Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Crystal Pite has been top of every ballet company’s wishlist for more than a decade and the Olivier-winning choreographer is busy. Very, very busy. The UK alone will have a trio of her greatest hits in the next three months: 2020’s Angels’ Atlas for the National Ballet of Canada at Sadler’s Wells; 2016’s The Statement at the Royal Ballet; and Assembly Hall, made for her own company, Kidd Pivot, which it will dance at the Edinburgh Festival later this month.In addition to supervising these revivals, the Canadian former dancer, 53, is also working on two pieces that will premiere next year. Pite’s genius for time management plus an ability to both collaborate and delegate become apparent as she chats to me via Zoom from her Vancouver kitchen/studio.Pite’s work is a polyglot blend of classical and contemporary styles, which frequently combines movement with text, tackling what she once described as “colossal, impossible subjects” such as bereavement (in the multi-award-winning Betroffenheit), the migration crisis (Flight Pattern) and herd mentality (Emergence). One powerful influence on Pite’s style and on her determination to stretch the boundaries of dance came from the genre-bending postmodernism of choreographer William Forsythe: she danced in his Ballett Frankfurt for five years, starting in 1996, after eight years with Ballet British Columbia.Beyond this unusual thematic range, Pite is celebrated for deploying large ensembles in surprising and thought-provoking ways. But her output comes in all sizes: Angels’ Atlas demands 36 dancers, Assembly Hall needs only eight. “When I work with big ballet companies I tend to work with large casts just because I can.” But whatever size the piece, slotting into the schedule of a major opera house requires serious adjustment.“I’m just one small part of a huge machine. It’s a question of scale but it’s also a question of time. With the big companies it’s a three-week, maybe a six-week process at the most. I have to work fast and I don’t have time to overthink. I don’t actually like working under pressure,” she says. “It’s not comfortable but I notice that I tend to flourish in those situations. With my own company I’m working with dancers I’ve worked with for many years: very tight, very intimate. I might take two years to make a piece and I just love that.”She founded Kidd Pivot in 2002, having retired from dancing and returned to Canada to concentrate on her own choreography. The company now numbers about 10 dancers; Pite also regularly creates work with playwright-in-residence Jonathon Young. Although she has made work for many different companies she almost invariably sticks with the same tight-knit creative team, which includes her life partner, the set designer Jay Gower Taylor: “I love the shorthand we all have — and the efficiency.”Soundtracks are generally by Kidd Pivot’s musical team Owen Belton and Alessandro Juliani, but Pite will occasionally cast her net wider. Her first work for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016, The Seasons’ Canon, used Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi. Light of Passage (2022, due for a revival at Covent Garden next February) was fuelled by Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, which provided both an emotional undercurrent and a structural device, “a kind of scaffolding to build the choreography on”.Pite’s own dancers are fluent in the contemporary vocabulary but when she began working with ballet bodies, some were unwilling (or unable) to relinquish old habits. The blurring of the boundaries between dance disciplines over the past two decades has changed all that: “[There are] lots of dancers who are not only capable but are hungry to move in different ways. Over time their skills deepen and they become much more versatile.” She begins with a few workshops: “We do improvisation, I teach them some material then see how it lands on their bodies.” This approach works for both creating new work and recasting her back catalogue: “There’s always something to be learnt when you remount a piece on another dancer.”This ability to discover fresh insights in existing material is true even of her most recent work. Assembly Hall was only premiered last October but it does not stay still: “Every time we remount it, it has these kinds of micro-changes in it.” This is partly a factor of the work’s oblique, even mystifying storyline, which she co-devised with Young. Part dance, part lip-synced text, the 90-minute piece riffs on the obsessions, insecurities and fantasies of a group of medieval battle re-enactors.It begins, unpromisingly enough, in a scruffy, strip-lit municipal hall. “I grew up in community halls like that,” smiles Pite. “It’s a multipurpose venue: basketball, cheerleading practice, community theatre, high school dances — but it’s also a place of rites of passage: a graduation, a wedding, a memorial, a place of thresholds and deep change in people. I like that.”Assembly Hall was designed to intrigue both audience and performers. “We can have a show in our lives for upwards of seven years: the creation of the piece, the workshops, the touring. It’s a long-term relationship so I have to choose subjects and ideas that feel complicated and challenging. Assembly Hall is probably one of the most mysterious things we’ve ever made.”Pite will be travelling to Scotland for her troupe’s Edinburgh debut but the further revivals to be danced in the UK this autumn will be staged by others. “I trust the [National Ballet of Canada] dancers and I trust the rehearsal director to take good care of Angels’ Atlas.” She is equally confident that the Royal Ballet will shine once again in The Statement — “They’re beautiful in it.” With so many revivals and creations in play, Pite has no choice but to cede control: “I have to delegate, I do have to kind of let go and be OK with that but it does require a lot of trust.”Pite and the Kidd Pivot dancers will not have the luxury of a long rehearsal for their Edinburgh dates: “Just four days, maybe five, but it’s OK because we’ve just finished a tour so it’s still fresh in their bodies. We could probably get it back in just one rehearsal but Edinburgh is a big deal for us. We want the show to be at its best.”‘Assembly Hall’, August 22-24, eif.co.uk‘Angels’ Atlas’, October 2-6, sadlerswells.com‘The Statement’, in rep 22 October 22-November 16, rbo.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
