★★★★★

“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 Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★★★

“Assembly Hall is nothing short of spectacular”

Crystal Pite is a visionary theatre-maker. A once in a generation choreographer. Able to convey emotion through movement in a way unlike anyone else I have had the pleasure to see.

My first introduction to Pite was as part of a mixed bill for the Royal Ballet in 2017. Her short work, Flight Pattern, created in response to Europe’s refugee crisis, blew me away with its ambitious use of the whole company moving in synchronicity.

Her latest work in collaboration with Jonathon Young and her Vancouver based company, Kidd Pivot, takes an utterly bizarre concept that, on the surface, has nothing in common with that politically charged piece – an Annual General Meeting of amateur medieval re-enactors.

It is as perplexing as it seems. Pite and Young’s signature style, developed over the course of a number of productions together, has dancers moving and lip syncing to recorded speech. They animate conversations with exaggerated hand gestures and head tilts, with each dancer imbuing their movements with oodles of personality as we are introduced to the reasons the group has gathered. Slowly through the narrative, after comic arguments about where refreshments feature on the agenda, it is revealed that the group are facing dissolution, with their fate hinging on a final vote put off since last year.

From relatively inauspicious beginnings, over the course of 90 minutes this show turns into something totally unexpected and will leave you gripped throughout. Pite and Young use this group of amateur re-enactors to explore themes ever present in theatre such as: Why do we tell stories? And what do the stories that persist say about us today? Are we doomed to repeat the failings of our forebears or can we learn to save ourselves and set us free?

As the piece moves into a dream-like sequence where the dance takes over, the conversation gives way to a soundscape of experimental electronic sounds using the recorded speech (Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe). The group moves like a living organism, not in stops and starts but in ripples and waves. How much are these individuals in control, executing free will vs. playing a role they are destined to play, over and over? This is explored right from the get go, with one of the dancers seemingly being pushed and pulled around by another, moving like a marionette. Movements flail and flutter as if under strobe lighting and repeat in mysterious ways. When later the same movements recur by a dancer in a full suit of armour they gain an audible element which inexplicably changes the feeling of the movement.

The set (Jay Gower Taylor) is exquisitely simple – a backdrop that is without doubt a run down community hall, with grubby walls and moody lighting (Tom Visser) that adds to the feeling this is a place in disrepair. The raised stage-upon-a-stage is a clever trick to instantaneously move the action from real to surreal.

The costume (Nancy Bryant) is again simple yet characterful. Dancers wear plain clothes whilst in their AGM but these get increasingly elaborate as the re-enactments play out.

Each element, movement, sound, costume, and lighting is top notch but together it is more than the sum of its parts. Pite uses dance to convey a message in concert with other elements and in many ways her approach to theatre-making is similar to her approach to the choreography – each element performing the role it’s best placed to play.

Out of many, we are left with one. A final image of a knight constructed from the torso of one dancer, the arm of another, with the whole figure moving as if being controlled by a master puppeteer.

I am not exaggerating when I say Assembly Hall is nothing short of spectacular. I came out feeling enthused at what a perfectly executed production it was – the best and most sought after sensation after leaving the theatre. Pite proves her talent once again, and to think something so ambitious can be achieved out of a group of medieval reenactors makes it all the more joyous. I can’t wait to see what pops out of Pite’s enviable creative mind next.

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ASSEMBLY HALL

★★★★★

Edinburgh International Festival

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.”

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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ASSEMBLY HALL

★★★★★

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

ASSEMBLY HALL at Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★★★

“Assembly Hall is nothing short of spectacular”