Figures in Extinction: ‘If Separation is the Question, Then Connection is Surely the Answer’

Still from Figures On Extinction © Andrew Perry

‘Figures in Extinction’ is a three-act dance work that considers the climate crisis, the segmentation of the brain, and society’s attitudes towards death. It is at the same time thought provoking and deeply moving. (Sadler’s Wells, London, 5-8 November 2025. I’m afraid it’s over now. Let’s hope it returns some time soon.)

‘The way you treat the outer world reflects what is happening in your inner world.’
Simon McBurney

The piece is a collaboration, between the choreographer Crystal Pite and the theatre-maker Simon McBurney; between Nederlands Dans Theater and Complicité. The plan was for Pite to lead the first part, for McBurney to lead the second, and for the third segment to be composed jointly. In practice, the co-creators found that sharing responsibility was more productive.

‘I choreographed all sorts of things, and Crystal wrote scenes and shaped stories. We didn’t stay on our patch because we never felt we had a patch.’
Simon McBurney

In fluid, restless motion, the dancers congregate and scatter, circle each other and separate, coil and uncoil. With sweeping gestures and sinuous lines, arms arch, bodies quiver and hands flicker. The mood is dark and sombre, as a voiceover takes us on a philosophical journey.

Figures In Extinction -  Nederlands Dans Theater and Complicité

Section one catalogues the animals, plants and places that have become extinct in the last century. The dancers’ subtle movements suggest the Pyrenean ibex, the Asiatic cheetah and the passenger pigeon; a warbler and a macaw, a herd of caribou and a shoal of hand-fish; poisonous frogs, blossoming irises and melting glaciers.

‘That’s what we do, as humans: we label and list, like in a museum.’
Crystal Pite

We hear an innocent child struggling to understand the absences. Meanwhile, a suited climate change denier stalks the stage, spouting false claims and flawed logic. 

In the second part, humanity itself comes under the microscope. We listen to a lecture on brain science by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, the words dramatized by the dancers

‘The left hemisphere yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere by contrast yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate living beings within the context of the lived world.’
Iain McGilchrist

McGilchrist contends that, in our hyperactive contemporary culture, the left brain has become dominant, creating a tendency to rules, control, bureaucracy, and a loss of freedom.

As Albert Einstein is reputed to have said:

'The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.’

Figures In Extinction -  Nederlands Dans Theater and Complicité. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

McGilchrist concludes that we are increasingly confined in a ‘hall of mirrors.’

‘There’s a hall of mirrors effect; the more we get trapped into this, the more we undercut and ironise things that might have led us out of it. We just get reflected back into more of what we know about what we know.’
Iain McGilchrist

The third act considers mortality. Families gather round a death bed. A body decomposes. The Doomsday Clock ticks towards midnight. And yet still we turn away from accepting these stark truths.

Whilst in awe of the choreography and touched by the grand themes, I confess I found myself struggling to understand how the three parts of ‘Figures in Extinction’ linked together. And then, in the programme notes, I read an interview with Pite and McBurney conducted by Sanjoy Roy. The work, it transpires, is fundamentally concerned with separation and connection.

‘We began with the desire to approach the climate crisis, but as we dug deeper, we felt it boiled down to separation: our perceived separation from the living world, our separation from the intuitive mind, our separation from the dead. And if separation is the question, then connection is surely the answer. You can feel a yearning for connection running like a luminous thread through the whole show.’
Crystal Pite

I found this rather a compelling thought. It’s true: as technology professes to draw us closer together, we find ourselves drifting further apart. Separated by screens, shepherded by algorithms, isolated by doomscrolling, our information is edited and moderated; our thinking is processed and packaged; our experience is filtered and abstracted. We yearn for intimacy, authenticity, real feeling. We need to re-learn connection.

'Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.'
EM Forster, 'Howards End'

'Hold my hand.
I am afraid.
Please pray for me,
When I am away.
Comfort the girl,
Help her understand.
No memory,
No matter how sad,
And no violence,
No matter how bad,
Can darken the heart,
Or tear it apart.
Take my hand,
When you are scared,
And I will pray,
If you go back out there.
Comfort the man.
Help him understand,
That no floating sheet,
No matter how haunting,
And no secret,
No matter how nasty,
Can poison your voice,
Or keep you from joy.'

