Tilda Swinton’s voice leads a thought experiment on the future, accompanied by surrealistic movements scored by Neon Dance
Narrated by Tilda Swinton and composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson and Yair Elazar Gotman, and set against the backdrop of Jóhannsson’s film, Neon Dance’s Last and First Men brings together some of the most celebrated names in contemporary performance and design. This contemporary dance work is based on Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. The 1930 science fiction novel imagines a future two billion years from now, when the last remaining humans reach back across time to warn our present-day society, urging us to act to ensure the future of the species.
Within the performance space, four distinct “languages” coexist: Swinton’s narration; Jóhannsson and Gotman’s musical score; Jóhannsson’s film; and the live dance itself. Although inspired by the same source material, these languages presented themselves as individual threads rather than a holistic performance in the space, making it especially difficult for the audiences to digest.
Drawing on the dystopian vision of Stapledon’s novel, the choreography, led by Adrienne Hart and performed by Fukiko Takase, Kelvin Kilonzo and Aoi Nakamura, speaks a physical language that reflects this distant future: surreal, distorted and often animalistic. The movement and costume design together construct a living sculptural installation in space, often opaque in meaning. Comparatively, the voice over and music delivers the clearest narrative. They articulate the conceptual framework in a way that is immediately accessible to a contemporary audience, and thus inevitably dominate the audience’s attention. This clarity, however, takes our attention away from the movements, which are the only live element in the space and arguably the reason audiences attend a performance rather than watch a film. With the live element often abstract and elusive, and the recorded narration exceptionally clear, the experience can feel like trying to follow two parallel strands that do not quite converge.
Jóhannsson’s film does little to resolve this tension. The projected imagery of monumental architecture as human remnants sometimes echoes the dancers’ movements, but it does not bridge the experiential gap between the different elements. Instead, as the backdrop to the stage, it occasionally slips from focus, adding another layer to follow rather than clarifying the whole.
With such a stellar creative team, Last and First Men feels as much an experiment in form as in thought. For audiences unfamiliar with the language of contemporary dance or with Stapledon’s novel, it presents a high threshold for engagement and comprehension, and whether the way the performance is presented best serves the message or the story itself remains a question.
The First and Last Man has just finished its run at the Coronet Theatre.