Most dance stories are about love and death, or desire and duty. Not Assembly Hall. The latest work by pioneering Canadians Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young is about the annual general meeting of a failing society of amateur medieval re-enactors. We’re a long way from Swan Lake – but the result is beguiling, inventive and supremely strange.The setting (designed by Jay Gower Taylor) is a despondent local hall where the society meets. Faded paint, penitential chairs, basketball hoop – the usual. The committee members fetch up and immediately start mithering about refreshments and agendas – they sorely need knuckle-rapping Jackie Weaver – before revealing that their main task is to vote on winding up the society, scuttled by declining interest and fading income.This doesn’t sound very dancey – but it is in fact thrillingly embodied. Ballet companies scrap for Pite’s time – she may be the world’s most in-demand choreographer – but with Kidd Pivot, her own Vancouver-based company, she has honed a signature style in which crazily articulated dancers perform to voiceover dialogue, often written by playwright Young. It’s like watching a full-body lip synch.At first, in Assembly Hall, this means a rapid shuttle of shrugs, literally pointing the finger. There are vivid mimes for phrases like “dwindling attendance” and “soaring debt” and lavishly operatic gesture as members bewail the loss of the Benevolent and Protected Order.But without warning, things take a turn for the mythic. Resonant phrases stud the dialogue and Tom Visser’s depressed, pewter-toned lighting adopts a Renaissance glow.