Perfume Genius, ’Normal Song’ (Michael Hadreas)

No. 546

NDT1: Locations Can Be Characters in Their Own Right

La Ruta ©Rahi Rezvani 2022 for Nederlands Dans Theater

'Someone walks alone/cutting the night into fragments of roads
The night is wounded/ bleeding through the cracks of a dream
Wounds scatter/ the breath of animals asleep/ the perfume of lilies
Eyes close and open/ night remains night’
Gabriela Carrizo

A little while ago I saw a programme of dance by the Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT 1 at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London). It was an evening of fierce athleticism, radical movement and provocative ideas. 

I was particularly taken with a piece directed by Argentine choreographer Gabriela Carrizo.

‘La Ruta’ plays out at night in fog beside a busy highway. There’s a glass bus shelter, which is occasionally visited by lonely strangers. There’s a workman in high-vis overalls repairing a junction box. We witness a road accident and a rescue. A seagull crashes against the bus shelter. Another workman comes along to paint some yellow lines. An irate woman falls out of a car with its headlights blazing. ‘F**k you!’ she cries, beating the bonnet with her handbag. She then desperately struggles to remove her trench coat. 

La Ruta ©Rahi Rezvani 2022 for Nederlands Dans Theater

The disparate cast stumble and spin, tumble and turn. And all the while they are accompanied by the incessant noise of passing traffic, by blaring horns, flashing lights and long shadows.

This is the stuff of a noir nightmare. And indeed from the outset we encounter curious characters that don’t seem to make much sense. A couple in kimonos; a man running about with a dead bird; a murderous thug throwing boulders. One poor soul has the heart of a roadkill deer transplanted into his chest. 

'It’s very difficult to organise a dream, because when you organise it, you wake up. When you take control of a dream, you understand that you are sleeping. This is why, to dream you need to be unprotected.'
Teodor Currentzis

Although we were witnessing a fragmented dystopian dream, the piece for me had a compelling coherence. It conveyed a strong sense of place: how it feels to be out late at night, by the side of a road, in the middle of nowhere. It suggested a desolate, unsettling world of loss and isolation; of violence and peril; of strange events and chance encounters.

‘La Ruta’ is bleak, surreal and curiously moving. 

I was struck by the way that this short 35-minute piece managed to mine a great deal from such a simple, ordinary setting. It prompted me to wonder whether, in the communications industry, we spend enough time considering contexts and environments. Do we settle for the commonplace and familiar, the stereotypical and cliched? Or do we create worlds that are vibrant and colourful; intriguing and evocative; rich with symbolism and emotion?

Surely locations can be characters in their own right.

'Come closer and see,
See into the trees.
Find the girl
While you can.
Come closer and see,
See into the dark.
Just follow your eyes,
Just follow your eyes.
I hear her voice,
Calling my name.
The sound is deep
In the dark.
I hear her voice
And start to run,
Into the trees,
Into the trees.’

The Cure, ‘A Forest’ (L Tolhurst / R Smith / S Gallup / M Hartley)

No. 426

Maliphant: Challenging the Hierarchy of Creation

Russell Maliphant’s ‘Vortex’ © Roswitha Chesher

A little while ago I attended a performance of ‘Vortex’ by the Russell Maliphant Dance Company. (Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London. Touring England until 29 June.) The piece represents choreographer Maliphant’s response to the work of abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. 

‘I didn’t want to make a piece that was literally about Pollock, that said this is his life. ‘Vortex’ is more tangential than that. It’s about energy, paint, gravity, form, physicality.’

‘Vortex’ begins with a single dancer in front of a large canvas that glows gold at his touch. The canvas is then tilted and athletically scaled. It becomes a spinning stage on which a performance is played out; a screen onto which spiralling silhouettes are projected.

The team of five dancers twist and turn, roll and rotate - gracefully, elegantly, hypnotically. They skip around a metal bucket swinging from the ceiling. They pirouette alongside a beautifully billowing silk sheet. They sway under a cascade of falling sand, tracing circular patterns on the stage as it settles. And all the while lighting designer Ryan Joseph Stafford bathes them in ligneous stripes, radiant pools and flickering shadows.

It’s a compelling piece.

Russell Maliphant’s ‘Vortex’

‘Philosophically, personally, I like calm.’

Maliphant is known for creating fluid, smooth, circular movements, and in this context we are reminded of Pollock’s process and product: his bold, physical painting technique and his emotionally expressive, colourful canvases. 

In an interview after the show Maliphant offered a definition.

‘What is choreography? The interaction of the figure, the light, the movement and the space.’

I pondered this concise articulation for a moment, before I noticed that it didn’t include music. Maliphant had consciously omitted what many would imagine as a foundational component of dance. He explained that music was important to him, but it did not come first - changing the hierarchy of the creative process was central to his approach. 

