Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young/Kidd Pivot in Assembly Hall

Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young/Kidd Pivot, Assembly Hall, Sadler’s Wells, March 23, 2024

The role of critics used to be, for better or worse, to pen a considered appreciation of a show that might guide the public as to its value. Some critics took that responsibility to heart, others to their head, with the result that some had the power to decide whether a show was worth seeing or not, which, according to the renown of the critic, would affect ticket sales. That critical role has effectively been taken over by the publicity department of the theatre, especially with dance performances limited to short runs, replacing the art of criticism with the act of selling. The pre-publicity machine gives the public an appreciation of what it will be seeing by extrapolating past successes into the present and underwrites the public’s future enjoyment with any number of five-star reviews. This has eviscerated the national press of a critical dance voice.

At the theatre there is the glossy programme with more positive endorsement for the show. Then at the end of the performance come the inevitable ovations. It all adds up to a spectacular evening that closes the virtuous circle of the theatre’s pre-publicity. Either you agree with the publicity, or you are disappointed because you evidently didn’t ‘get it’. This is endemic of the commercialisation of culture, or perhaps more precisely of cultural commerce.

A case in point is Assembly Hall, a new collaboration between Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young with Pite’s company, Kidd Pivot, presented at and co-produced by Sadler’s Wells, where Pite is an Associate Artist. Recommended by the ‘success’ of their previous collaborations, Assembly Hall was sold out. Pite, a brilliant choreographer (my value judgement) in her own right, has been associated with theatre maker Young in previous productions (Betroffenheit, The Statement, Revisor). I only know Young’s work through these collaborations but have seen Pite’s work independently of Young. Their chemistry has produced a Pite variant that thrives on the intersection of speech and movement. Young’s side of the equation is the writing and adapting of text, but as a theatre-maker — he is the founder of Electric Company Theatre in Vancouver — he is also keen to explore the movement-to-speech and speech-to-movement relationship. There is thus a natural meeting of creative focus in their work that starts at a high level of affinity and excitement but seems to dissolve at the point where the writing takes a detour into the hinterland of the surreal before some sort of recapitulation and resolution. If the level of affinity and excitement lasts for the initial 30 minutes of the work’s exposition, in which the level of dance and recorded speech artistry is highly charged, we are left for the next hour to experience Jay Gower Taylor’s sets, Tom Visser’s lighting, Nancy Bryant’s costumes and Owen Belton’s musical sleight of hand. All are brilliantly inventive, but instead of enhancing what happens on stage, they are what happens on stage, which reduces their contribution at this point in the production to theatrical effect. Given that the subject of Assembly Hall is the AGM of a financially precarious benevolent and protective order of mediaeval re-enacters with props and costumes to hand, the scope of visual imagination runs wild. And while this is going on, Pite contrives with uncanny regularity a series of substantial solos for each of the dancers that have little to do with their initial characters or roles, and everything to do with their phenomenal ability as dancers. That Revisor followed a similar path indicates a certain structural fatigue in the Pite/Young alloy. Where it worked admirably was in their very first collaboration, the harrowing Betroffenheit in 2015, and in the tightly woven treatment of The Statement, for Nederlands Dans Theater the following year.

Where Pite excels is in her choreographic sensibility, her ability to match physical, emotional and spiritual sensation with music to create a single experience that arises from that transformation. In matching movement to the speech in Assembly Hall, it is the procedural nature of the words that seems to reduce the emotional and spiritual realms into which she can extend her choreographic sensibility. If it is a constraint for the choreographer it is not for the theatre maker, whose craft consists in the manipulation of words to dialectic or poetic effect. Pite and Young have proved their collaboration can work, but both Revisor and Assembly Hall leave one with the suspicion it needs to be reeled in or, like the AGM of the benevolent and protective order of mediaeval re-enactors, risk foundering on a point of order.

