Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A juicy coup for Manchester’s Aviva Studios, which has just premiered Figures in Extinction, a collaboration between choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité co-founder and artistic director Simon McBurney, danced by Nederlands Dans Theater. A puzzling, poignant, movement-packed exploration of life, the universe and everything.The three-act work, co-commissioned by Factory International, has been made and released in stages. The first segment, Figures in Extinction [1.0], about the loss of flora, fauna and habitat, premiered in The Hague in 2022. The second, but then you come to the humans, followed last February. The all-new third element invites us to think about our attitudes to dying and the dead. This is the first time all three parts have been performed together.Pite has never been afraid of big, difficult subjects. Some choreographers rely on programme notes for the trickier material but Pite deals more directly with undanceable concepts by clever use of voiceover. Figures in Extinction chiefly uses the work of John Berger (“Why Look At Animals?”, Hold Everything Dear and “12 Theses on the Economy of the Dead”) but numerous less intellectual writings and broadcasts are also sampled in Benjamin Grant’s fast-moving soundscape .The second part, but then you come to the humans, examines the knotty question of the “Divided Brain”. Dancers taking turns to lip-sync to quotations from Iain McGilchrist’s writings on how the left and right cerebral hemispheres affect the way humans think and act. But this too is peppered with more everyday material, from the familiar London Underground mantra “See it; say it; sorted” to a man screaming into his phone that he would like if possible to speak to an actual person. A handheld camera tracks the dancers and the results are relayed on to the backcloth, dramatised in grainy, true-crime monochrome.Pite’s choreography responds to the soundtrack with a fluid, almost gestural body language, dancers bonelessly collapsing in despair or rising in fury. Her fabled ability to deploy an ensemble in lines, clumps and swarms is used to tremendous effect. Chains of bodies freeze-frame mid-surge, like figures on a pediment. The company spread and cluster with such force and purpose, they might be 200 rather than 22.I have a suspicion that dancers of NDT’s quality would look pretty terrific simply performing Canadian Air Force exercises if Tom Visser were given control of the lighting. Visser, essentially co-director of every piece he works on, plays tricks with the vast Aviva stage, shrinking it down to a single moonbeam or reinforcing the complex argument with sudden changes of temperature.The third part, requiem, is an essay on death, dying and loss and begins with a woman death-rattling in a hospital bed. Squabbling relations debate the five stages of grief. Orderlies change the woman’s sheets in a Complicité-style slapstick routine. White-coated medics cold-bloodedly check for (absent) vital signs. A large black box — Death? Fate? — descends intermittently, consuming one scene, revealing the next.Part three had begun with each dancer stepping downstage to tell us the names of their dead grandparents. Berger’s text contends that “the dehumanisation of society by capitalism” has broken the interdependence between living and dead but the long, sad list of the lost, repeated in the closing moments, suggests that the dead might still be with us after all.★★★★☆To February 22, factoryinternational.org, and touring, ndt.nl