I think that – curiously - creative people can sometimes be quite conservative in their outlook; somewhat set in their ways. Too often they are constrained by the inertia of their own assumptions; by the straitjacket of custom and convention. We would all benefit from occasionally reordering standard practices; challenging technical hierarchies; setting aside our methodological habits. 

Because if you want to change the product, you should try changing the process.


'Well, I've been afraid of changing,
Because I've built my life around you.
But time makes you bolder,
Even children get older,
And I'm getting older too.

Oh, take my love, take it down.
Climb a mountain and turn around.
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills,
Well, the landslide will bring it down.’

Fleetwood Mac, 'Landslide' (S Nicks)

No. 420

The Uncertain Leader: Crystal Pite and the ‘Doldrums of Doubt’

Isabella Gasparini, Solomon Golding, Joseph Sissons, Kristen McNally and Lukas Bjørneboe Brændsrød in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern. © Dave Morgan, courtesy the Royal Opera House

Crystal Pite creates dance for the modern world. She has choreographed touching and thought provoking pieces that respond to personal trauma, grief and addiction; to the science of swarm intelligence; to the tragedy of the refugee crisis. She deals in organic structures and fluid shapes; complex patterns and restless waves. She explores the forces, conflicts and tensions at play in our bodies, our relationships and the world beyond.

‘It’s just human beings striving and yearning and reaching and trying. That is what moves me when I watch people dance.’

In person Pite seems a quiet presence, gentle and softly spoken. She is very articulate, but also cautious and considered.

‘I don’t feel that speaking is my first language. Dance is my first language.’

In a recent BBC documentary (Behind the Scenes, Radio 4, 25 July 2017) Pite is interviewed in the midst of rehearsals for ‘Flight Pattern,’ her first collaboration with the Royal Ballet. She openly expresses her anxieties about the piece.

‘I can feel that I’m overwhelmed by this project right now. It’s ambitious and there’s very little time, and I’m not convinced about some of the choices that I’ve made, and I don’t know if things are going to work. And if they don’t work, I don’t think I’m going to have time to come up with a Plan B.’

Pite reassures herself that persistence, effort, action and creation will see her through what she calls ‘the doldrums of doubt.’

Crystal Pite portrait courtesy of Sadlers Wells

‘Keep pushing through, just keep making. Keep making, keep imagining, keep building, keep trying. Otherwise I’ll just freeze.’

Pite’s candour about her misgivings is rare and compelling in someone so successful. And yet her uncertainty comes in harness with a steely determination, and a clear conviction about her core idea and end objective.

‘I have such a clear plan for the eye of the audience…Not only do I choreograph what’s on stage. I also choreograph the viewer. I choreograph what I think they’re going to be looking at.’

Pite is the very model of a modern creative leader. She has complete confidence about where she wants to go. But she is also open about the doubts and uncertainties, opportunities and threats that present themselves along the way.

‘I have to be a leader and I have to be a creator. Being a leader requires that I know what I’m doing. I need to walk in here, into the studio, and know; and to be able to be clear and decisive and sure. And being a creator is really the opposite of that. I need to be in a state of not knowing. I need to remain open to possibilities and to allow myself to meander and to play.’

It struck me that Pite’s remarks do not pertain just to creative leadership; but to all forms of leadership in an age of change. In the past we wanted our leaders to be consistently certain, steadfast and strong. But in times of transformation complete conviction about the future can come across as arrogant, misguided or delusional. When all around us is in flux, absolute certainty is absolutely impossible.

Of course, we need our leaders to be sure about the objectives we’re pursuing; the direction we’re headed. But we also need them to be more honest about their doubts and fears; more open to alternatives and opportunities; more responsive to events and circumstances.

‘Flight Pattern’ turned out to be an exceptional piece of modern dance. It was at once beautiful and sad; heartbreaking and inspiring. Its success must in part derive from its choreographer’s willingness to embrace her apprehensions and anxieties. Uncertain times call for uncertain leaders.

No. 143

NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND 6

Rehearsing and Editing Creativity

Next week the English National Ballet brings its award-winning programme of new ballets, Lest We Forget, to Sadler’s Wells. Three contemporary choreographers have created works reflecting in different ways on the First World War. I saw Lest We Forget last year at The Barbican and it’s a very moving experience. There are still some tickets available.

I attended a talk by Russell Maliphant who has created one of the pieces, Second Breath. Maliphant was classically trained, but has since used the learned vocabulary of classical ballet to create his own distinct choreographic language. He explores the interaction of movement and light with the eye of a film-maker. His dancers spin, twist and turn around each other. They redistribute each other’s weight, as if working with levers, pulleys and pistons. It’s a wonder to behold.

