Latest news with #FiguresinExtinction
Scotsman
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Figures in Extinction: the EIF dance show tackling climate change
Simon McBurney and Crystal Pite conclude their stunning triptych with Nederlands Dans Theatre with panache and pathos, writes Kelly Apter Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Exiting a theatre after a contemporary dance performance, it's not uncommon to overhear versions of the following: 'Well I loved it, but I've got no idea what it was about.' Watching Figures in Extinction is a slightly different proposition. Firstly, there is nothing ambiguous about the subject matter underpinning this stunning triptych. It's a beautiful, sensitive, emotional and deeply troubling look at the impact of climate change, and how human beings relate to each other and the world around us. Figures in Extinction [1.0] Secondly, the show's creators share their thoughts throughout, using recorded conversations to convey the creative process. Which would be fascinating in any circumstance, but when those creators are Complicité founder Simon McBurney and choreographer Crystal Pite you definitely want to sit up and listen. Over the past four years, the duo have been working with the talented dancers of Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) to create three new works. Figures in Extinction [1.0] premiered in 2022, part two in 2024, and the final instalment earlier this year, with all three being delivered in one performance at this year's EIF. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad While the voiceover captures the musings of McBurney and Pite, they are in no way telling us what to think or how to act as a consequence of seeing the show. 'It's fragmentary recordings of our own lives, and we also recorded everything we said to each other in the rehearsal studio,' explains McBurney. 'Because we wanted to make it clear to people that Crystal and I were making these pieces step by step, moment by moment, and that neither of us had any fixed ideas about what conclusions people should draw.' Figures in Extinction [1.0] At the start of their journey, McBurney and Pite had a rough sketch in place, but everything was up for debate. 'What happened between Crystal and I was a dialogue,' explains McBurney. 'We knew it would be in three parts, and decided that for the first one I would provoke Crystal and she would choose the structure. Then for the second one Crystal would provoke me, and then we would work on the third one together. But of course, like all propositions, it developed, shifted and altered. And the incredible thing about Crystal, and what's beautiful about her name, is that she crystallises ideas within movement with an astonishing clarity and precision. It was an enormous privilege to work with her.' One of the provocations McBurney sent Pite was eventually shaped into a list of animals, plants and bodies of water that no longer exist. During Figures in Extinction [1.0], the names of these former lifeforms are projected onto a screen, along with a number. As the numbers grow, so does our understanding of the scale of the problem. Meanwhile, dancers embody the animal experience, moving as one in a flock or herd, and depicting a small frog caught under the burning sun. Yet remarkably, it never strays into mimicry. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Figures in Extinction [2.0] 'I think Crystal was very aware of that when we were making it,' says NDT dancer Nicole Ward. 'And just as she can really evoke human emotions with small gestures, it was about trying to find that same thing through an animal. So not trying to perfectly shape the animal or move like a bird in an obvious way, but instead finding the human inside the animal to help the audience connect with it more. The movement of the frog under the light looks a bit amphibian but it's more about heat and exhaustion. So it was about trying to find a link – what would that heat do to a human? And what does it also do to an animal?' Figures in Extinction [2.0], on the other hand, is all about us. Dressed in identical suits, the dancers depict the worst form of humanity. Disconnected, disinterested, self-serving, with the natural world of part one long forgotten. 'The first piece is about our separation from what people call nature,' says McBurney. 'But I feel that term leaves us a bit removed, as if it's something outside of us, when we're all part of nature. In the second piece, it's almost a separation from ourselves, from one person to another.' Simon McBurney By the time we get to Figures in Extinction [3.0], there's an acknowledgment that one thing unifies every living creature on this planet: death. So here we find a series of tableaux taking place around a hospital bed. The personnel may change, the language and culture vary, but the outcome is always the same. 'The image of the bed became very important to us,' says McBurney, 'because my mother died in bed, as did my father. I've had the privilege to participate in quite a few deaths, and so the bed itself is an extraordinary place. And we examined the prone, horizontal body and what that's like for dancers who are largely vertical and sometimes even airborne.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Crystal Pite To demonstrate that we are all citizens of the world, the dancers share information about their ancestry, building a rich tapestry on stage of the names and birthplaces of their grandparents. For Ward and the other dancers, it was an unusual but illuminating experience. 'I've never been in a process where you're asked to share those parts of your background,' she says. 'And it was quite exposing, but also really beautiful to realise that you didn't know this about your colleagues. It was kind of scary to really open up but it also felt like a gift.' Figures in Extinction [3.0] Working with one of the world's finest dance companies was also received as a gift by McBurney, who looked on in awe and admiration at the self-sacrifice of these young people. 'I felt incredibly humbled,' he says. 'These dancers have denied themselves a careless youth in order to achieve what they're able to do. They have to take such care of their bodies, it really is the most extraordinary monk-like dedication to their art. And they're all imaginative artists, so they don't just blindly follow a piece of choreography. You can give them an idea, ask them to work on it, and they'll produce something. So it was all an exchange.'
