Figures in Extinction

ART AS A MIRROR OF THE WORLD

Crystal Pite and Simon McBurnay set standards at schrit_tmacher justdance with the NDT and ‘FIGURES OF EXTINCTION’!

Once again, the headline could read: ‘Splendid opening of the Schrit_tmacher Festival in Heerlen’ – but it would be far too little to say.

But it would be far too little to do justice to this event, actually three events, because, as the artists said in an interview, they are three planets that have lined up to form their own cosmos and thus develop their gravity. Sinking planets perhaps? ‘Figures in Extinction’? – Even a single review of it would be far too complex, too incomplete, too little and certainly not an acceptable review overnight.

‘Figures in Extinction is an impressive example of art as a mirror of the world.

It reflects the challenges and crises we face. It exposes what we often try to escape from, while at the same time giving us quiet hope that change is still possible. Pite and McBurney’s poetic exploration of extinction is therefore also a call to the living to (re)connect with ourselves and the people around us,’ writes Emily Molnar, artistic director of the NDT, welcoming the audience in the small programme booklet, which is actually the back of a photo by NDT in-house photographer Rahi Rezvani. ( https://www.rahirezvani.com/ )

It shows the dancers from a sideways perspective, lined up next to each other, looking at their palms as if praying. Together, they form a chain, a spine, a strand of DNA, as shown in the bird’s eye view, which is visible as a projection behind the dancers that Rezvani has captured in his photograph.

An invitation and a hint at the same time, because on this evening we will be constantly asked to change our gaze and our perception in order to even begin to take in what will be happening before our eyes, in our senses and in our brains.

FIGURES IN EXTINCTION is a three-part evening, produced between 2022 and 2025 by NDT, together with Complicité, in co-production with Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, Montpellier Danse and Schrit_tmacher Festival, which was only premiered in its entirety in Manchester in February 2025.

In the first part, subtitled ‘The List’, Crystal Pite has choreographed grandiose movements and images in which the dancers of the NDT, currently by far the best contemporary dance company in the world, bring to life portraits of a whole list of extinct animals, all with numbers, for short sequences.

A list that begins with an impressively physical solo by a dancer with two oversized, twisted horns, representing the Pyrenean ibex, and later takes us to waterholes with gazelles at sunrise, to glaciers that have melted and disappeared, to plants and animals to which Crystal Pite gives living bodies because they are long gone, and an aura so that these creatures look at us, measure us and look us in the eye so that we can recognise who we actually are.

Figures-in-Extinction-1.0-©RAHI-REZVANI

Archaic beauty and a caricature

Pite and McBurney break through this archaic beauty with the caricature of a TV presenter, or is he perhaps the president of a small or large banana republic who denies the existence of climate change? The words sound as familiar as they are hollow and false.

Quite different is the voice of McBurney’s daughter Mamie, after a wonderfully touching scene in which a dancer lent her body to a bird that was also on this list: ‘Where has he gone, is he gone forever?’

Sometimes the dancers have to pause in their embodiments, the acceleration of the list of vanished and extinguished species becomes too fast.

Death is everywhere and so is life. For example, when dancers put together the skeletal parts of an extinct cheetah species and move it together like a giant puppet. The empathy and precision with which these dancers give life back to the skeleton that looks at us and its tiny movements of the tail skeleton and the inner restlessness with which it watches us before the curtain slowly closes is impressive.

Figures-in-Extinction-1.0-©RAHI-REZVANI

How can a human being…

How can man, who is able to create such creations, individually or collectively, full of empathy and sensitivity and incredible technical and artistic precision in dance, who is able to be one body and many bodies at the same time, human, plant, animal or even glaciers and lakes, how can man as a species destroy the living conditions of his planet for all its inhabitants in such a way? What drives him to his exploitative treatment of nature until it has become so inhospitable that man has to ‘fight nature to survive’?

This question was probably on the minds of many members of the audience when they were released into the interval, shaken and silent as rarely before, after forty minutes and the magnificent first part ‘The List’ of ‘Figures in Extinction 1.0’ by Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney.

Figures-in-Extinction-1.0-©RAHI-REZVANI-2022

‘Why aren’t they moving’…,

…asks the English child’s voice as the curtain rises again for the second part: ‘But then you come to the humans’.

The company sits motionless on the stage ramp and stares at the audience. Later, they will stare at their mobile phones, the screens of which they will illuminate coldly, they will begin to scroll and tap ever more crazily, on screens and the tops of their own skulls, while the spoken information, to which the dancers in various roles move their lips in synchronisation, becomes ever faster, more complex and more contradictory. The words race through space and brains like a computer-generated matrix.

These are excerpts from ‘The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World’

by Lain McGilchrist, one of the leading neurology researchers and philosophers of recent years, which rain down on performers and spectators alike:

‘…There is a loss of uniqueness. The how has been absorbed into the what. And the need for control leads to a paranoia in society that we have to regulate and control everything. Our daily lives are increasingly subject to a web of small, complicated rules that cover the surface of life and stifle freedom.

And I think, more importantly, there is also a kind of mirror effect: the more we are caught up in it, the more we undermine and ironise things that might have led us out of the trap. We just get thrown back into what we know about what we know.

It turns out that Einstein’s thinking sort of anticipated this thing about the structure of the brain. He said, ‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.’… A staccato of thoughts that escalates the opposition to the will to see into the unbearable….

And then, as if out of nowhere, in the middle of the second part, Crystal Pite synchronously dances Johan Sebastian Bach’s ‘Concerto for 2 Violins in D Minor’ in wonderful movements, from one millisecond to the next, far too briefly, so that it catapults you into the back of the theatre seat with your mouth open, before the left and right halves of the brain continue to fight for power for a long time (perhaps a little too long) and verbosely until the group slowly dissolves into nothingness in the background of the stage and the curtain slowly closes.

figures-in-extinction-1-0-rahi-rezvani-2022

Requiem

The third part, ‘Requiem’, ultimately leads from the frenzied flood of information to an awareness of transience, of our own as well as of time itself. Death now clearly takes centre stage. It is no longer an abstract death, which also went hand in hand with ‘extinction’, but a very direct, personal one. For the first time, the dancers speak with their own voices, speak their own names and those of their ancestors, parents and loved ones. Again and again they touch the floor when they speak, as if to say that everything comes from here and goes back there. And we are all surrounded by what has passed and will pass.

We bow to Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney for this production and choreography, but also to everyone else involved. To Tom Visser, who has once again shown that he is one of the world’s best lighting designers. A new discovery on the same level Benjamin Grant for the sound design, Michael Levine for the stage and Nancy Bryant for the costumes and Jochen Lange for the design of the puppets. And many other great talents, not least Jay Gower Taylor for the fantastic lighting video animation, together with Tom Visser.

And last but not least for the phenomenal dancers of the NDT:

Alexander Andison, Anna Bekirova, Demi Bawon, Jon Bond, Conner Bormann, Pamela Campos, Emmitt Cawley, Isla Clarke, Scott Fowler, Barry Gans, Ricardo Hartley III, Nicole Ishimaru, Chuck Jones, Genevieve O’Keeffe, Omani Ormskirk, Kele Roberson, Luca Tessarini, Theophilus Veselý, Nicole Ward, Sophie Whittome, Rui-Ting Yu, Zenon Zubyk.

What an incredibly rich evening, which makes it hard to believe that there could be similarly enriching dance productions in the coming weeks, but that is also what characterises a festival, being able and wanting to set a standard with such courage.