Creators of performance works have long been exploring the relationship between movement and text. In the 19th century, Richard Wagner’s idea of gesamtkunstwerk–the “total work of art”–strove to amalgamate various art forms into a coherent whole on stage. Many contemporary performance works, although produced in a very different time period and context, do not stray too far from that premise in a basic sense–incorporating multiple art forms and blurring the lines between them. More often than not, a work that one encounters today may not fit neatly into narrowly-defined categories such as “dance,” “theatre” or “music,” but may straddle more than one and challenge such boundaries.   

As part of Esplanade’s upcoming da:ns focus – Body Language series, audiences can look forward to the Asian premiere of Revisor, performed by Canadian company Kidd Pivot, and created by long-time collaborators Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young. Prior to Revisor, Pite and Young had collaborated on Betroffenheit (2015) and The Statement (2016); the latter was also presented at Esplanade’s da:ns festival in 2018. What is common in all three of these collaborations is the creators’ evident interest in working with movement and text. In this article, we will look more closely at the relationship between movement and text in The Statement and Revisor, illuminated by Jonathon Young’s own thoughts that he kindly shared through an email interview.

Balancing movement and sound

On one level, text, when used in “dance” performances, can be understood simply as part of the accompanying sound. The use of the word “sound” rather than “music” here is deliberate–contemporary dance choreographers draw on an extremely wide range of possibilities, not just what is conventionally understood as music accompaniment, but also things like ambient sound, sounds created by everyday objects, rhythmic sounds created by the performers themselves through body movements like clapping, vocalisations and speech, recorded text and even silence. 

Both The Statement and Revisor open with a section where physical movements are performed in time to a recorded text carrying a strong narrative meaning. In the case of The Statement, the narrative describes a boardroom drama, while Revisor is based on an 1836 play, The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol. The respective works then progress into more abstract sections, where the performers move to a soundscape that includes recorded text segments consisting of repeated and sometimes jumbled words and phrases, recognisable from earlier in the respective works. This can be seen in the following excerpts:

During the process of creating a choreographic work, the relationship between movements and the various elements of the soundscape is often a back-and-forth one. In the case of his collaborations with Pite, Young describes: 

This fluidity and overlapping of roles translates into the work that we see on stage, in which the elements meld together into a smooth whole. 

Not quite ‘dance-theatre’

When we think of works over the last few decades of dance history that incorporate the use of text, Pina Bausch is often one of the first few artists who come to mind. For example, Bausch’s Nelken (1982) was considered radical for a movement work at the time, breaking the fourth wall with performers directly addressing the audience. Bausch has thus become inextricably linked with Tanztheater, or “dance-theatre,” a German movement in the 1980s. It is quite telling that the term is a conjoining of the categories “dance” and “theatre.” Tanztheater itself actually goes beyond the simple combining of genres, but the term “dance-theatre” as used in English today seems to be applied to almost every performance piece that we have difficulty categorising as one or the other. 

The term “dance-theatre” in a simplistic sense would, however, seem inadequate to describe Young and Pite’s work, in which the relationship between movement and text is complex and goes beyond one simply being an accompaniment for the other. Young explains: 

Humour and cruelty

With Revisor, the creators explore the genre of farce, and how its exaggerated movements can be comical and yet shed light on serious topics at the same time. “We were interested in how this heightened brand of comedy utilizes extreme physicality, caricature and cruelty,” Young says. The themes of corruption and cruelty of those in power in Gogol’s original play continue to resonate today, and in Revisor, are heightened by the extreme movements of the performers’ bodies accompanying the text in perfect time. 

Young explains, “We saw this heightened style as a kind of oppressive regime; we imagined ‘Farce’ as being the official mode of communication that was untenable and absurd, forcing bodies to perform in a certain way.” Here farce is not simply a genre that the creators happened to work with; it is a physical manifestation of the oppression that the characters are experiencing. The full meaning of the work thus comes through not just in the meaning of the text heard by the audience, but simultaneously through the visually arresting experience of watching the performers’ movements.

The narrative of The Statement describes a boardroom scene likely familiar to many audiences, in which executives in suits discuss a mounting faraway crisis and the “statement” that they need to produce to explain their role in it:

In both works, the opening narrative section, besides being gripping and entertaining, also sets up the context for the later parts of the works in which the movement then seems to become more dominant. Although “more abstract, harder to define, more fluid and fleeting,” as Young remarks with respect to Revisor, this second part of the work feels like a distilled essence of the background that had been set up earlier, where the work’s ideas intensify both literally and metaphorically through the performers’ movements.

Telling stories

Ultimately, most artists create work because they have something that they want to express–they have stories to tell. This is something that Pite herself discusses in an interview with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity: “I’m interested in humans, and I’m interested in emotion, and I’m interested in connecting to other humans in the work that I do.” In order to tell those stories of the human condition and human experience, artists are free to choose the tools that they want to use. In the same interview, Pite mentions that dance alone may not be the most efficient tool to tell a story, particularly a complex story, and that is where other tools like text come in. However, dance is efficient in bringing out a visceral response when dealing with complex emotions. 

Young looks at it in a similar way: “... we’re conscious of the ‘tyranny of narrative’ and the expressive power of abstract or dreamlike physical images and configurations. This tension is the driving force behind both Revisor and Betroffenheit. I would also argue that it’s the central tension and driving force within every human mind. Could the text of Revisor or Betroffenheit stand on its own, and still mean something without any movement whatsoever? Yes. Can one sit alone at home or in a library and read the libretto of an opera, or a screenplay, or a script and still understand it without hearing the music, or seeing the film, or watching the play? Yes. Would that person be missing anything without live performers inhabiting, expanding, subverting, articulating, elevating and breathing life into that text?  As the writer of Betroffenheit, Revisor and The Statement, I can say with confidence that without the choreography no one would be paying much attention to any of these texts.” 

Indeed, it is hard to disagree with Young. For audiences planning to watch Revisor, this insight hopefully illuminates the work a little more. In our increasingly disembodied lives dominated by high stress and social media, works such as these–that engage both cerebrally and viscerally–encourage a more embodied experience that we so badly need. 

Revisor makes its Asian premiere at Esplanade Theatre from 5-6 May 2023 as part of da:ns focus - Body Language.