“A philosophy lecture overshadows dance”
I have complex feelings toward Figures in Extinction. The collaboration between Simon McBurney and Crystal Pite sounds irresistibly inviting and tasty, where McBurney’s bold yet playful meta-theatrical experimentation meets Pite’s precise and crisp choreography to conjure an overwhelmingly visceral feast.
Figures in Extinction is indeed an ambitious project. Firstly conceived as a multi-year collaboration between Nederlands Dans Theater and Complicité, the trilogy began with Figures in Extinction [1.0] the list in 2022, which premiered at Amare in The Hague and presented a sequence of endangered and extinct species through dance, voiceover spoken text, and projected lists. The second part, [2.0] but then you come to the humans, premiered in 2024 and shifted the focus toward human brains and how its functions affect our ways of seeing. The trilogy reaches its conclusion with [3.0] requiem, which premiered in 2025 at Aviva Studios in Manchester, drawing the work toward a final reflection on the living and the dead.
To some extent, Figures in Extinction mirrors much of Complicite’s recent reimagined project Mnemonic at the National Theatre. Through exploring the story of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old natural mummy discovered in the Ötztal Alps on the border of Austria and Italy, Mnemonic displays an almost Daoist philosophy. It reflects a perspective seeing time as non-linear and questions the Western, capitalist dichotomy between human and nature. Instead, it views humanity as inherently part of the natural world: we are indeed connected to Ötzi the Iceman; we are indeed part of those extinct species.
Therefore, Pite’s choreography illustrates many of those species vividly. For instance, one tableau features the majority of the proscenium concealed by three mechanised drapes, leaving only a narrow aperture at the centre of the stage visible. Within this reduced frame, a group of dancers forms the delicate, suspended silhouette of a spider orchid, appeared as even more immediate and raw. Another moment features one dancer under Tom Visser’s exhilarating lighting: plopping, twisting, leaping. He is not imitating a poisonous golden toad, but indeed is one, lively, vibrant, and present.
However, much of Pite’s choreography feels overshadowed by the over-pouring philosophical and scientific voiceover recorded by McBurney himself, especially in the second part. By citing Iain McGilchrist’s text on human brain’s hemispheres, the piece criticises a Western philosophical approach deeply seated in the left hemisphere that dominates definition, categorisation and explanation. Interestingly, the excessive voiceover exactly operates in this left-hemisphere register, relegating dance, the sensual and physical, to the subsidiary.
In the third part, McBurney’s heavy directorial hand exhibits some poignant moments such as the raising of the skeleton, and Pite still showcases her most stylish choreographic tableaux sketching an ensemble extends their bodies toward a single elevated point. But the overall attempts to explore the theme of sustainability by juxtaposing illness, death, and new birth, from my biased perspective, feel somewhat clichéd, outdated, and unavoidably human-centric. Although Benjamin Grant’s sound design incorporates a number of classical requiems, and Will Duke’s projection of a vast, chthonic spider nest is breathtaking, both trying to saturate those attempts into visceral shades, the whole piece inevitably falls as bland and airless, leaving little lingering resonance, impact, or aftertaste.
I could not agree more with this review and it summarises so eloquently what I felt watching it. I would add music to the list of relegated elements…