Dance Victoria presents the theatrical event of the season by award-winning choreographer Crystal Pite and actor/writer Jonathon Young
Revisor
February 7 + 8, 2020, 7:30 pm, Royal Theatre
Two of Canada’s most ground-breaking artists have joined forces again to create an innovative contemporary dance theatre work called Revisor touring to the Royal Theatre on February 7 and 8, 2020.
By the creators of the international sensation, Betroffenheit, Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s Revisor takes inspiration from the 1836 play, The Inspector General, by Nikolai Gogol. Revisor satirizes the greed and pettiness of small-town citizens who mistake a low-level clerk for a high-ranking government inspector. Soon the community is wining, dining, and bribing him. Eight dancers embody the recorded dialogue of some of Canada’s finest actors (Jonathon Young, Ryan Beil, Nicola Lipman, Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe) in this warped pantomime/karaoke ballet with broad, exaggerated gestures.
The gestures are akin to movement ventriloquism. Choreographer Crystal Pite explains, “[The dancers] are lip-synching with their whole bodies. 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.” The show itself is continually “revised” throughout the performance. Halfway through, Jay Gower Taylor’s set disappears, Tom Visser’s lighting takes over and the dancers reappear in contemporary dress. They reprise the story you’ve just seen but abstracted into athletic sequences with pas de deux and solos showcasing Kidd Pivot’s technique and breadth of movement vocabulary.
Revisor was sold-out in Vancouver weeks before its premiere with Crystal Pite hailed as “an image-maker of rare distinction” (The Australian). Pite is the recipient of numerous awards including the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production (Betroffenheit, 2017) Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance (2015), four Dora Awards, and the National Dance Award for Best Modern Choreography (2016)…
Full Media Release available here.