“Every once in a while, a work of art humbly steps onstage, regards its audience with all the grief in the world, and then utterly stretches what anyone thought theatre could be or do.”
Every once in a while, something humbly steps onstage, regards its audience with all the grief in the world, and then utterly stretches what anyone thought theatre could be or do. Something that gives you hope that the most human part of humans – not machines – will save us, if not physically, then spiritually. Something that shifts the innermost shade at the core of the soul, just enough to see something flickering and pulsing, reassuringly animal-like and universal, expertly and habitually sewn shut beneath the hem of the garment we call “daily life.”
Just as Figures in Extinction perforates whatever standards we had for “good” theatre, so too does it challenge the very nature of a critic’s review. As I stare up from the base of this behemoth, it seems more fitting to write some poetry instead. But for now, I’ll stick to the form I know best and simply encourage anyone who sees it to let it spark their own imaginations in the way the piece clearly wants.
Figures in Extinction is the fruit of a multi-year collaboration between acclaimed Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité founder and theatre legend Simon McBurney. Perched somewhere on the dance-theatre continuum, the piece is divided into three parts – the extinction of non-human beings, the troubling neuroscience of behavior, and human mortality. Performed by Nederlands Dans Theater, Figures transcends traditional climate communication, grinding the pages of heavy natural history textbooks and oblique science journals into new colors and sounds for new compositions and symphonies. In one breathtaking swoop, it elevates non-human beings to spectators and reduces humans to the scientific probings of a petri dish. Quite simply, it has created a new language with which to effectively articulate the nastiest of today’s truths: how humans have adapted to ignore the destruction we cause.
There are ingenious details hidden in this piece that could only be unpacked in the span of a short novel – how the sound design actively takes advantage of the very neuroscience the show explains; how the set – an ever-shifting black frame mimics and manipulates the limited focus of a human brain; how the dancers tick so precisely in harmony with every beat and sigh of the aural landscape that everything feels reverently interconnected from the moment it begins. When a piece is this detailed, it vibrates.
When I woke up the following morning, this piece was still with me. It was in the water I splashed on my face and ran through my hair. It was in the coffee I drank as I tried to write. In the cheeps of birds bubbling up through the window, letting the world outside greet the one inside. Whatever NDT, Crystal Pite, and Simon McBurney have gifted us in this piece, it doesn’t feel like a tissue with which to wipe our eyes. It feels like a reason for which to open them.
Figures in Extinction is a part of the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival and playing until 24 August. Get tickets here: http://www.eif.co.uk/events/figures-in-extinction