Nederlands Dans Theater review – a moving menagerie from a world in crisis

Sweeping curves … Luca-Andrea Tessarini in Figures in Extinction [1.0] by Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

The headline piece in this triple bill from Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) is a collaboration between acclaimed Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité director Simon McBurney. Figures in Extinction [1.0] is the first in a planned trilogy of works by the pair, asking what art we should be making in the face of environmental crisis.

The answer for this first chapter came from McBurney’s six-year-old daughter, asking of a bird in the garden that flew away: “Has she gone for ever?” More than a million species face extinction, and Pite conjures some of them with a menagerie using the NDT dancers’ malleable bodies.