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.

There are the graceful ripples of a school of smooth handfish and the giant horns of the Pyrenean ibex, worn on a dancer’s arms, that make for beautiful sweeping curves, looking like the outstretched wings of a doomed Icarus. It’s an ultra serious topic, but Pite has fun embodying the animals, whether the quivering feathers of a warbler, or a head-bobbing, pecking Spix’s macaw. It’s sobering that such creatures may come to exist only in these danced charades, and not only animals, but flowers, lakes and glaciers – illustrated by a mass of bodies fracturing into separate pieces.

McBurney gives the piece theatrical clarity – there’s no use in obfuscating when you’ve got a point to make – and Pite brings texture, a little wonder and humour. There is a comedic turn – that’s really anything but – in the shape of a climate change denier (they suggest he’s also facing extinction, but that’s moot) with Pite’s exaggerated physical expulsions accompanying his words given in a voiceover. The piece is thoughtful and moving, and despite the gravity of the theme, not heavy-handed.

Figures in Extinction [1.0] by Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

Figures in Extinction is the main story here, but it’s only the climax of a triple bill. Before that is 2008’s Gods and Dogs by longtime director Jiří Kylián. It was, incredibly, the 100th piece he created for the company, and it sums up what you’d expect from NDT: technically excellent dancers, with dramatically splayed limbs and subtly virtuosic duets.

More intriguing, and a sign of the influence of Emily Molnar, NDT’s new director since 2020, is a new piece called La Ruta by choreographer Gabriela Carrizo. Carrizo is the co-artistic director of Belgian company Peeping Tom, and you can see the resemblance immediately in its unsettling, surrealist, cinematic style of dance theatre. It doesn’t feel like a dance piece, more a contemporary film noir mixed up with a bad dream.

A desolate urban scene, circa 3am: a bus stop, a junction box, double yellow lines. One scene segues into the next with mounting hallucination – a traffic accident, a heart transplanted from a roadkill deer to a man – while the dancers appear rubberised, catapulting their bodies in dances of highly choreographed confusion. It’s very well made. Although like any dream, there’s not much point or meaning to it all, it’s very successful at creating a world that seems eerily real in the moment: one which, like Pite and McBurney’s Figures in Extinction, can disappear in a blink.

• At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 22 April