The Daily Telegraph - Features
Forget maple syrup, here’s Canada’s greatest export
In short, this is the cutting-edge of dance theatre – beg, borrow or steal to get a ticket
Assembly Hall Sadler’s Wells, London EC1 ★★★★★
Sometimes, expectations of a forthcoming work are so high, you can’t help feeling a little sorry for its creators. In the wake of their extraordinary study of grief
Betroffenheit (2015), it was true four years later for the UK premiere of choreographer Crystal Pite and playwright Jonathon Young’s 2019 take on Gogol, Revisor. But, just as the Canadian duo and her crack contemporary troupe Kidd Pivot rose to the occasion then with another full-evening slice of hyper-imaginative, impeccably grown-up dance theatre, so history has now repeated itself – not only a great pleasure to report, but also especially apt.
For the sense of history repeating itself is everywhere in their beautiful, noirish new work Assembly Hall, here getting its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells. The eccentric premise is that it’s the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of an octet of medieval re-enactors. But the result is more the sort of trip you might conceivably have if you devoured a book on Arthurian lore and then swiftly downed a pint of mead with a mescaline chaser.
As it progresses, images and vignettes layer up and up into a dark, droll, ungraspable spectacle that seems to play out just wide of your comfortable field of perception and still boggles the mind the morning after. It is also an absolute triumph of pin-sharp production and performance, with satisfying Pitean choreographic tropes reappearing here and there but never descending into schtick, and offering up an eye-widening surprise at every turn. Try to make sense of it all second-by-second, and chances are you’ll tie yourself in knots. But sit back and let it wash over you, and the rewards are huge.
The setting is designer Jay Gower Taylor’s down-at-heel village or possibly school hall with, crucially, a small raised stage at the back. The tone is set immediately with a man lying on the floor apparently unconscious or even dead. But when a second person comes in, curiously unperturbed
by his being there, it turns out she can effortlessly manipulate his limbs as if he’s a wire-and-rubber model. He isn’t, it seems, dead; but nor is he exactly alive.
The scene that follows – echoing both Revisor and Pite and Young’s shorter (but also excellent) 2016 piece, The Statement – sees the eight members of of the marvellously named Benevolent & Protective Order meet to discuss the 93rd Annual Quest Fest, which has fallen on hard times: urgent action is needed, or the organisation faces dissolution. Predictably, though, all they do is natter, the performers lip-synching with pin-sharp accuracy to fast-and-furious pre-recorded dialogue, the almost ritualistic bureaucratic gobbledygook heightened by exaggerated, almost Looney Tunes-like gesticulations. It is funny, certainly, but also subtly unheimlich.
With the help of fantastic lighting and sound-design, the meeting swiftly splinters into a surreal, hall-of-mirrors exploration of (I’d say, though blimey…) the infinitely complex relationship between past and present, fact and fantasy, real life and theatre, and perhaps the way we’re eternally cursed to learn everything and nothing from what has come before us.
The hall bleeds into and onto the stage, “real” life into myth (and vice versa), the two becoming completely confused, but always following a credible kind of dream-logic. That early impression of “manipulation” is crucial, too, emblematic of our approach to the past – even a ravishing central duet that erupts from nowhere has a desperately elegiac edge, as if the woman is dancing less with a man than with a memory of one, which she then “buries” through the curtains of the stage.
In short, this is the cutting-edge of dance theatre, perhaps not quite as exquisitely tight as those two previous shows, but still a case of beg, borrow and steal to get a ticket. With sincere apologies to maple syrup, I wonder in fact if Pite, Young and friends aren’t fast becoming Canada’s greatest export.
Until tomorrow. Tickets: 020 7863 8000; sadlerswells.com. Then at the Edinburgh International Festival from Aug 22-24: eif.co.uk