Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney
Nederlands Dans Theater 1 and Complicite: co-commissioned by Factory International; co-produced by Schrittmacher Festival, Les Theatres de la Ville de Luxembourg and Montpellier Danse
Aviva Studios, Manchester
February 19-22, 2025; 2 hrs 35 mins
To get Nederlands Dans Theater 1 to Manchester is, by any standard, a real achievement. The company visited Sadlers Wells in 2023 with the first part of this trilogy, Figures in Extinction [1.0], and the second was performed in Holland last year, but this is the world premiere of the complete work. Well done, Factory International.
The work is the creation of Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and British actor/director Simon McBurney, and rather different from many contemporary dance shows. The first part was in a triple bill when it was seen before, and makes a coherent short piece on its own. We are told it was always going to be the start of a longer work, though the nature of the beast seems to change once the first interval is over. It’s then that you become aware of Pite’s style as a kind of choreography of words, rather than to music. And there are plenty of words.
The title is the binding element: both “Figures” and “Extinction” have more than one meaning. In Part One, “Figures” means both “illustrations” (or “examples”), as in a textbook, and numerical totals: projections, each numbered as “Figure…”, list the names of animals, plants and aspects of the physical world such as glaciers that have been lost in recent time because of climate change.
A little girl’s voice talks about a bird that’s seen then doesn’t return. “Has it gone forever?” she asks. This is to return at the end.
The dancers frequently mimic the gaits and shapes of the natural elements in focus – even using an activated skeleton to show the fate of a lost species of cheetah. Pite’s imagination creates shapes that often contain symmetry, and always grace. The dancers of NDT1 are amazing in the fluidity of their movement, extraordinary physical and technical brilliance under perfect control. There is lyricism, briefly, in a duo, and humour (a “Climate Change Denier” – hopefully soon to be himself extinct), but the overall message is one of pessimism.
You wonder whether Part Two - subtitled “But then you come to the humans” - will provide answers. It starts with people, sitting still. The innocent asks: “Why don’t they do something?” (good question), but this is where you realise that in McBurney’s view – I guess this is mainly coming from him – extinction may be on the way for humans, too. It’s heavily influenced by a book by psychiatrist turned philosopher Iain McGilchrist. There’s a lot of choreographed lecturing about the hemispheres of the brain and how today’s technocratic society elevates perfection above inwardness, with emptiness its result. So not much hope there, then.
Part Three goes further into the idea of extinction – a Dance of Death. The NDT1 performers tell some of their life stories and of their own ancestors, and we are assured that “the dead surround the living”. There’s a mimed scene (to recorded dialogue) of a loved one’s hospital death and a description of the five stages of decomposition – an animal skeleton appears again, to remind you that when it comes to extinction, we’re all in it together. Music is used more extensively here than before, and yet a chunk of the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem, or a heavily engineered version of the opening of Faure’s, pop classics though they are, seem to add little more than death-references to what’s already obvious.
There’s more lyrical dance to come, though – loving embraces and the individual supported by the group seem to offer a means of redemption of our sad condition. The vast full size of the Aviva Studios’ Hall stage was used, for the first time, in this section of the work – the first two being conceived for slightly smaller spaces, I imagine. That’s a thrill in itself (the patterns could probably be squeezed a bit for other places, no doubt).
Finally, the dancers call each other by name, as if that’s one way of seeking meaning in a cold universe. But, as both Pite and McBurney said in their talk before the show, this work began with the sense of loss and grieving… perhaps a pointer to the possibility that we are more than that. What if “…trailing clouds of glory do we come”?
It's a deeply thoughtful – possibly over-thought – response to a crisis that above all needs action more than words. But, as an example of dance at its most accomplished, Figures in Extinction can hardly be faulted.
More info and tickets here
