Words have their own particular architecture. A scaffolding of syntax and a skeleton of grammar that both shapes and constrains the sayable. Dance, by way of contrast, has the facility to slip beyond these rigidities, to convey emotion in motion, to hold a kaleidoscope of positions in rapid succession.

Figures in Extinction, a four-year, three-part project premiering in its complete form at Manchester’s Aviva Studios, illuminates the truth of this proposition in quite extraordinary fashion. A collaboration between choreographer Crystal Pite, Complicité’s artistic director Simon McBurney, and the Nederlands Dans Theater, the company seemingly casts aside the apparatus of muscle and bone, shedding the skin of vertebrate corporeality for something more akin to the soft-bodied mutability of the octopus and its kin. Over the course of three 30-minute pieces, Figures’ bioluminescence plumbs the depth of death, from the planetary scale of mass extinction to the snuffing of a single human flame; restless, curious and ultimately hopeful.

Each movement, while distinct in its focus, and in the case of the first two previously performed in isolation, reveals something of the greater thematic whole. Opening act The List might as well be titled Death on Earth, as, with increasing urgency, McBurney takes on the role of David Attenborough officiating at the planet’s wake, gravely reciting the names of the departed, both species and habitat, while the dancers embody their essence with an uncanny exactitude that suggests the connective tissue of empathy. Complementing their terpsichorean mediumship, the lighting and sound design complete the illusion they conjure; the breadth and depth of the stage extending into CinemaScope or shrinking to more intimate dimensions, but always setting the scene.

If the triptych has a structural weakness, it is that, on occasion, the architecture encumbers the dancing and the words are over-determined. For instance, The List’s inclusion of a climate change denier among its roll call of the lost feels like a mis-step, all the more clumsy amid the impeccable wow and flutter of Pite’s choreography. Like LazyTown’s cartoon villain, Robbie Rotten, but without the character’s redemptive wink of knowingness, his single dimension flirts with the indulgence of preaching to the converted. Similarly, the deployment of Ian McGilchrist’s conjectures on hemispheric specialisation in the vertebrate brain throughout the second act lends But Then You Come To The Humans something of the quality of a TED Talk, leaving less to the imagination when more would surely be to greater effect.

Fortunately, in its culmination in the final act of Requiem, the tableaux of dance returns to the fore, almost like a secular Stations of the Cross in which the closed communities of the hospital take on the qualities of a cathedral; its rites and routines showing humanity at its most humane. Lit and composed like a painting from the Renaissance, it progresses through a routine that resurrects the jarring jollity of the jazz-handed dancing of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective to close with an image of moving and eloquent simplicity; each dancer, as though in a children’s game, ghosts beneath a white shroud, receding thereafter into the black.

Ultimately, it is synaptic sparks such as this that catch fire in the spaces the production leaves for individual interpretation. Where a reviewer might discern a counterpoint to the dead end of human exceptionalism in the living, breathing demonstration that everything is exceptional, or revel in the wordplay that links the human figure to the illustrative figures that shed light on the heavy type in a text book, or even the opportunity to observe that, in a company without principals, Figures in Extinction is nothing if not principled, the beauty in the production lies in the multitudes it contains.

A call to the light of imagination against the encroaching dark, Figures in Extinction goes beyond words to the threshold of a sacred art. It is an exhortation to dance while the music still goes on.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Figures in Extinction © Rahi Rezvani 2022

       

Figures in Extinction is at Aviva Studios, Manchester until February 22, 2025. For more information, click here.