The collaboration between choreographer Crystal Pite and writer Jonathon Young began with Betroffenheit, a searing study of grief, and continued with The Statement and Revisor, images of politics and bureaucracy in action. Now they present Assembly Hall – a portrait of an amateur medieval re-enactment society that is both serious and really very funny.
The uniqueness of Pite and Young’s work together doesn’t just lie in the style they have developed, where dancers lip-sync with fluid, split-second timing and large-gestured grace to words spoken by actors. It also springs from the uniqueness of their combined imagination, which here conjures a world in which the petty machinations of the Benevolent and Protective Order, meeting in a rundown community hall, can slip into Arthurian quests and extended slo-mo battles.
The everyday and the mythic constantly merge. Time slides into loops as squabbles about when to serve refreshments, and an agenda that concludes with “recurring and unfinished business”, dissolve into journeys in a mythic, magical place where a knight can end suffering if only he asks the right question.
The eight magnificent dancers play specific characters – bossy Bonnie, enthusiastic Woody, Dave the Downer – and turn into figures in the legend. They re-enact battles – running by with a banner proclaiming Quest Fest – but they also become something unworldly. At one point, the knight suddenly splits into versions of himself. There’s a constant sense of instability generated by Pite’s transfixing choreography and Jay Gower Taylor’s set, which contains a stage where carefully posed tableaux come to life.
Owen Belton’s soundscape, full of clashing swords as well as Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, and the lighting by Tom Visser and costumes by Nancy Bryant, all fashion a distinctive world, at once unreal and entirely recognisable, Parsifal crossed with a parish meeting. It’s incredibly rich, raising haunting questions about community and the need to belong and to strive. But it is also, simply, astonishingly beautiful. A wonder.
