Crystal Pite, one of the most celebrated choreographers working today and Kidd Pivot Artistic Director, reunites with acclaimed theatre artist and Electric Company Theatre Co-Founder Jonathan Young, to create Revisor, a wildly innovative dance/theatre hybrid that mixes classic farce, corruption, and the forces of radical change, on stage March 7-16, 2019, at the Bluma Appel Theatre.

Creators of the international sensation Betroffenheit (winner of 2017’s Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production) that played to sold out houses around the world, Pite and Young have once again created a work that is a masterful blending of text and dance.

“We could not be more excited to be welcoming back to our stage two of our country’s finest artists,” says Brendan Healy, Canadian Stage Artistic Director. “With Revisor, Young and Pite are bringing their wit, imagination and virtuosity to a set of themes that could not be more relevant to the political climate of today.”

In Revisor, 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. 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. Using larger-than-life characters, subversive satire and humour in a plot that reinvents theatrical devices with anarchic absurdity, Revisor explores politics, deceit, tyranny, greed, willful blindness and complicity.

“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.”

Revisor is on stage at the Bluma Appel Theatre from March 7-16, 2019. Performances run Thursdays at 8 PM, Fridays at 7 PM, Saturdays at 8 PM, and Sunday at 2 PM.

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Photo: Tiffany Tregarthen. © 2019Michael Slobodian.