The work of very few living dance artists is described with such consistent awe as Crystal Pite’s. ‘Mind completely blown, yet again’, reports one breathless journalist. ‘Raw’, ‘vibrant’, ‘probing’, write others. Words appear almost to fail critics, whose reviews also come with a seeming sense of relief that dance is capable of producing something grown-up, intelligent and moving, and worth mulling over the next day.

In a way, this loss for words seems fitting when talking about Pite, someone whose output for Kidd Pivot (her Vancouver-based dance company) is often about the breakdown of systems of communication, and will make you wonder whether you’re watching a play or a dance. Kidd Pivot’s latest work, Assembly Hall (another collaboration with Jonathon Young, who writes and co-directs), leans more than ever into these idiosyncratic qualities. 

‘It’s tricky when you say “written by”, you sort of think he just wrote a script and handed it to me, and I took it and ran,’ says the Canadian choreographer about her collaboration with Young, who usually writes most of the scripts. ‘We participate in aspects of both the writing and directing. He has this incredible knowledge as an actor of how to listen while I usually attack it in a more physical sense. And he can talk more beautifully and eloquently about the backstory and language.’

Jay Gower Taylor’s efficient design for this work’s community hall setting gives a wonderful sense of grounding: a laminate floor, a basketball hoop, a stage in the background with red velvet curtains. ‘The community hall is a place where people go to weddings and to memorials, have their graduations and their dances, their first kiss, their first experience of being on a stage,’ says Pite. ‘And all these beautiful and important human thresholds and rites of passage take place in these spaces sometimes.’

We are here for the Annual General Meeting of the board of the Benevolent And Protective Order, an amateur mediaeval re-enactment association. The eight members are there to discuss an event they organise called Quest Fest, which is in crisis due to low attendance, soaring debt and endless upkeep. Through comically rigid observance of their procedural rules, the members keep delaying a vote on whether to dissolve the Order. ‘They’re actually quite lovely these structures that we’ve made to try to contain ourselves and to create fairness,’ adds Pite. You could apply this thinking to democracy itself, she adds, another organising principle meant to create fairness in unity: ‘I like the tension in that.’ 

The dialogue is all pre-recorded by voice actors, while the onstage dancers each play a different character as they lip-sync and embody that dialogue accompanied by physical amplifications which veer between realistic and athletically virtuosic. Watching Assembly Hall, you get the curious sensation of seeing a cartoon being animated before your eyes, hovering somewhere between the real and the unreal. Soon, a whooshing sound booms from offstage (created by sound designers Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe), cascading notes from Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto tumble into the space, and the action breaks into surreal re-enactments of mediaeval warfare, loops of movement and voice, and occasional interludes of dance. 

In these lyrical moments, narrative recedes to let dance create further layers of meaning. ‘As a choreographer, one of my big challenges is always to ask “why do this as a dance?”’ says Pite. ‘Dance is the most inefficient way to tell a complex story, so what is it about dance that can bring something to this that nothing else can?’

For Pite, once the narrative and text are clear, the trick is ‘to play with a kind of slippage or a distortion of where we can go with language, and what dance can do that words can’t, and to play with how the body can distort or change the meaning of things.’ The Arthurian legend of Perceval and The Fisher King also runs right through the work. ‘It’s an awkward, strange, dreamy tale and we loved the question of service that it comes with; the question of “did you ask why they suffered? Did you ask what you could do?”’

Assembly Hall doesn’t attempt to answer these questions in a straightforward way, instead creating layers of story and imagery that will leave the viewer free to formulate their own interpretation. Experiencing the show, you’ll be pleasantly engaged in working out associations and making sense of it; thinking about your own communities, even. Perhaps you’ll still be thinking about it the next morning, turning it over in your head like some multifaceted artefact that refuses to remain still. Or you may just let it wash over you as a uniquely kinetic and narrative experience. Either way, you’ll be left wanting more.

Assembly Hall, Festival Theatre, 22–24 August, 7.30pm.