DanceHouse presents a return engagement of Kidd Pivot’s internationally-acclaimed dance/theatre hybrid Revisor, at the Vancouver Playhouse, on stage March 30 to April 2.
Revisor is choreographed and directed by Kidd Pivot Artistic Director Crystal Pite, recently recognized with a 2022 Governor General Performing Arts Award, for her outstanding body of work and enduring contribution to the performing arts in Canada, and written by Electric Company Theatre Co-Founder and playwright Jonathon Young. Nominated for Best New Dance Production from London’s prestigious Olivier Awards, Revisor is a “nightmarish, beautiful, mind-blowing journey” (Telegraph) that takes inspiration from Nikolai Gogol’s scabrous pantomime of power and politics. A wildly imaginative work of artistic and intellectual heft, Revisor is a tale of petty bureaucracy, mistaken identity, and mixed motives that teeters between farce, melodrama and spoof. The inventive articulation of Pite’s choreography for eight dancers embodies the eviscerating wit of Young’s script, recorded by some of Canada’s finest actors.
“DanceHouse is thrilled to welcome back Revisor – the riveting work by audience favourites and award-winning Betroffenheit creators Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young,” says Jim Smith, Artistic and Executive Director of DanceHouse. “At its world premiere in 2019 in Vancouver, Revisor enjoyed overwhelming success and a sold-out run. This presentation is particularly significant as it marks the official relaunch of Kidd Pivot’s international tour, cut short in the spring of 2020 when the world shut down.”
The title of the work is inspired by an article Young read years ago about Russian theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1926 non-realist production of Nikolai Gogol’s farce, Revizor (known in English as The Government Inspector published in 1836). Pite and Young’s central character is a revisor – someone who is responsible for the revision of legal texts – in a plot that reinvents theatrical devices with anarchic absurdity.
Each masters of their craft – Pite with the language of the body and Young with the spoken word – the co-creators use larger-than-life characters, subversive satirical tropes, and absurdist humour to tease out perceptive truths about politics, corruption, and our shared human foibles. The end result is a funhouse mirror, a horror show, a comedy that is no longer funny. More than just an excoriating takedown of human venality, the 90-minute work pulls apart the very foundations of the creative impulse, itself a form of obsessive control. As the architecture of farce falls away, what emerges is the raw truth of the body.
“The process with Revisor is a kind of feedback loop, similar to working with original music. Sometimes the text acts as a way of underscoring the physical: it is both musical and meaningful,” explains Pite. “Similarly to a musical score, the choreography can move analogously with the rhythm of the text and reflect its message, or it can be at odds with it, creating tension between what we’re hearing and what we’re seeing.”
DanceHouse presents Kidd Pivot’s Revisor from March 30 to April 2, 2022 at Vancouver Playhouse. Tickets and details available at dancehouse.ca