![Figures in Extinction [1.0]: ‘angry and incredibly moving’.](https://media.guim.co.uk/07b17e4f2173b5417abca9549a25b8af862bc9ff/0_37_1100_660/1000.jpg)
Choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité theatre director Simon McBurney are two of the most distinctive creators at work today. So it was always likely that, if they worked together, they could produce something special.
Figures in Extinction [1.0] is just that. The highlight of this new triple bill from NDT 1, it is a cry from the heart about all that is being lost thanks to the climate emergency – both angry and incredibly moving. It opens with McBurney’s distinctive voice floating over the dancers who stand ready, heads and hands moving in time to his speech as he discusses how he will read a list on extinction.
Then an extraordinary creature appears in the spotlight. A bare-chested dancer, with huge horns on his arms, carves circles in the air, flexing and turning. Overhead a caption announces, Figure 1: Pyrenean ibex. It is the first of an extraordinary living slide show of 12 animals, plants and places, representatives of the more than 1 million species that are under threat.
On Jay Gower Taylor’s flexible set, with costumes by Nancy Bryant, the piece accelerates as it continues, creating vivid portraits of all that is vanishing: the flickering blue feathers of Spix’s macaw on the fingers of two dancers in a preening duet; a caribou herd represented by a slow-moving phalanx of bodies, backs arched, heads alert; the smooth handfish evoked by a wave of disembodied hands captured in Tom Visser’s ghostly white lighting. A puppet of a skeleton conjures the wonder of the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah.
Amid these glories of nature, flits a climate crisis denier, his words floating over the soundtrack, his body contorting in the quick, convincing gestures of the snake-oil salesman.
Pite’s inventiveness, her ability to imagine movement that both suggests nature and our reaction to its loss, powers the piece and its message. It’s mingled with fragments of text – from John Berger’s Why Look At Animals and from the mouth of McBurney’s six-year-old daughter – that make the tragedy we are witnessing utterly clear. It feels like a tribute and a call to arms.
Jiří Kylián is also a choreographer who can make movement that is ceaselessly interesting, but the purpose of his Gods and Dogs is considerably less clear. His programme note suggests it is about mental health and balance, and it is a piece structured on contrasts – between fragments of Beethoven and piercing electronic sound, between steps that are as sharp as razors and as soft as butter. In pairs and alone, eight dancers prowl the stage, coming together in intimate shapes, limbs clenched and curled to extremes. A ghostly dog occasionally appears above them.
Gabriela Carrizo’s La Ruta is deliberately obscure, a series of dream-like images lit by Visser and designed by Amber Vandenhoeck to strand the dancers in a liminal space of violence, dominated by a glass shelter and the sound of traffic. Odd events happen, culminating in one dancer beating the others to death with a boulder. Or does he? It is like a nightmare but strangely compelling.
In all three pieces, the dancing is sublime; the performers not only impress by their suppleness and strength but by their commitment and understanding. They always entice.
