by MARITES CARINO

When you think of the jig, musicians whooping it up in a corner might come to mind - playing traditional music while the crowd drinks itself silly as dancers in poofy costumes with rigid torsos pop up and down with the beat.

Choreographer Lük Fleury wants his audience to forget all of that. He’s on a mission: to revamp the traditional jig and make it something people can relate to today.

Fleury started experimenting using the jig in a theatre context as a sort of dialogue and response between characters in a play he wrote. After Deena Davida, artistic director of dance space Tangente, saw his work, she encouraged him to continue developing his style.

“People think that the jig is super boring, but I want to show them it’s contemporary, it’s fun and that it’s part of our cultural heritage,” explains Fleury in a makeshift dance studio in an industrial building. Here Lük and his dancers, in their stompin’ shoes, rehearse for their next show, Machines.

“In the traditional jig, the upper body is rigid, while the feet do all the work.” Fleury explains. Straying from convention, Fleury energetically animates the upper body. In one section of his work, precise angular movements taken from breakdancing and club-dancing styles are juxtaposed with the complicated rapid-fire footwork of the traditional jig. Fleury likes contrast and it shows not only in his movements, but in his music choice as well. Imagine jigging to Moby.

A practitioner of the dance since 1982, Fleury continues to jig the traditional way with Les Éclusiers de Lachine and is working on a new creation scheduled for the spring, which will break away from the folk dance, for traditional dance group Les Sortilèges.

Keep your ear to the ground for Machines at Tangente, and who knows, 2003 could be the year of the jig. :