Scotland, August 2003. In this work solo dancer, solo actor move through one hour of streaming video and music. The piece creates ten poetic, metaphorical, kinetic events and glimpses in time, and space, that combine to produce a deconstructed, sensuous, philosophical, kinetic journey exploring what it means to be alive in an expanding improbable universe. Joe... This Infinite Universe was selected as one of the 5 Best Dance Productions at the Edinburgh Festival.
This kinetic exploration continues to produce new Joes. The newest production is Joe/RiVeR, The Journey of An Artist. In this work, Joe swims Life's River, revealing the dreams, desires and struggles of an artist, a human being --- of an average yet extraordinary Joe. A sensual, poetic and kinetic journey incorporating dance, theater and film, with Actor Michael Lugering and film by New York Filmmaker Tad Mike. This work uses Kavouras' own journal writings from 1983 to the present to create a James Joyce portrait of Kavouras himself of a developing artist.
The next Joe in the series of Joe, is simply called 2. It will premiere in 2007.
