Dance review: By turns cerebral and funny, Kidd Pivot's Assembly Hall plays elaborate games
In Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s world premiere, ancient stories and unruly humans can’t be contained
Kidd Pivot’s Assembly Hall, with Renée Sigouin. Photo by Michael Slobodian for DanceHouse
DanceHouse presents the soldout Assembly Hall at the Vancouver Playhouse until October 28
IN CRYSTAL PITE and Jonathon Young’s much anticipated new Assembly Hall, we get an early sign that things are off in an otherwise familiar world. In the first scene, a woman enters a dingy gymnasium—the kind that’s instantly recognizable from a thousand piano recitals, floor-hockey drop-in games, girl-scout meetings, and charity fundraisers—complete with a beatup basketball hoop and a small stage with a tired red-velvet curtain. She starts tidying up a small mess of upturned chairs and basketballs when she spots a body collapsed on the floor, legs bent up unnaturally.
But this doesn’t phase the woman, who starts to prop him up and arrange his legs—a bit like the puppets in Pite’s earlier Dark Matters—as if this might be a normal thing to do when one finds a corpse. But to those who know Pite and Young’s work, he’s clearly a glitch in the universe.
As they have in productions like Revisor and Betroffenheit, Pite and Young are working on multiple planes of reality—it’s just that they establish them earlier than usual in Assembly Hall. Kidd Pivot’s Revisor and The Tempest Replica were cleaved almost in half, the surface reality fracturing and melting midway through. In Assembly Hall, other dimensions and planes of reality erupt throughout—ancient stories that can’t be contained. It’s an eclectic, chaotic, daringly strange work, by turns cerebral and playfully absurd. There is more dialogue than in their previous pieces, and perhaps less traditional “choreography” than dance fans will want. And yet it feels so utterly original and mind-expanding in its reality-glitching.
As in Revisor, Young has written a script that is performed by actors (a top-flight Vancouver array that includes Young himself, Gabrielle Rose, and Ryan Beil) and broadcast through speakers, the dancers mouthing and “miming” the dialogue in exaggerated, frenetic bursts of physicality. The wordplay and ideas come in breathless blasts, accompanied by occasional flourishes of Kidd Pivot’s signature visual magic. When the auditorium stage curtain pulls back, the cast conjures El Greco-like candelabra-lit oil-painting tableaux. Swords magically appear from beneath the curtains, and apparitions seem to come to life before our eyes.
The collapsed man (standout Gregory Lau’s noodle-limbed Dave) appears to snap back to life—“I got turned around,” he says cryptically—just in time to form a quorum for the annual general meeting of a society of medieval re-enactors. The General Assembly of the Benevolent and Protective Order is on the verge of losing its community hall and annual Quest Fest event—of “dissolution”. A parallel breakdown starts to happen narratively: words loop in on themselves, mythical forces emerge, and the script dissolves and repeats. In one brilliant section, as a line of text multiplies, the amateur-knight character speaking it magically regenerates on stage. In another sequence, dancers move to the soundtrack run eerily backwards.
Containment and conflict are big themes in Assembly Hall, especially in the ongoing play with the language of Robert’s Rules—the endless fussing over points of order, motions to move, and, most ominously, the agenda’s final “unfinished business”. But those rules ultimately can’t control the outbursts, conflicts, and quirky personalities of the group. Or any gathering of human beings, for that matter. (Young’s sophisticated toying with meeting jargon will remind dance fans of the way he worked with boardroom speak in the pair’s taut The Statement, a Netherlands Dans Theater piece that’s been performed by Ballet BC.)
The unruly characters range here from Brandon Alley’s super-perky Woody (check out Pite’s berserk solo for him) to Livona Ellis’s take-charge Gail. Rakeem Hardy’s Boyd is eye-rolling sarcastic, while Lau’s Dave is an embittered, self-flagellating maybe-ghost (“Dave the downer, Dave the dud”). The board members have alter egos in the Dungeons & Dragons-like dimension, with Renée Sigouin a standout as a sobbing, bereaved maiden in a gauzy dress. Elsewhere, the board chair (Doug Letheren) becomes a surreal, half-naked king whose crown is so absurdly tall he can barely enter the hall door.
Each dancer has their own, intricate movement language, from Sigouin and Letheren’s balletic sequences to Lau’s elasticity—even when he’s wearing stiff knight’s armour. Sometimes the complexity of what Pite and Young pull off is dizzying: watch an early scene where the group is busily setting up the meeting, speaking in wildly overlapping conversations, and moving around the space in meticulously detailed, character-specific choreography.
Tying together the disparate planes is the atmospheric soundscape by Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani, and Meg Roe, spanning percussive clanking of metal swords to the haunting winds from a mythical forest. Adding immeasurably to the visual impact of the piece are Nancy Bryant’s elaborate costumes (not to mention Valentine Armouries’ gleaming knight suit); Jay Gower Taylor’s adept mix of memory, myth, and realism in the set; and Tom Visser’s lighting that shifts so effectively between realities.
Content-wise, the touchstones are vast and enigmatic—sometimes perplexing. A spotlit empty chair at the meeting (“Behold the chair of the absent one”) may refer to the absent-presence of God (we’ll let you Google your way down that rabbit hole if you want). Young’s signature existentialist questions (“Like, where are you Dave? Are you even present?”) meet Grail and quest myths, rationalistic theology, Goethe, and more. There are central reflections on mortality, and our purpose here on earth: to gather, to create and repeat stories, it seems to assert, and to work toward some sense of “unanimity” that can embrace multiple points of view.
But if all that makes Assembly Hall sound heavy, it’s not. In fact, sometimes it feels unabashedly goofy. Notably, the theatre rippled with laughter throughout opening night. You can feel the Kidd Pivot creators and performers having fun juggling the many torches in the air, the work acknowledging that we’re gathered in our own “assembly hall” creating our own narratives. They’re revelling in the juxtaposition of light and dark, silliness and the head-achingly complex. And so ultimately, it might be best not to linger too long in the larger philosophical questions of a piece that sometimes struggles to “contain” its own unruly ideas. It's a hugely enjoyable show if you can submit to its dream logic, let go of time and space, flow with the endless movement, and experience it all communally.
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