Crystal Pite, Jonathon Young, Kidd Pivot in Revisor at Sadler’s Wells

Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young with Kidd Pivot in Revisor at Sadler’s Wells, March 5

Choreographer Crystal Pite and playwright Jonathan Young have collaborated previously on two productions, Betroffenheit for Pite’s company, Kidd Pivot, and The Statement for Nederlands Dance Theatre. Although each work is quite independent of the other in terms of emotional heft, they both use the technique of lip-synching to recorded voices as a choreographic tool. In The Statement, the relationship between language and choreography is the basis of the entire work, taking Young’s one-act play about corporate disinformation to expressive heights, while Betroffenheit combines choreography and text in a haunting expression of trauma. Their latest collaboration for Kidd Pivot, Revisor, presented recently at Sadler’s Wells, pushes the boundaries of text and its physical embodiment further than both The Statement and Betroffenheit, with mixed results. 

What Young has proposed is his adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (Revizor in Russian), a farce written in 1836 on the theme of government corruption in a small provincial town. Young’s production uses the recorded voices of nine actors directed by Meg Roe with original music and sound design by Owen Belton and Alessandro Juliani. By making a pun on the Russian title, Young changes the function of the Revizor to a Revisor of government documents; it has no bearing on the outcome of the farce but the word play informs the adaptation. After the curtain rises to an ominous rumbling of thunder, we hear the voice of a narrator (Roe) revising her description of the scene a couple of times before she’s happy with it. We’re in the office of the Director of the Complex (Doug Letheren) who has called in his cronies to discuss the arrival of a revisor (Tiffany Tregarthen) who they mistakenly believe has been sent by head office to report on their incompetent practices. The clarity of Jay Gower Taylor’s minimal period set, Nancy Bryant’s lush costumes and Tom Visser’s lighting engage with that of Pite’s gestural response to the voices. The ensuing scene of heated discussion sets in motion a thrill of choreography-as-farce as we take in Pite’s transmutation of language into gesture and the imagery she extracts from every nuance of the script. The dancers embody their characters through total corporal articulation and lip synchronisation to a degree of verisimilitude where we see the voices and hear the gestures. Jermaine Spivey’s physical translation of Juliani’s speech-impaired Postmaster Wieland’s dialogue keeps the audience in gales of laughter and on the edge of their seats in anticipation of its continuation, while Ella Rothschild as Minister Desouza fleetingly combines imagery of the Russian orthodox church and classical ballet in a passing phrase about religion and culture. 

The sheer energy of creative investment in this opening scene, so intricately woven and detailed, is remarkable. In the subsequent dialogue with the revisor and his assistant (David Raymond), however, and in the further convolutions of the plot, Pite’s transmutation of language plays second fiddle to Young’s adaptation of the script, which now takes us on a digression through a conceptual landscape — what Young calls a deconstruction of a farce. The dancers are in rehearsal clothes, and the dialogue is replaced by the narrator’s ‘report’ on the action using stage directions, looped vocal phrases and fragments of recorded text. It is difficult to tell if this ‘report’ demands something less precise of Pite’s choreography, or if her choreographic ingenuity loses traction in the treatment of dialogue. What were the dancers’ individual textual-corporal characterisations gradually evolve into danced solos and duets — even sections of unison choreography — that change Pite’s focus away from the text into movement. Just when Young’s deconstruction seems in danger of completely losing the plot, the opening scene and its characters return for the play’s resolution. Once again the dancers are in their costumes and their dialogue becomes lip-synched action. But by now the effect has waned and a sense of déjà vu sets in. What Pite and Young had begun with such promise just an hour before appears to be already overused, or perhaps that long, conceptual, self-reflexive middle section has numbed our choreographic interest and drained the dramatic action of its momentum. In an intense collaboration like this, if one partner pulls too much in one direction the other’s contribution suffers. Betroffenheit and The Statement held the balance like a high-wire act between theatre and choreography, each on their own terms; Revisor is ultimately disappointing because that balance is not maintained throughout the work, and there is nothing the extraordinary cast can do to save it. 