Scotsman
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh International Festival 2025 preview supplement: e-mag
In a post-truth world, art still has the power to communicate timeless truths, writes Roger Cox Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... To read the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival preview supplement, click here The theme of this year's Edinburgh International Festival is 'The Truth We Seek', and given the current state of our post-truth world, it could hardly be more timely. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Of course, an arts festival can't fix our broken public discourse overnight, but what it can do is invite us to reflect on the concept of truth on a deeper level, and perhaps in doing so, equip us to better navigate our increasingly compromised and complicated information space. EIF director Nicola Benedetti has spoken about the way in which the arts can 'take us into realms of timeless truths that are more nuanced and precise than literal fact', and there are certainly some good examples of this in the shows previewed in this supplement. In their production Figures in Extinction, for example, previewed by our dance critic Kelly Apter on pages 5-6 of our EIF preview supplement, Simon McBurney and Crystal Pite explore some difficult truths about the ways in which humanity has become increasingly disconnected from the natural world. In a similar vein, in Works and Days – previewed by our theatre critic Joyce McMillan on pages 7-8 – the FC Bergman collective of Antwerp transport us back to a time when most humans still survived through a communal process of working the land, thereby forcing us to confront the extent to which we have now become cut off from the natural rhythms of nature, and from each other. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Meanwhile, speaking to our classical music critic Ken Walton, Yaron Lifschitz explains how he went about creating a radical, circus-inspired reimagining of Gluck's opera Orpheus and Eurydice by finding his own version of the universal truths at the heart of the tale.
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Light of Passage – a mesmerising meditation on loss, grief and hope
An accidental Crystal Pite festival sprang up last week, following Figures in Extinction, the results of an exceptional four-year collaboration with Simon McBurney and Nederlands Dans Theater with a revival of Light of Passage, made for the Royal Ballet in 2022. It's a sweeping, powerful piece, combining three separate points of departure into its 90-minute running time, all set to Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, conducted by Zoi Tsokanou and sung with passion and poise by Francesca Chiejina. The first section, Flight Pattern, was originally a standalone work and the pulsating intricacy of its portrayal of a mass of refugees, moving in great swaths of misery before emerging in solos and duets of individual sadness and resistance, remains overwhelmingly strong. The single moment when a woman is laden with the burden of many coats is a searing image of grief and loss and the young dancers of the Royal Ballet dig deep into its patterning, uncovering the emotion beneath. In Covenant, the dancers are even younger – six junior associates of the Royal Ballet School, all in white, use the ranks of black-clad adults as their support and their protectors in a short, soaring assertion both of their hopefulness and their need for safety as they grow to adulthood. In Passage, the last part, the liminal space is between life and death and – in the performance I saw – Kristen McNally and Bennet Gartside made the love of two people seemingly separated by that final frontier full of touching grace and shared memory. Around them, dancers flood like angels, illuminated by reflective light designed by Jay Gower Taylor and Tom Visser that seems to take on physical form, shifting in golden, molten clouds. The serious intent of the whole work is balanced by its ability to create these moments of elevation, with Pite taking on the roles of philosopher and magician in her ability to forge dance that beautifully conveys both thought and feeling. Light of Passage is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 12 March
The Guardian
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Figures in Extinction review – Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney's impassioned response to the climate crisis
One of Crystal Pite's most distinctive qualities as a choreographer is her willingness to grapple with the society around her, to craft works that engage with the issues of our time – bureaucratic bungling (Revisor), global diplomacy (The Statement), mass migration (Light of Passage). Theatre guru Simon McBurney of the groundbreaking Complicité has a similar belief in the power of art to change the world. Together over the past four years, with the exceptional dancers of Nederlands Dans Theater, they have forged Figures in Extinction – a work of serious thought, urgent entreaty and utterly sumptuous dance around the questions of human-made climate change and its effect on the planet. The evening-long show is made of three separate works, and it was the third that received its premiere last week at Aviva Studios, home of Factory International. Pite led the creation of the first, McBurney the second, and the third is credited as an equal partnership. But as a whole, the piece has extraordinary sweep and coherence. Each begins with all the dancers on stage and a question being asked. Images run from one to the other – the skeleton of a cheetah and the pinioned movements