Kidd Pivot, Assembly Hall Review ★★★★★

A group of modern day medieval re-enactors, the Benevolent and Protection Order, meet in their shabby community hall to consider their situation: membership declining, debts mounting. In short, after 93 years the end is in sight, unless something drastic can be done.

The eight group members sit in a semi-circle, one chair left tantalisingly empty.


Kidd Pivot, Assembly Hall © Michael Slobodian
At first their concerns are mundane: is the meeting quorate, what’s the precise order of the agenda, when to break for refreshments. And crucially, will they vote to wind up the group and abandon their Quest Fests. But this being a Pite/Young piece, reality doesn’t reign for long; abruptly the tales they exist to re-enact take over. The everyday dissolves into myth and subconscious projection. Darkness and comic absurdity alternate or co-exist.

The work, which premiered in Vancouver last October and has now had its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells, bears all the hallmarks of Pite and Young’s previous collaborations, starting with Bettrofenheit and then The Statement and Revisor. Speech is pre-recorded by voice actors and animated by the dancers on stage, with meticulous lip-synching and expressive body movement that illustrates or overstresses words.

Jay Gower Taylor’s set design is characteristically detailed: the hall’s little stage with its ratty blood-red curtain is surmounted by a basketball hoop, denoting its various community uses; the chairs are cheap and not designed for comfort; the exit signs over the doors look grimy.

Tom Visser’s lighting design is deeply atmospheric: the hall is harshly lit by naked lightbulbs, while the re-enactments are plunged into a shifting, hazy twilight. And the sound design by Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe mixes unidentifiable, at times threatening sounds and jumbled text with startling bursts of loud music, including Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1.

The eight terrific dancers of Pite’s Kidd Pivot company bring her exacting choreography, with its abrupt changes of pace and mood, to life acting and dancing with thrilling precision and exact comedic timing. One moment they’re dancing, the next they freeze into static tableaux, very much one of Pite’s favourite tropes.

However, while in their previous collaborations the overriding themes were clear and clearly treated – dark, maddening grief in Betroffenheit, blame-shifting bureaucracy in The Statement, arbitrary state power in Revisor – Assembly Hall suffers from what seems to be thematic overload.

It is, of course, about the human need for coming together, for community with its complicated group dynamics. It is also about the projection of subconscious fears, dreams and nightmares, about how the past infects the present; and in the person of the hapless nobody Dave, the all-too-common yearning to be somebody, ‘The Knight of No Name’ coming to save the day. His character brings a touch of pathos into the piece

Its lack of focus notwithstanding, Assembly Hall is an enjoyable piece, provided you’re prepared to go with the flow and abandon yourself to its own absurdist logic.