‘The unknowable is not nothing': Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney on the mysteries of Figures in Extinction

The Guardian

05-02-2025

To one side of this light-filled studio at Nederlands Dans Theater in the Hague are director Simon McBurney and choreographer Crystal Pite. McBurney is as still and reflective as a lake, though you sense the currents of contemplation moving behind his eyes. Next to him, Pite can barely stay on her chair and her arms keep rising up in urgency and encouragement. Both are facing the other side of the studio, where the company's outstanding dancers are crafting a new piece, working through details of timing and spacing as they test the viability of different moves. At the centre of it all stands a deathbed.
It's a shock at first, but it makes sense. Pite and McBurney are working on the last part of a trilogy called Figures in Extinction. The idea of extinction has evolved over the course of these three pieces: the first focused on non-human life forms; the second on neurological connections between our inner and outer worlds; and the third – well, that's what they're finding out right now.
They had been introduced to each other because their companies, NDT and Complicité, thought their multimodal, highly physical approaches to performance would provide much common ground. They were right: Pite and McBurney were transfixed when they saw each other's work. But it was the ecological theme with which they found common cause. 'Straight away we decided we wanted to make something centred on the climate crisis,' says Pite. 'Which is not,' stresses McBurney, 'separable from human crisis. We are all inescapably part of this living world.'
It was planned as a full evening of work, in three parts. 'The idea was to have me in the driver's seat for part one, Simon for part two, then work jointly for part three,' explains Pite. In the event, their roles quickly merged so that the sequence was less about who was driving and more about the accelerating dynamic between them. 'It's like bouncing a ball back and forth,' she continues. 'At the start, there was time between each throw, but now the ball is going like this' – and her hand vibrates like a hummingbird wing.
Each piece has taken them into a different tone and terrain, though Pite-watchers will recognise a signature technique that she developed in collaboration with another theatre director, Jonathon Young – a kind of physical lip-syncing that brings movement into lockstep with words, then stress-tests that bond.
The first of the trilogy (staged in 2022) is perhaps the most thematically recognisable, being based on our current, well-documented sixth age of mass extinction. Pite took her choreographic cues from forms of life that no longer exist (not just animals, but glaciers and rivers), while McBurney came up with a framework to hold the scenes. 'I had the idea of a simple list of extinctions,' he recalls. 'I imagined Crystal would take it into a more organic direction, but the more we looked at the list, the more right it seemed. Because that's what we do, as humans: we label and list, like in a museum.'
That instrumentalised, classificatory mindset was a spur for the second work (staged in 2024), which turns its gaze on to the human species in the modern age; specifically, on to our brains. McBurney had been much taken by the work of neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, which meshes the operations of our cerebral hemispheres with expansive questions of culture, philosophy and ecology. He showed a short video animation about McGilchrist's ideas to Pite. 'It was sharp and funny,' she says, 'and very choreographic. I could see it translating on to the stage in an excitingly cartoonish kind of way.'
How about the final part? McBurney breathes slowly, and one of his contemplative currents comes to the surface: 'There's an aspect of our society which treats death as a kind of failure. So, in part, we're dealing with our separation from death – which is to say, a separation from mystery, from things beyond our knowledge. What happens to us if we eliminate mystery from our lives? What happens if we say the dead don't matter? Or rather, they don't exist?'
'The unknowable is not nothing,' agrees Pite. 'That has been a really inspiring thought for me. To live and to work with those great unanswerable questions. To feel expanded, not diminished by them – and to try to create the conditions for that expansion in the theatre.'
Back to that deathbed, then. It's central to the scene, but not because it represents the extinction of a life, as I had first thought. Rather, it shows death as an ungraspable mystery that is integral to and essential for life. The disavowal of death within our lives is, for McBurney, one of the problems of our age. 'I'm tempted to call it the extinction of the dead,' he says. 'And the amazing thing about working with Crystal is that I can feel all these ideas surging up unspoken through the body. Because, in the end, we are trying to communicate through a work of art, and it's the work which is speaking, not the ideas.'
The Figures in Extinction trilogy is at Aviva Studios, Manchester, 19–22 February. Sanjoy Roy's trip to the Hague was provided by Factory International.