of a frog seen in the first section return in the last. The effect is one of cumulative richness forged from separate ingredients. Figures in Extinction [1.0] the list is a mournful litany of lost nature. Pite creates an encyclopedia of haunting pictures, suggestive of the creatures that are extinct but not mimicking them. In conjuring lost animals through human bodies, the work generates exactly the state of empathy its soundtrack pleads for. The second part, [2.0] but then you come to the humans, starts with a phalanx of suited dancers in suits on chairs, transfixed by their phones as urgent events unfold around them. As it develops, the movement embodies the dense arguments unfolding on the voiceover, about the left and right brain and the ways in which we have created a society that – quoting Einstein – 'honours the servant' by promoting the rational mind over the intuitive, 'a sacred gift'. Finally, [3.0] requiem explores ideas of death and time, the relationship between the living and the dead, and the faint hope that springs from the continuity of both. With music that ranges from Mozart and Fauré to Schnittke and Ice Spice, and scenes around a hospital bed where relatives lip-sync their grief over the dying while shadowy dancers seem to represent the dead, this section is the most diffuse of the three. Yet it is astonishingly moving in its willingness to grapple with the philosophical notions of extinction, on both a personal and a planetary level. Pite creates choreography that seems to stretch the dancers to their limits, their bodies so expressive, so impassioned, as they form into tableaux and patterns, that at one moment look like Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa and at the next like a medical documentary. Group movement breaks into solos and aching duets and finally resolves into stillness. It's textured, varied, utterly beautiful. In each section, Tom Visser's astonishing lighting, which constantly switches and highlights mood, Owen Belton and Benjamin Grant's compositions and sound designs, which blend classical melody with the sound of the street, and Jay Gower Taylor's fluid, evocative design all add to the weight and power of the trilogy. It's a towering achievement – a challenge to do more, think more and feel more. Figures in Extinction is at Aviva Studios, Manchester until 22 February
The Guardian
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Figures in Extinction review – life, death and a heartfelt plea for Earth's creatures, humans included
It's a state of the nation piece. Actually, not the nation, the whole globe, humanity itself. Not as pompous as that sounds. Necessary. This is the world premiere of Figures in Extinction as a full three-act work (in the UK, the first act was performed as part of Nederlands Dans Theater's own tour). It is a meaty piece from Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité director Simon McBurney, rich with thought and heart and a plea for the future of the Earth and its creatures, humans included. McBurney's directorial hand brings clarity, with voiceovers lip-synced by the dancers; Pite's movement turns the stage into a living thing, the dancers' bodies expanding on the text. They are expert (along with the wider creative team – special nods to sound designer Benjamin Grant, Tom Visser's lighting, Arjen Klerkx's video) at shaping atmosphere, the morphing shades of silence, sorrow, humour, fear and relief. The dancers of Nederlands Dans Theater are awesome in their technical ability. They easily inhabit any number of textures and timbres of movement, the long sweep and tightly specific gestures of Pite's choreography, but also the myriad animalistic forms that populate the first act, a list of species that have become extinct in the last century, Bachman's warbler to the Spix's macaw, narrated by the soft gravity of McBurney's voice (and his daughter's). The comical appearance of figure number 15 'climate change denier' is all too sobering, because there's nothing extinct about it. The second act, entitled But Then You Come to the Humans, puts homo sapiens under observation. 'She moved!' shouts a girls' voice, like a visitor to the zoo watching the inert group. It turns into a lecture on the brain (the text by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist), left hemisphere versus right, the qualities of fine focus and technical detail versus broader vigilance and empathy, then the frontal lobe, which gives us imagination, but also deception. There's a sense of creeping dystopia, and a powerful question about what is innate to human nature; will we bring about our own downfall by following our natural instinct? The third act, Requiem, goes deeper into death itself. It's jarring, upsetting, to see a hospital scene of relatives saying goodbye to a loved one followed directly by a voiceover on the stages of human decomposition accompanied by a jazz waltz. It's a jolt to the system, a reminder that we are matter, much the same matter as every other living thing, no more or less than the Asiatic cheetah or splendid poison frog. They look to find hope through ancestral connection. I'm not sure how successful that is. But what Pite embeds in the piece is a deep belief in community. The choreography itself proves that, its bodies breathing as one, the power of the mass, networked like fungi roots under the forest floor. Most potently, in the midst of the second act's apocalyptic essay appears a duet. Two people, connecting with such empathy, tenderness, support, curiosity and steadfastness, that it is impossible to believe we are doomed. At Aviva Studios, Manchester, until 22 February.
