Crystal Pite’s Kidd Pivot debuts Assembly Hall at DanceHouse

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Kidd Pivot: Assembly Hall

When: Oct. 26-28, 8 p.m.

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Where: Vancouver Playhouse, 600 Hamilton St.

Tickets and info: dancehouse.ca

Crystal Pite‘s previous two works, Betroffenheit and Revisor, both received Olivier Awards. This is an immense achievement as Britain’s most prestigious stage honours are hard won. Pite has three of them.

With credentials like that, any new work from the Vancouver-based choreographer and her acclaimed company Kidd Pivot is sure to be a highlight of global dance in 2023.

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Created by Pite and frequent collaborator Jonathon Young of Electric Company, Assembly Hall appears poised to both amaze and amuse when it premieres at DanceHouse in late October.

In keeping with the creative team’s unusual choices of source material, the new work revolves around the most-unmoving experience of an annual general meeting and the human dynamics of gatherings. In this case, a fractious one held by the board of directors of a medieval battle re-enactment group behind an event called Quest Fest.

As a creator for works for the Paris Opera Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, as well as holding down the associate choreographer chair at Nederlands Dans Theatre since 2008, Pite maintains a full schedule. This is the first new work for Kidd Pivot in four years.

“When things started easing up again after the hard part of the pandemic, there was a bottleneck where projects that were postponed were suddenly all happening in the same month at the same time, which was hard for creating new work,” said Pite. “But I still managed to continue my work at Nederlands Dans Theatre, to make a short piece for Kidd Pivot and now this major work. For a career that is already so short for dancers, losing those years has been a huge challenge for members of my company and throughout the community.”

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Meditating on what it means to gather again, what it means to belong to something and how that relates to our humanity was on her mind coming into creating Assembly Hall. She stresses that the work isn’t about post-COVID-19 experiences, merely that those might have provided some guiding light toward the work’s subject matter. Don’t come expecting to see dancers coming out of their armour carapaces to emerge as lithe, free new entities. Or any longswords swinging, for that matter.

“I love the amateur nature of re-enactment, the obsessiveness, the earnestness and curiosity, and how these rituals and events keep something alive,” she said. “Whether it keeps something alive, from reclaiming history to making a new story, re-enactment is endlessly fascinating to me.

“As in Revisor, we are working with a voice-over recording of a text by Jonathan performed by eight actors which the dancers react to, which means they are basically re-enacting the voices of these actors.”

The Quest Fest board AGM and all of its personal drama is a level of the mundane that anyone who has ever been on a strata council or club committee can cringe over. But introducing the fantastical into that experience with dancers embodying everything from direct dialogue to inner conversations, moves the whole narrative of Assembly Hall into another realm. As the 80 minute performance moves forward, reality and imaginary inevitably criss-cross over one another.

Working with Young has opened up a world of combining theatre and dance in distinctly new ways for Pite, who freely admits that she has no interest in adding playwright to her skill set.

“I do love the process of working with Jonathan and words and seeing how language can affect our bodies and deliver a story,” she said “As a dance artist, being able to access language feels so potent and I love it. But it’s not my skill set and I haven’t put in those 10,000 hours as a playwright. What I love is the results of the collaborations and I certainly don’t want to be alone in making them if I can access others’ talents.”

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Anyone who has seen Pite’s work knows that her mastery of movement is something that could only come from putting in “over 40,000 hours” as a dancer and choreographer. Part of what makes her pieces stand apart from her contemporaries is the pairing of ferocity and microscopic nuance in motion. Adding in a script has the effect of narrating these sudden shifts in speed and stillness, in strength and flexibility for the audience to derive yet one more level of insight into the meaning.

Pite says her creations are determined by the size of the troupe and Kidd Pivot is where some of the best balance is achieved in her dance.

“Kidd Pivot are this incredible group of experts who have built such a deep understanding of one another that it’s a bit like a living laboratory,” she said. “Some of the other companies where I work regularly such as Nederlands Dans Theatre, is an equally incredible group of artists, but with a very different approach. Then scaling up to the much larger groups like the National Ballet of Canada or Paris Opera Ballet are these big, incredible creative machines which are amazing to play and work in. Each one has its own unique movement vocabulary, and I love it all.”

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Assembly Hall is sure to showcase aspects of all of Pite’s choreographic knowledge as she delves into the dynamics of how we come together to achieve both harmony and disruption. She is excited about the possibilities that the new piece presents to blur the edges of perception of events playing out in the show with triggers to more expansive and imagined settings.

Next up is a co-creation with English actor Simon McBurney, founder of the theatre company Complicité, which the two began in 2022. It’s a three-part triptych that will, once again, open up new avenues of expression for Pite’s unique visions.

sderdeyn@postmedia.com

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