Can you get too much of a good thing? That’s what I found myself thinking during and after this UK premiere of Assembly Hall co-directed by Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young; choreographed by the former and written by the latter. It’s their fourth theatrical collaboration following Betroffenheit (2015) and Revisor (2019) for Pite’s own company, Kidd Pivot (in association with Young’s Electric Company Theatre) and The Statement (2016) for Nederlands Dans Theater, which was taken into The Royal Ballet’s repertoire in 2021. Those earlier works deservedly garnered a slew of awards, including Olivier’s for both Betroffenheit and Revisor.
Does Assembly Hall continue their collective innovations or is it just more of the same? Ironically, the central theme of Assembly Hall concerns a “for-and-against committee” debate (more detail to follow) and I found myself having a similar internal discourse about the innovative qualities of the piece itself. On the one hand, Assembly Hall has a remarkable sense of theatre and what imagination must it take to create a work of dance theatre shaped around a committee meeting (of a medieval re-enactment society to boot)! On the other, the activity seemed stylistically very similar to those earlier works: the verbal sparring amongst the committee members seemed particularly to echo the wrangling around the table in the political intrigue of The Statement.
Those prior works owed much of their remarkable success to a strong – and relatively unique – stylistic sameness, with each role performed by a dancer and a voice actor, the former lip-syncing to loud recorded dialogue while accentuating the words they appeared to speak with exaggerated descriptive movement. It’s a formula that has been proven to work so I got the sense of: if it’s not broke, let’s not fix it!
The Assembly Hall of the title is a down-at-heel community centre where the eight committee members of the “Benevolent and Protective Order” – a similarly down-at-heel society of medieval re-enactors – have convened for what might be their final meeting where following incongruous reports on their ongoing outreach activities and “further and unfinished business” comes the crucial vote on the Order’s dissolution (after almost a century in being).
A place of assembly is also the setting for Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof and Michael Keegan-Dolan’s MAM and this Assembly Hall shares some key features, such as a recessed stage, hard plastic chairs, and refreshments, as well as a basketball hoop that is probably twice the regulation height (a ladder would be needed to achieve a slam dunk)! But woe betide any committee member who steps out of line; coffee can only be taken at the appointed time and every statement needs a seconder!
The work opens with the various members arriving for the meeting although one (Dave) seems to have slept in the hall and the first movement sequence has his fellow committee members attempting to get Dave off the floor and his limbs functioning correctly. It turns out that Dave (a performance of dumbstruck hyper flexibility by Gregory Lau) is the supernumerary, a committee member with no purpose other than to ensure a quorum. At the other end of the hierarchy, Shaun is the ambiguous chair (performed by Doug Letheren and voiced by Young in his inimitable style) and Rakeem Hardy plays the laid-back Secretary (Boyd), voiced by Alessandro Juliani.
Albeit still punctuated by pathos, there is more ongoing humour in Assembly Hall than in its predecessor productions (although they all had their riotous moments) with the early parody of a (very) formal board meeting: approving minutes, apologies for absence, motions, points of order and so on. Tensions are heightened since the committee is split down the middle on the issue of dissolving the Order and previous attempts to kill it have been narrowly averted. I found myself thinking about the flaring tempers during that chaotic Zoom meeting of Handforth Parish Council that brought a certain Jackie Weaver five minutes’ of national fame during the lockdown.
The meeting is first interrupted by a re-enactment rehearsal and then later it morphs into costumed scenes of knightly combat complete with a maiden in distress (Ella Rothschild) whereupon our downtrodden Dave becomes the knight in (spectacularly) shining armour! In both scenarios, Dave gets run through (in typical pantomiming fashion the weapon goes through the gap between arm and torso, where it is held tight by the victim)! In typical Pite/Young fashion these scenes of medieval re-enactment provide for spectacular imagery in group tableau and the obviously bendy, plastic broadswords gave a nod to the Order’s amateurism.
Pite’s choreography ranges from descriptive theatrical movement direction to a pair of strong duets. The quality of performance was, as we have come to expect with work by the Pite/Young combo, outstanding both in terms of movement and voiced text. If you have never seen a work by Pite and Young, this will seem exceptional but if you are familiar with their work then it will probably seem… familiar!
