Kidd Pivot's Assembly Hall wins Best New Dance Production prize at U.K.'s prestigious Olivier Awards
Vancouver choreogapher Crystal Pite has won previous Oliviers for Revisor, Betroffenheit, and Flight Path
Assembly Hall. Photo by Michael Slobodian
CRYSTAL PITE’S KIDD Pivot has done it again.
The Vancouver company’s dance-theatre work Assembly Hall has just won an Olivier Award, the U.K.’s most prestigious performing arts prize.
The production, which had its world premiere here as part of the DanceHouse program in 2023, was named Best New Dance Production at the ceremony Sunday night at London's Royal Albert Hall. Assembly Hall had been presented at Sadler’s Wells.
The show, which Pite created in collaboration with theatre artist Jonathon Young, made sophisticated, visually inventive play out of medieval re-enactment, Robert’s Rules, and the spoken word, moving between a small assembly hall and a mythical world.
“It’s a small little scene of a community hall with this little group of a board of directors, but if you zoom out it has these larger implications to the broader question of conflict and what that means when it gets cranked up and amplified—when it gets to be larger forces in the world,” Pite told Stir in an interview for the premiere. When the epic, ambitious work premiered, we called it “funny”, “cerebral”, “utterly original and mind-expanding”; London’s Telegraph called it “the cutting-edge of dance theatre”.
Kidd Pivot’s equally inventive Revisor won an Olivier Award in 2022, and Betroffenheit won in 2017; both were created with Young and showed at Sadler’s Wells. Pite also took home an Olivier in 2018 for Flight Pattern, a moving look at the plight of refugees choreographed for the Royal Ballet and set to the first movement of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3; it premiered at the Royal Opera House.
Assembly Hall went up for the award against another Canadian production that also featured the work of Pite: Frontiers: Choreographers Of Canada – Pite/Kudelka/Portner by The National Ballet Of Canada, which also showed at Sadler's Wells. Also in contention was Theatre Of Dreams by Hofesh Shechter Company (a familiar force on the DanceHouse program here), and An Untitled Love by A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham.
Pite’s work on the Frontiers Canadian mixed program, Angels’ Atlas, was also up for another Olivier for Outstanding Achievement in Dance, with Tom Visser and Vancouver’s Jay Gower Taylor nominated for their lighting concept and design. That prize went to Eva Yerbabuena for her performance in Yerbagüena at Sadler's Wells.
Last summer, Stir reported that Assembly Hall had been turned down for Canada Council tour funding, and consequently had to scale back its tour this year. The news sparked a widespread dialogue in Canada’s dance community, with artists and presenters asking, '“If companies of the calibre of Kidd Pivot aren’t getting funding, who is?”
Assembly Hall is also up for a Touring Production award at Ontario’s Dora Mavor Moore Awards for a Canadian Stage presentation. The event announces its winners in June.
The Oliviers are named for famed late actor Laurence Olivier and are Britain’s highest performing-arts awards—akin to America’s Tony Awards.
Amid other winners, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, with music and lyrics by Darren Clark, and book and lyrics by Jethro Compton at Ambassadors Theatre won Best New Musical. Giant, by Mark Rosenblatt, at Jerwood Theatre Downstairs at Royal Court Theatre was named Best New Play.
Walking the red carpet for the star-studded event were names like Cate Blanchett, Adrien Brody, and Tom Hiddleston. 
