Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young make a great team, he the words, she the choreography, in another dance theatre piece with her singular movement signature. Throw in physical comedy, Tourette’s syndrome style ‘involuntary’ exaggerated gesticulation to enhance the lip-synced text (or is it the other way round?). Add the subject matter, amateur medieval re-enactors, and what do you get?
Monty Python, naturally, springs to mind: The Holy Grail, The Ministry of Silly Walks… as do Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Max Wall, and more. But I’m repeating myself—I’ve compared Pite’s works to Python before. If not in The Tempest Replica, or Revisor, or in Betroffenheit, then definitely in The Statement… Pite’s repetitions, though, are finessed to look like an ongoing rehearsal.
There’s more than meets the eye in this ninety-minute, no-interval Assembly Hall satire. Workshopped for over a year, it evolved, the programme tells us, down many routes and detours. The end result is an argumentative group of eight, who constitute the members of this ‘Quest Fest’, at a board of directors AGM, discussing the group’s dissolution. And going off on personal tangents (internal monologues—“I could just leave”) and fantasies.
A shabby community hall with two double door exits, a raised small stage behind red curtains, a basketball net and a semicircle of chairs for nine people—there are only eight of them. Already we have mystery. And there’s a body lying on the floor. Is he dead, has he slept there all night? This is Dave. Glenda (I think) finds him and tries to put his recalcitrant body back together again.
Is she in love with him—we shall see in their re-enactment of a valiant knight saving a maiden in white. Or is she a witch? Interpretation and metaphor, parable and folk tales—why do people join societies—for company, for education, for validation? There is an electric current running between them all. Silent duets are lovely interludes amidst the ensemble work.
Swords flash, a raven lands on a dead man, nightmares and mystical experiences, alter egos and rambling tableau after tableau, though it’s not exactly the Bayeux tapestry. The saviour comes but they kill him, naturally—that’s the human condition. Or am I imaging things? Fantasy invades reality.
Why re-enact tales of old in our modern age—escapism or does it reflect our hollow times, are we in need of knights to ride to the rescue? Tableaux of battles and chivalry intermingle with everyday concerns. The final tableau—all of them holding bits and pieces of shining armour to constitute the figure itself—suggests wishful thinking.
Magical thinking. There are other ‘divine’ creations—a man in high crown and loincloth, a winged female, the sudden disappearance of the exit signs, misty smoke… and a faulty slideshow—but most of all Assembly Hall does not take itself too seriously. Comedy makes the serious intent slip down easily. It is very funny.
The body language is street-sharp—popping and locking, sort of, capoeira, hyperbolic hand gestures, puppets off the string. Or rather on Pite’s strings. We English don't go in for demonstrative gestures when we speak, but many nationalities do—body, hands, arms, head, eyes often animate speech and emotion. Pite has taken them one stage further. Gestures amplify simple words and phrases—“what is that?” You can see and hear the beat.
Add Owen Belton’s dramatic sound design with Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe (additional music by Tchaikovsky), Jay Gower Taylor’s witty stage design, Tom Visser’s moody cinematic fish-eye lighting design and Cybèle Young’s video design—and it really does take a village to raise this child.
The cast, Brandon Alley, Livona Ellis, Rakeem Hardy, Gregory Lau (brilliant as Dave and the nameless, initially reluctant, gauche knight), Doug Letheren (I remember from Revisor), Rena Narumi, Ella Rothschild and Renée Sigouin deserve a mention as fabulous interpreters. Voices are Ryan Beil, Marci T House, Alessandro Juliani, Meg Roe, Gabrielle Rose, Amanda Sum, Vincent Tong and Jonathon Young.
They will be at the Edinburgh Festival 22–24 August this summer.