Late in the day at this year’s Edinburgh Festival arrives one of the most truly extraordinary, unique and emotion-firing performances of all this year’s festivals. A collaboration between Simon McBurney’s ground-breaking theatre company Complicité and the Nederlands Dans Theater, under the choreography of their associate Crystal Pite, Figures in Extinction is an epic in three parts.
In the first, a company of 24 dancers embodies a list of extinct species being read out by McBurney in naturalistic, often amusing recorded voiceover. Here the striking scenic and lighting designs by Jay Gower Taylor and Tom Visser lend a cinematic quality to every finely-tuned twitch of a grazing ibex, a herd of caribou or a shoal of fish seen through a crack of aquatic light.
One animal seen is a climate change denier, loudly declaring his belief that God will sort everything out, with a lone dancer physically performing every exaggerated gesture and mannerism. This ties into the second part, a piece about humans, in which the ensemble perform a group of commuters sucked into their phones, then the undulating chemistry of their brains as McBurney breaks down the workings of the organ.
The final movement is about grief, from set designer Michael Levine’s magically-appearing hospital deathbed, to a more metaphysical consideration of grief’s impact and the ‘ghosts’ the dead leave behind. With a stellar recorded vocal ensemble including Indira Varma, Miles Jupp and Saskia Reeves, this production truly is perfect, a fusion of the most gorgeously evocative dance and a thought-provokingly stimulating and revelatory text about what it is to live and die in this world.
Figures in Extinction, Festival Theatre, run ended