Maliphant explained that a lot of his creativity occurs when he’s working with his dancers in the studio, where he has the opportunity to respond to their different personalities and styles of movement. He also films his rehearsals and subsequently explores the possibilities available to him in the edit: rearranging the sequence of movement, deleting the unnecessary, reversing the action, slowing things down and speeding them up. This level of experimentation would not be possible, physically or financially, with live dancers in the studio.

In the communications business we often talk of work-shopping ideas; of giving creativity the room to breathe and develop in rehearsal; of exploring how technology can enrich (not just economise or speed up) the creative process. But it strikes me that hitherto this has been more rhetoric than common practice.

For the most part we’re still stuck in our linear, demarcated approach to idea development.  Concepts are formed in camera, refined through dialectic, pre-produced, produced. It’s a rhythm without fluidity or flexibility; without much space for creative collaboration or technical experimentation.

Couldn’t we do more to open the creative process up? Perhaps we need to take some dance lessons.

The Oresteia: Not A Window on the Ancient World, But a Mirror on Our Own

It’s Oresteia season in London as two productions of Aeschylus’ 458 BC tragedy open in theatres across town. Why do we feel the need to revisit this dark ancient story of murder and revenge? What relevance has it for us today?

In The Oresteia a father sacrifices his daughter to win over the gods; a wife kills her husband to atone for the murder of their daughter; a son kills his mother in vengeance for the death of his father; and the cycle of killings culminates in a court case. Blimey!

The Oresteia is a trilogy of plays about duty to one’s faith and community, to one’s family and to one’s self. There’s a sense that, once the series of revenge killings is in train, it will never stop. How could it? To some extent individuals are not masters of their own destiny. They are caught in a Fate-driven chain reaction of inevitable acts.

In these respects The Oresteia is as relevant today as when it was first performed. The modern world is gripped by wars whose origins can be traced back to tit-for-tat blood feuds; disputes that are justified by reference to duty and honour and revenge.

I wonder is this true of business too? Do we sometimes find ourselves caught in a cycle of action and reaction, unable to break out of competitive role-playing, incapable of seeing beyond the injustices of the past?

Sometimes inertia is the most powerful force in any organisation and it is also the most pernicious.

Like a Moth to a Flame

‘Like a moth to a flame
Burned by the fire
My love is blind
Can’t you see my desire?’

Janet Jackson/ That’s The Way Love Goes

Where music is concerned I have a sweet tooth.  I think it’s coming from Essex. I preferred gospel to blues, soul to funk, disco to house, acid jazz to techno. And I had a particular weakness for female soul vocals: for Gladys, Dionne and Diana; for Anita, Randy and Roberta. In my world Aretha was always the Queen, Donna defined disco and Mary J saved hip hop.

And then there was Janet Jackson.

Janet didn’t have the soul of Maxine, the heart of Chaka or the voice of Whitney. And many of her ‘80s recordings haven’t aged well, as they’re scaffolded in Jam and Lewis’ industrial production.

But give Janet a break. She was the tenth of ten children; her father was a tough old patriarch; she was Michael’s sister. Throughout her career she demonstrated admirable independence and an open mind.

And Janet gave us That’s The Way Love Goes, a definitive work for the sweet toothed soul fan. There’s the languorous rhythm, the melodious guitar pattern and Janet’s gentle, soothing serenade; not forgetting the warehouse-set video, where Janet’s hip mates sway diffidently to the beat from the ceiling-high speakers. Not unlike my own arrangement on a Saturday afternoon.

Of course, the central image of That’s The Way Love Goes is the tragic moth bewitched by a flame. I think I understand why people are attracted to doomed love. But I have always wondered: Why are moths attracted to flames? Surely they could evolve out of the suicidal self-immolation thing, given its endless repetition?

It transpires that the world of science is not entirely sure why moths are drawn to flame either. One theory suggests that they confuse fire with luminous female pheromones. Another suggests that it’s a primitive escape reflex gone wrong. But the dominant theory seems to be that the moths mistake artificial light sources for the moon, which is their primary navigational reference point.

It’s a rather sad thought: that your core point of reference, your North Star, is in fact leading you astray, to certain death.

It’s not entirely an alien concept for commerce. Many a business sets its controls for the heart of the profits, its navigation system almost entirely geared around financial returns. Only to find that, when you prioritise profit ahead of people and product, then your profits tend to suffer. It’s the commercial form of doomed love. Intense, sad, misguided, inevitable. ‘Like a moth to a flame, burned by the fire.’

No. 45