Choreographers: Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young
Kidd Pivot presents funny ballet. Assembly Hall, their latest project, explores the world of medieval re-enactors. This committee of a re-enactor society is under the financial cosh, unable to continue their tenancy of the scruffy assembly hall in which they meet. They have failed to vote on dissolving the society for several years, and this year looks no more likely to bring any vote to the floor. That’s it. That’s the story. A dysfunctional committee meeting in a bleak hall, failing to enact a bureaucratic procedure to dissolve itself.
The squabbling committee members are sensational dancers. Every movement made, putting out chairs, fetching a tea-urn, everything, is performed beautifully – the choreography at base level makes mundane actions immensely pleasing to watch. Then the concept kicks in. The medieval aspect leads to the committee transforming into knights in combat, into la Belle Dame Sans Merci, into, most spectacularly, the White Knight. The convincing naturalistic design (by Jay Gower Taylor) is astonishingly transformed by Tom Visser’s spectacular lighting. Delicate colour washes create convincingly entrancing spaces for the dancers to be medieval in. It’s really pretty and more than a bit magical.
The culmination of this happy synergy of dance and design comes with the entry of the White Knight, into a crepuscular hall that is illuminated by flashes of lightning as well-aimed spotlights sizzle off his silver armour (costume design by Nancy Bryant). The committee members sort of dismember him subsequently, in a ritualistic kill-the-king-to-make-the-land-fertile kind of way, and once again, the silver armour pieces held aloft by eight dancers sing in the gloom. They even create a puppet White Knight as the costume elements are brought together to make a dancing form from inanimate objects.
Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young speak of their interest in opening portals from everyday reality into worlds of myth and magic. They also have a serious agenda, exploring control and manipulation. In a light-hearted, unpompous way, Assembly Hall manages to develop those themes and make mundanity thought-provoking
Assembly Hall is an off-the-charts wacky idea, but it conjures real magic out of resoundingly everyday material, it makes committee members’ ordinary movements into things of grace and beauty, it brings the mystery and the wonder out of the dreams and imaginings of otherwise nondescript people. The old stories come viscerally and significantly back to life.
The concept is wacky, the effects are surreal, the impact is absolutely stunning.
Runs until 23 March 2024 and then at Edinburgh International Festival from 22 – 24 August 2024.
The Reviews Hub Score
Banal, bonkers, beautiful.
