ASSEMBLY HALL at the Edinburgh International Festival

★★★★★

“The dancers lose themselves among a host of ambiguous landscapes. It’s all mesmerizing to watch, and to listen to.”

Fans of Kidd Pivot’s work will delight in Assembly Hall. This piece has all the hallmarks of choreographer Crystal Pite and playwright Jonathon Young’s earlier work in Resizor— a reimagination of Gogol’s Government Inspector—which I reviewed in early March 2020 at Sadler’s Wells. Assembly Hall isn’t based on another play, although it is about the way we create dramas. This piece is a dance/drama about a group of medieval re-enactors who are desperately trying to remain in the game. Presented as part of the 2024 Edinburgh International Festival at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, Assembly Hall is another aptly chosen production for this year’s festival slogan, “Rituals that Unite Us.”

The show begins in a shabby and dilapidated assembly hall as the title suggests, at the group’s annual general meeting. If that doesn’t sound too promising a beginning, stick with it. What Kidd Pivot do with this mundane situation literally propels us into different spaces, different times. They do it with a highly original fusion of words and movement, set in a space that is always many places at once. There are times when we are not quite sure when we are, or where, in this ever changing narrative about a never ending game.

On one level, Assembly Hall is a dance about the well meaning fanaticism of cosplayers and re-enactors who go to extraordinary lengths to maintain a game in a world that isn’t real. Even when they have to hold annual general meetings that include voting whether the group can continue. There are already disturbing hints of past violence at the beginning of the show, which opens with the body of a man sprawled on an overturned chair. Is he asleep? Dead? The ambiguity that infuses all of Kidd Pivot’s work is alive and well in Assembly Hall. The meeting is accompanied with a sound design that incorporates both realistic dialogue and distorted sounds. (Composition and sound design by Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe). The dancers mime the words while their bodies take on an increasingly stylized interpretation of board members at a mundane meeting that is anything but. As the group gets increasingly fractious, the sounds and the movements fracture into a fight between medieval knights, equipped with armour, weapons and banners. Snatches of classical music emerge to accompany all this violence. It’s extraordinary to see performers literally transform from people in everyday clothing into medieval warriors. The Kidd Pivot company dance their way through all these transformations as though it were perfectly normal to go from nerdy looking committee members with glasses, to faceless warriors moving from one stylized battle scene to another. (Lovely costume design by Nancy Bryant.) We are forced to awareness of the choreography of the battlefield. It is paradoxically both beautiful to look at, and horrifying in its implications. While the game has become real for the re-enactors, the dancers lose themselves among a host of ambiguous landscapes. It’s all mesmerizing to watch, and to listen to.

Another feature of Pite and Young’s work is that when you think everything is about to reach some kind of dramatic conclusion, it both does, and doesn’t. We watch the story in which Assembly Hall begins its descent into violence, and we see, at various points, how the participants reappear to try to continue their meeting and force a vote. Do they continue as medieval re-enactors, or do they dissolve? It all comes down to one vote—a vote from the player we saw lying inert on stage at the beginning of the show. Does he vote yes or no? No one can decide. It is a fitting end to the piece because regardless of how these players decide in their own time, the dance of medieval re-enactors is, in some sense, eternal. Even the audience ends the show so caught up in the dance that Kidd Pivot has created, that we ourselves cannot decide whether it is over. We wish it could continue forever. But we clap enthusiastically, gather up our coats and belongings, take ourselves out of the past, and into our futures, mundane or otherwise. The return to reality is both saddening, and oddly comforting.

ASSEMBLY HALL at the Edinburgh International Festival – Festival Hall

Reviewed on 22nd August 2024

by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Michael Slobodian

ASSEMBLY HALL

ASSEMBLY HALL

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