Pierre Pontvianne / Cie PARC: Janet on the Roof. 21.09.2018, L’Allegro Miribel, La Biennale de la Danse, Lyon.
With a loud „cling-ing” the bullet’s empty shell hits the floor and someone must have been shot. Yet apart from blinding light, nothing hits the audience – but their nerve endings. We are being offered two shows in one: the quiet, steadily paced architectural movements of a dancer dressed entirely in blue, who busies herself with a paced retreat towards the upstage, and whose face will remain shrouded so as to not inject any individuality into the whole undertaking. A slow piano tinkle is the only accompaniment of this highly intriguing minimal scenic set-up, which is brutally sliced into by intermittent black-outs and the playback of an unknown movie’s nervous soundscape: men trying to gain control over a situation by shouting instructions, women having lost their senses screaming in fear and horror, a drama, which we can not see, nor understand, as the speech is either blurred or reversed – Janet!… Janet!… what are you doing on that roof, you, the only survivor of an apocalypse whose imminent death you will not be able to avoid by stretching yourself to the end of that stage. Janet?