Revisor

As I sit in Her Majesty’s Theatre there is an excited buzz anticipating the extraordinary. What a difference a year makes, very few masks and very happy faces.

We aren’t disappointed. Revisor, a work by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and playwright Jonathan Young, known collectively, along with their company of eight dancers, as Kidd Pivot is an amazing piece of theatre!

Like Canadian company Kidd Pivot’s masterpiece Betroffenheit (seen at the Perth and Adelaide festivals in 2017), Revisor combines Crystal Pite’s movement and Jonathan Young’s text, lip synced by the dancers or heard in voiceover, resulting in an exhilarating, melodramatic production.

The text is borrowed from Revizor, aka The Inspector General, the work of Russian playwright Gogol, which premiered in St. Petersburg in 1836.

Pite and Young share their directors’ vision for the work in that the planning for performance we normally don’t see -  playscript, stage directions, deportment, gesture, mime, dance, plié and pause, gait and gavotte are seamlessly integrated into a new 90-minute performance piece. The eight dancers make their multiple entries and exits with razor sharp timing,  using their dance technique to amplify the text.

Unlike conventional dance, these dancers perform dialogue as well as dance. They take lip synching to a new level . The result is amazing, not for the synching itself, but for its exactness: every syllable and stress drives every gesture and step. Choreographically, it’s incredibly clever, as the dance reinforces the dialogue  on an almost blank stage with few set pieces, some of which double between scenes.

The dance-acting adopts the genre of classical melodrama, while keeping Gogol’s themes of deception, bureaucracy, inept rulers, infiltration and political scheming. The viewer inexperienced with this genre could find this overplaying, but it serves to highlight the corruptness of the officials.

Then, when the ‘play’ is about to be resolved, the music changes, the stage is cleared of its set, and the performers – now in plain dance clothes, replay the first act to a voiceover that is more choreographic than dramatic: it describes moves and figures, gives stage instructions and enumerates scenes.

The droning voiceover, repeating a choreographer’s musings about choreography, is grating, as is the recitation of dance notations (“Section 1 dash 3, Figure 3 meets Figure 9”), but then it is meant to be. It forces us to examine the text further with new eyes and make decisions.

The mirth of the first section largely disappears and a darker mood descends. Streaks of lightning flash across the back of the stage and dance becomes the focus.

A creature in a fancy dress costume with antlers from the first half becomes a strange mythical creature with antlers as hands. Emotions that were hidden in the first half surface and one by one the characters are ‘torn apart’. Farce becomes tragedy.

We are left with the disturbing question - which act is the real act and which is the revised act? What is truth and what is fiction?

When the farce does return, its meaning has new depth and has been ‘revised’ and life can never be the same.

Revisor is an exciting take on dance meets drama that entertains, but leaves you with much to consider!

Barry Hill OAM

Photographer: Andrew Beveridge