Yes, yes, I know. You’ve had your fill of David Attenborough’s jeremiads, you’ve heard enough already about climate change catastrophe. You’ve got the message, ordered the electric car and solar panels: now can we talk for a moment about something less unthinkably apocalyptic?
The point is as much to celebrate the grace and beauty of these phenomena as to mourn their passing
But the quiet triumph of Figures in Extinction [1.0] is to make the crisis seem freshly urgent and emotionally engaging. The first of three scheduled collaborations between the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité’s theatrical magician Simon McBurney, presented by Nederlands Dans Theater 1, it focuses on endangered or defunct species – a subject first addressed balletically in 1988 by David Bintley in his whimsical Still Life at the Penguin Café, but treated here with a darker sense of doom and a richer, angrier poetry.
The format is deceptively simple – an animated picture book in which 22 neutrally clad dancers impersonate everything from a melting glacier and a spider orchid to a herd of caribou, a shoal of smooth handfish and a selection of magnificent lonely specimens such as Bachman’s warbler and the Pyrenean Ibex (both irretrievably gone).
It may sound like something more suited to the wall of a primary-school classroom, but Pite is too wise an artist to let it get sanctimonious – the point is as much to celebrate the grace and beauty of these phenomena as to mourn their passing, and the effect is light-footed rather than heavy-handed, and all the more potent for being achieved without hi-tech trickery.
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