Review: Nederlands Dans Theater & Complicité Figures in Extinction, Sadler’s Wells

Nederlands Dans Theater & Complicité Figures in Extinction is made up of three pieces tackling the climate crisis. It’s a combination of dance, theatre, spoken word and music, brought together by Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney and featuring the truly astounding NDT 1 dancers.

Figures in Extinction [1.0] the list presents a series of now extinct animals, plants and even a glacier as McBurney reads out a list of the names. We begin with a single dancer portraying a Pyrenean Ibex, his hands forming the horns. As the list grows the company comes together as herds and flocks, showing so much that we have lost with abundant beauty and terrible sadness. Interspersed with this is a recording of a climate change denier, his blustering nonsense danced out with exaggerated gestures and tremendous skill as a dancer lip syncs to the recording. The contrast of this utter buffoonery with the beauty of what we lost is striking. The list keeps growing and we see more and more lost animals, it is a powerful piece.

Figures in Extinction [2.0] but then you come to the humans examines both the connections between people and the connections that we seek in the world. It starts with a good laugh, a small girl’s voice asking “why aren’t they moving” as all the dancers are motionless on the stage.

As they slowly begin to move, the girl’s voice-over calls out each move she sees, before the scene shifts to a lecture by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist; a staggeringly impressive full cast lip sync, passed from one dancer to another and the flow between the company is truly astounding. We move from a lecture on discredited science about left brain and right brain through how technology and social media has captured people and, in some ways, diminished the connections between us

Figures in Extinction [3.0] requiem is about the dead, those who we have lost, those who came before and, in many ways, those who made us who we are today. The voice-over is from interviews with the dancers, their family backgrounds and where throughout this interconnected world they come from. More intimate and more reflective than the first two parts, this feels a little anti-climactic. Thematically it works well, the individual pain and loss aiming for quiet poignancy rather than power, but it feels more subdued and slightly less urgent overall.

The technical work throughout all three pieces is formidable. Tom Visser’s lighting is sublime, narrowing to pinpoints or pulsing in rhythm with the movement. Visser’s light not only isolates individual dancers but also mirrors the changing scale of the world beautifully, and sadly, complementing the extinction of the animals being played out. The set by Michael Levine expands and contracts, the stage shifting from the full breadth of Sadler’s Wells to an intimate black box-like space as walls and frames fly in and out silently.

The dancers are awe-inspiring, each having an inordinate level of control and precise movement, both individually and with the other around them. It’s never short of spectacle and impossible to take your eyes from with moments that are truly breathtaking. For me the first part is the outstanding piece, the dancers bring the animals and their loss so vividly to life that I felt that loss and sadness along with a rage for what we have done to cause this.

Nederlands Dans Theater & Complicité Figures in Extinction plays at Sadler’s Wells until Saturday 08 November.