Assembly Hall
Festival Theatre, 22/8/2024
Kidd Pivot company, Crystal Pite, choreographer, Jonathon Young, author
The backdrop for this uniquely enhanced piece of modern ballet depicts a small stage (within-our-stage), set into one end of a fading community hall. On either side are swing doors, leading left to backstage, and right, to the outside world. Perhaps we are to expect themes of shifting realities? The hall looks to have been decorated pre-war, in faux Regency fashion. Above hangs a sweetly incongruous basket-ball net.
Similarly fading is the membership of the local historical re-enactment society, whose committee enter for their AGM, squabbling over procedural trivia and agonising over the elephant-in-the-room: “business unfinished”. This is carried over, one suspects, from one year to the indecisive next: should they keep going, or should they dissolve? They are divided.
‘Assembly Room’ is set to Owen Belton’s beautifully orchestrated soundtrack of rumblings, whispers, and – Kidd Pivot’s hallmark – recorded dialogue. The eight dancers lip-sync, hand-sync and whole-body-sync to Jonathon Young’s witty dialogue, elegantly amplifying their characters’ moods, texts and subtexts. Like animated cartoon figures they truly embody their message. It is a delight to see.
Meanwhile for our committee, surely there is time to fit in a bit of (final?) cosplay? As the characters put their everyday world on pause to immerse themselves in the mediaeval lore and primal legend of their re-enactments, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 amplifies their social body-language into exquisite dance. There are frenetic solos, pas de deux where bodies morph from two people into one multilimbed creature and back again. Lovers descend one upon the other; whether to embrace or devour is ambiguous. There is the king in his tatterdemalion crown and loincloth, to be sacrificed after one year of glorious reign. The roles our committee crave are heroic, tragic, Romantic. Viewed through the comedic lens of this piece, our committee remain – drama queens. Through a more thoughtful lens, they reveal their yearnings and isolation.
Partner to the dancers is Tom Visser’s dynamic lighting. Like a living thing, it shifts between darkened community hall with a world glowing beyond the stage, then back again, alternating fore and aft like a Magic Eye print. Then blackout, then silhouettes, then framed in the small stage, a creeping chiaroscuro of armoured figures, frozen like a Roman frieze or a heroic painting by Delacroix. The soundscape brings in growls, groans, boulders rolling under seething seas, sharpening steel, and battle noise swelling to battle music.
A lot of apparent dying takes place, and resurrection, and is that the actor, the player or the historical character? Blurring between realities and make-believe has become a tiresomely common theme these days, but here it is leavened by comedy and exceptionally beautifully expressed. And framing it all within the curious leisure pursuit of historical re-enactment is a touch of genius.
Every strand of ‘Assembly Hall’ is quality: direction, execution, choreography, lighting, sound, set and dialogue. It feels profoundly organic, that those collaborators were always alert, tweaking and shifting to accommodate and enrich each other’s input, until the emergence of this strongly woven tale.