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.
Solos can seem like demonic possession – the dancers seem spun and shaken by forces beyond their control. Tchaikovsky surges on the soundtrack – along with sighs, sobs and panting breath – and the entire group shift into slo-mo combat, plaid-and-denim citizens becoming gouging, skewering gladiators.The committee members might initially seem too prosaic for the legends they revere – but soon they are enveloped by their fantasies and nightmares. The hall’s little stage reveals a green and dense forest, where characters fight and feast.
The society’s spare part, Dave the Downer (spindly Gregory Lau) becomes an unlikely knight in very shining armour. A sword slides like Excalibur from beneath the stage curtain – will he rise to the occasion and brandish it with renewed authority? In crisis, people shade into the imaginative realm – just as they plunge from realistic dialogue into unhinged, dizzying movement.Pite and Young have previously explored trauma (Betroffenheit) and power (Revisor). In Assembly Hall, they follow the craving for familiar patterns – the rituals of meetings and myths, of stories that aren’t satisfying but stubbornly resist change.
And with these quaveringly eloquent dancers they ask how we can crack them open, let bodies run free and change the story at the last gasp.Sadler’s Wells, to 23 March; sadlerswells.com
