Contemporary dance company Kidd Pivot rewrites Gogol’s play with ‘full body lip-syncing’
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A scene from the theatre dance piece titled Revisor, which will be performed by Kidd Pivot dance company at the Esplanade.
PHOTO: MICHAEL SLOBODIAN
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SINGAPORE – Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector gets revised, literally, in contemporary dance company Kidd Pivot’s show.
Revisor, which was supposed to have come to Singapore as part of the Singapore International Festival of Arts in 2020, is finally getting an airing at the Esplanade
The work’s title is a play on the original Russian title Revizor, which means government inspector, says Canadian theatre artist and playwright-in-residence at Kidd Pivot, Jonathon Young.
“I realised by changing the Z to an S, we had the English word Revisor, and could reference the original title while suggesting the theme of revision,” he explains in an e-mail interview.
The original 1836 play is a farce about a low-ranking civil servant who is mistaken for an important government inspector. “I was interested in the figure of the imposter and the act of infiltration,” adds Young.
Adapting a play as a work of performance theatre and contemporary dance has its challenges. Revisor is presented as a recorded voiced performance of Young’s script, with the performers acting out the script with their bodies as they mime the words of the characters they play, in the first part of the show.
“I reminded myself throughout the writing process that the performers are not speaking out loud and this has an effect on my writing,” he adds.
“Something uncanny happens. It’s as though the voices have been left behind or the words are lying in wait for the people who will physically inhabit them.”
In the second part, the play is deconstructed. “It‘s an internal inspection of the play itself,” says Young. “I had read that Gogol was horrified by the farcical style of the original production and saw the play as something much darker.”
Revisor is directed and choreographed by acclaimed Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, who is the founding artistic director of Kidd Pivot. It premiered in Vancouver in 2019 and was named Best New Dance Production by the British Olivier Awards in 2022.
Essentially a dance piece, Young says he wrote Revisor “with rhythm in mind”.
He adds: “And when I shared the writing with Crystal, she helped shape the text based on what inspires her choreography.”
The eight dancers also have an important part to play as there is an element of improvisation in the piece. “For all the concrete meaning the words provide, they remain only an empty structure, and the voices are only ghosts until they have bodies to animate them,” says Young.
“Moving inside this structure, the physical performer is making choices constantly and there’s a freedom in that, despite the strict rhythmic confines of the language.”
Revisor is directed and choreographed by acclaimed Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, who is the founding artistic director of Kidd Pivot.
PHOTO: FOUR EYES
Contemporary dance is hard to define. Combined with theatre, it goes into uncharted territory.
Eric Beauchesne, associate artistic director at Kidd Pivot, says it is hard to describe what the audience can expect. “I have never seen anything like it before,” he adds in an interview via Zoom.
The audience may recognise some references to mime, especially in the first part of the show, but Beauchesne says Revisor is more of a full-body lip-syncing experience.
While it is not essential, he does recommend that the audience read the original play by Gogol. “The experience will be deeper,” he says. “There are so many layers in the original play and there are as many, if not more, in Revisor.”
Book it/Revisor
Where: Esplanade Theatre, 1 Esplanade Drive www.esplanade.com/dans
When: May 5 and 6, 8pm
Admission: Tickets from $40 to $100 from
