“Pierre Pontvianne could have become known as the worthy heir of a kind of academicism or formal virtuosity […] He is suspicious of fixed ideas.”*

Percut was born between two periods of confinement and perhaps between two different eras.  One is a time of certitudes, in which we consider prosperity as a given right; the other time is that of the uncertain, in which any programmed vision of things is deranged and different relationships are inversed by a single movement. It is this context of global upheaval Percut attempts to re-transcribe with paradoxical choreographic tenacity.

In precedent pieces Pierre Pontvianne has explored the extremes of movement, passing from performative tension in the solo JANET ON THE ROOF, to the fluent complexity of a saraband with six dancers in MASS, to work with a virtuosic ensemble in BEASTS with the Ballet National de l’Opéra de Lyon. Percut draws on the body’s most profound resources, allowing only the most absolute necessity to escape, up to the point of breaching the very limits of what dance is.

Accompanied by six performers, Pierre Pontvianne carves out a path that leads to the very nerve centre of his research, which finally becomes the totality of the piece. In chorus, the dancers accompany each other through a jagged profusion of words cried out, exclamatory and powerfully synchronous, that attests to the science of a collective at work.

The question of breath is central to the piece, as the performers’ bodies are put physically to the test. The dancers cry out up to the point of losing their breath. It becomes clear what invoking, expressing, addressing and altering all do to the body. Throughout the daily flow of communication and contradictory messages, Percut compensates the senses. Via words and fragments of words, it makes a clean break with movement, becoming the reflection of our social paralysis, both figurative and concrete.

In Percut, language and cries are the materials that permit the body to open out beyond itself.

« With Percut, words are lodged within the screams and cries. They act like the perceptive phenomenon of pareidolia; each hears what they want to hear, what they need to hear… The word exists within its poetic dimension, its meaning is not subject to discourse. The score, the construction, the deconstruction and repetition of fragmented phrases, is a pretext for giving prominence to the cries in their physical and sensorial dimension. I was surprised by the dancer’s capacity to use their voice and to appropriate the words, and to resist at exactly the place of immobility and to throw themselves into the great logorrhoea, a horizon of words that roll out, without losing their humanity. All of which results in some very strong presences. "

Pierre Pontvianne

* Nathalie Yokel for the Journal de la Terrasse