Kidd Pivot, who will perform this weekend at On the Boards, should've been a Stranger Suggests. But there's never room for everything.

Its choreographer Crystal Pite has worked with the world-famous Nederlands Dans Theater and danced for William Forsythe—whose polarizing One Flat Thing, reproduced was recently performed at the ballet, where it inspired wild applause, dozens of angry walkouts, and this gushy Theater News column about sex and cancer, machines and cocaine.

And Pite/Pivot's performance at On the Boards last year (Farther Out) is still stuck in my head.

From an old Slog post about Farther Out.
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Farther Out is, nominally, about an astronaut who is assaulted by an alien. It’s also about telling the same story several different ways. It’s also about a writer (the astronaut) in front of her typewriter, wrestling with an idea (the alien). There is a great looped and fucked-with voiceover by Annie Dillard. There is a typewriter suspended from the ceiling that the astronaut spins, then releases, then dances beneath. The alien moves like an alien—with the stop-motion specificity of a bird or a breakdancer—and the astronaut moves like her whole body is moonwalking.

There are surprises. There is tap dancing. There is . It’s theatrical and smart and fun.

In the comments to that post, Jim Demetre contradicted me, saying: "Farther Out may be the most tedious thing I've seen at On the Boards since Laurie Anderson performed there a few decades ago. It was as pretentious as it was uninteresting, a shame since the dancers had some real skill."

At last Pite provokes debate, which is more than most choreographers can do. I can't wait to see what debates she'll provoke this time.

If you want tickets, see here.