The Royal Ballet, works by Dawson, Wheeldon and Pite

The Royal Ballet, Triple Bill, Royal Opera House, March 23

Kristen McNally and artists of the Royal Ballet in Flight Pattern (photo: Johan Persson)

This is a program of repertoire works by former Royal Ballet dancers, David Dawson and Christopher Wheeldon, wrapped around a new commission by Crystal Pite, the first female choreographer to perform her work on the main stage in a long, long, time. Despite this landmark achievement, Pite is not a classical choreographer, nor are her works in the classical idiom. Borrowing a leaf from Tamara Rojo’s astute book, the Royal Ballet has brought in a lauded contemporary name on a contemporary theme at an appropriate moment. It is also borrowing from the book of Sadler’s Wells associate artists. Much as I love Pite’s work, Flight Pattern blends uneasily with both the accompanying repertoire and the surroundings. It’s a beautifully fraught work (beautiful and fraught) about the fate of migrants, not a subject that lends itself naturally to the velvet and gilded glamour of the Royal Opera House. It’s an oddly imbalanced program, too, because Flight Pattern is not a natural closer, and neither Dawson’s nor Wheeldon’s work prepares for it in any way; it comes out of nowhere. It is nevertheless a sublime conception, both scenically and choreographically, for a mass of 36 dancers with the suggestion of a lead migrant couple (an incongruous notion) of Kristen McNally and Marcelino Sambé. Anyone who saw Pite’s monumental Polaris on the Sadler’s Wells stage for the See The Music Hear The Dance program just over two years ago will remember her powerful massed forms of 64 dancers responding to Thomas Adès’ orchestral storm of the same name. Flight Pattern is more poetic and less menacing, influenced by the eerie refinement of the first movement of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, but its subject is harrowing. The work visualises the endless lines of stooped humanity on a desperate trek to an unknown future but Jay Gower Taylor’s set, Thomas Visser’s lighting and Nancy Bryant’s costumes bestow epic proportions on the entire journey. The movements of the dancers are muted and repressed throughout the work, hemmed in by heavy overcoats and by the giant partitions of the set that close inexorably on them until only a gently rocking McNally and a seething Sambé remain isolated. It is a moment that almost spits with rage but Sambé at this crucial point allows his pyrotechnical wizardry to infiltrate his character, dissipating Pite’s entire psychological build-up.

There’s plenty of legitimate technical display on the rest of the program, however, and the men get a thorough workout in Dawson’s first work for the Royal Ballet, The Human Seasons, to a commissioned score by Greg Haines. You know you’re at the Royal Ballet with this level of technical skill, though the loud landings (and there are many of them) of the men in particular exhibit some weakness in execution. The women are on display too, especially when upright; they are less so when being dragged unceremoniously along the ground.

Seeing The Human Seasons (2013) side by side with Wheeldon’s After The Rain (2005) one can’t help seeing similarities; both are in the neo-classical style with stripped down costumes, and there are one or two quotes by Dawson of Wheeldon’s lifts and slides. Where the two works differ is in the use of space as part of choreographic form. For all its intense movement, its entrances and exits, and its asymmetrical groupings, The Human Seasons, unlike Keats’ sonnet that inspired it, is constantly crying out for some kind of form to hold them all together. This is amplified by a lackadaisical deportment in the men in between partnering duties or bravura steps; they just amble over to the next sequence, killing the dynamics. Haines’ score can’t hold the work together either, so with all these holes Dawson’s form fails to gel, leaking out in all directions over the course of the work’s 35 minutes.

Scored for three couples, the first section of After The Rain is set to the first (Ludus) movement of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa; as soon as it begins, Wheeldon’s spatial stagecraft is apparent. The form is held in place by the harmony of the music allied with the harmony of the choreography, pumpkin rolls and all. The second movement, to Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, is joined to the first but not closely related. It is often performed as a separate duet and its renown makes it appear as the feature film we’ve been waiting for. Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares make it a powerful meditation on the beauty of strength and the strength of beauty, where each gesture is thought through and flows seamlessly to its natural resolution. But while the consummate elegance of this movement is framed on one side, the absence of a final, contrasting movement leaves it floating in splendid isolation; it should either be set free for good or the frame completed.