Kidd Pivot’s Satirical New Work, ‘Revisor’, Blends Farce with Politics

DanceHouse is thrilled to present the world premiere of Kidd Pivot’s Revisor, February 20–23, 2019 at 8pm at the Vancouver Playhouse (now sold out). In their third collaboration, Kidd Pivot Artistic Director Crystal Pite and Electric Company Theatre Co-Founder Jonathon Young join forces to create a wildly innovative dance/theatre hybrid, mixing classic farce and the forces of radical change to craft a fizzing concoction that confounds expectations and inverts the official order. The bold physicality of Pite’s choreography for eight dancers embodies the eviscerating wit of Young’s script, recorded by some of Canada’s finest actors.

“Following the overwhelming international success of 2015’s Betroffenheit, including 2017’s Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production, we are delighted that Pite and Young are collaborating once again. Not only that, we have the great fortune to present Kidd Pivot’s first Vancouver world premiere since 2006’s Lost Action,” says Jim Smith, Artistic and Executive Director of DanceHouse. “This creative duo are each masters of their craft: Pite with the language of the body and Young with the spoken word, making their creative partnership incredibly potent. In Revisor, 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 title of the new 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). 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.

“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.”

Now an internationally renowned choreographer, Pite is a former company member of Ballet BC and William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt. Since her choreographic debut with Ballet BC in 1990, she has created more than 50 works for companies such as The Paris Opera Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theater I, Cullberg Ballet, Ballett Frankfurt, The National Ballet of Canada, Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal (Resident Choreographer, 2001-2004), Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, and Ballet BC. She has also collaborated with Electric Company Theatre and Robert Lepage. The recipient of numerous awards for artistic excellence, including the 2017 Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production and, most recently, the 2018 Grand Prix de la danse de Montreal (PDM), Pite is an Associate Choreographer of Nederlands Dans Theater, Associate Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre, and Associate Artist at Sadler’s Wells, London.

An admired veteran of stage and screen, Young is among Canada’s most acclaimed theatre artists. He has collaborated on more than 20 original productions with Electric Company Theatre, of which he is co-founder, including Tear the Curtain! (a film/theatre hybrid for Arts Club Theatre and Canadian Stage), No Exit (a re-working of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play performed in San Francisco at the American Conservatory Theatre), and Studies in Motion (Vancouver Playhouse, Edmonton Citadel, Theatre Calgary, Canadian Stage). Young was the recipient of the UK National Dance Award for his performance in Betroffenheit, as well as several Jessie Richardson Awards for acting and writing.

Kidd Pivot’s phenomenal dancers – Doug Letheren, Rena Narumi, Matthew Peacock, David Raymond, Ella Rothschild, Cindy Salgado, Renée Sigouin, Jermaine Spivey, and Tiffany Tregarthen – will lend their considerable talents to Revisor, coupled with the production team behind many of the company’s works: composition and sound design by Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani, and Meg Roe; set design by Jay Gower Taylor; lighting design by Tom Visser; and costume design by Nancy Bryant.

Following the world premiere in Vancouver, Revisor will tour to Ottawa (Feb 28–March 2), Toronto (March 7–10 & 13–16), Chapel Hill, North Carolina (March 21–22), and Montreal (April 3–6).

Revisor is co-produced by Sadler’s Wells (London, UK), Théâtre de la Ville (Paris, France), Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Banff, Canada), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (North Carolina, US), The CanDance Network Creation Fund, Dance Victoria, (Victoria, Canada), Canadian Stage (Toronto, Canada), National Arts Centre (Ottawa, Canada), DanceHouse (Vancouver, Canada), Danse Danse (Montreal, Canada), and Seattle Theatre Group (Seattle, US).

Revisor is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter Program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.

Developed with support from the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund.

Kidd Pivot benefits from the support of BNP Paribas Foundation for the development of its projects.

Kidd Pivot gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia, British Columbia Arts Council, the City of Vancouver, and countless individual and business supporters.

DanceHouse gratefully acknowledges the support of The Government of Canada, The Canada Council for the Arts, The Province of British Columbia, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, and Vancouver Civic Theatres.