Latest news with #FiguresinExtinction
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.
The Guardian
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The unknowable is not nothing': Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney on the mysteries of Figures in Extinction
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.
