Dance: Connection is the answer

Nederlands Dans Theater & Complicité 
Figures in Extinction
direction & choreography Crystal Pite, Simon McBurney
dancers Alexander Andison, Demi Bawon, Anna Bekirova, Jon Bond, Conner Bormann, Viola Busi, Pamela Campos, Emmitt Cawley, Conner Chew, Scott Fowler, Surimu Fukushi, Barry Gans, Ricardo Hartley III, Nicole Ishimaru, Chuck Jones, Paloma Lassère, Casper Mott, Genevieve O'Keeffe, Omani Ormskirk, Kele Roberson, Gabriele Rolle, Rebecca Speroni, Yukino Takaura, Luca-Andrea Lino Tessarini, Theophilus Veselý, Nicole Ward, Sophie Whittome, Rui-Ting Yu, Zenon Zubyk
music Owen Belton • sound Benjamin Grant
lighting Tom Visser • sets Jay Gower Taylor, Michael Levine
Sadler's Wells, London • 5-8.Nov.25 ★★★★★

Nederlands Dans Theater and Complicité are two of the world's finest dance companies, led by top artists Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney. So it's hardly surprising that this three-part show (with two intervals) is both dazzlingly beautiful and often heart-stopping, drawing the audience in with visual, technical and artistic prowess to provide an experience that is both thought-provoking and deeply moving. From the detailed, precise choreography to an inventive mix of sound and light, everyone involved is at the very peak of their powers.

The trilogy opens with Figures in Extinction [1.0] the list, which I first saw as part of another NDT programme at Sadler's Wells in 2023. Here it's presented in a robust new context as it traces species and places that have been lost, including mammals, birds, flowers and glaciers. Alongside a mix of spoken words and musical underscore, each is depicted interpretively by the dancers in ways that send chills up the spine. Highlights include a herd of caribou, a breathing cheetah skeleton, a duet of macaws and a twitching frog. Through all of this there's a real sense that we are watching the earth disappear around us, and the earth is watching us.

Figures in Extinction [2.0] but then you come to the humans finds the entire cast on-stage in chairs, with tiny movements expressing isolation as they look into phone screens. Their reactions are hilarious, and also astutely pointed, as the voiceover speaks about how brains are constructed for various tasks, including the distinctly human ability to see perspectives beyond ourselves, giving us both distance and empathy. This plays out in expressive ways that urge us to see humanity in a new way. Visual trickery often feels like magic, especially as the dancers bring cameras onto the stage, projecting images onto the screen behind them. It's also deeply moving to think about humanity in connection with everything around us.

Finally, Extinction [3.0] requiem explores our relationship with those who have gone before us, intriguingly opening as each dancer notes where they were born, the culmination of ancestors scattered across the globe. A gigantic black cube descends onto the stage, revealing a hospital scene that plays out through this piece in a mix of gallows humour, family drama and profound grief. Even here, there's a blast of life in choreography that resolves into full-on Fosse-style jazz riffs as well as moments of racing and straining, understanding that death is something real for all of us. Witty, harrowing and tender, this is viscerally moving on surprising layers.

Throughout this show, light and shadow are skilfully deployed alongside striking projections, evolving through a series of spectacular transitions. But the demanding choreography makes the biggest impression, as dancers guide our eyes around the stage with both micro-movements and grandly sweeping physicality, often performing as if they are puppets controlled by an unseen hand. At every point in all three segments, there are pointed comments that combine physicality, religion and politics into a pure reflection of what it means to be human. It's the kind of show that changes the way we see the world and ourselves. As Pite says, "If separation is the question, then connection is surely the answer."

For details, SADLER'S WELLS >

photos by Rahi Rezvani • 5.Nov.25

Dance: Dazzling and demanding

The National Ballet of Canada
Frontiers: Choreographers of Canada
Crystal Pite / James Kudelka / Emma Portner
Sadler's Wells, London • 2-6.Oct.24 ★★★★

This programme features pieces by three of Canada's top choreographers, each with a distinct perspective. They are sharply designed and performed, although the impact they carry is a mixed bag, each deploying its own style of dazzling visuals and demanding movement...

Passion
choreography James Kudelka
with McGee Maddox, Heather Ogden, Larkin Miller, Genevieve Penn Nabity, Donald Thom, Chelsy Meiss, Isaac Wright, Monika Haczkiewicz, Nio Hirano, Clare Peterson, Ayano Haneishi, Connor Hamilton, Miyoko Koyasu
music Ludwig van Beethoven • piano soloist Zhenya Vitort
costumes Dennis Lavoie • lighting Michael Mazzola

Hugely ambitious, this features three separate dances sharing the same stage.The concept is impressive, and the choreography is often beautiful, although it sometimes feels like it's about to spiral badly out of control as dancers bump each other, stumble or lose synchronicity, as if the performers are struggling with the dimensions of a new stage or the pacing of the live orchestra. Even so, it's visually impressive. The central narrative focusses on a couple (Maddox and Ogden) performing an emotive modern ballet with witty touches, prowling around the edge of the dance floor before coming together with a kick of intensity. Meanwhile, a traditional couple (Miller and Nabity) dance in classical ballet style and costumes around them, often accompanied by two matching couples. And snaking between them the whole time is a line of five twirling ballerinas. The effect is vivid and often powerful, creating intriguing barriers while highlighting different forms of physical expression and connection. So even if it's a bit rough around the edges, and even if more progressive casting would make it even more impactful, this is a lovely piece.

Islands
choreography Emma Portner
with Heather Ogden, Genevieve Penn Nabity
music Brambles, Guillaume Ferran, David Spinelli, Forest Swords, Lily Koningsberg, Bing & Ruth
costumes Stephanie Hutchinson
lighting Paul Vidar Saevarang

In a rectangle of projected light, two dancers (Ogden and Nabity) are pressed together creating shapes and striking poses as one. Always in contact, their movements are vivid and sometimes amusing, offering fascinating visuals by skilfully maintaining a tight connection. Sometimes pushing or lifting each other into position, they begin to emerge from their locked-in perspective, untangling their limbs and removing their leggings to allow for even more expressive movement as the light on the stage grows, shrinks and changes shape. All of this is performed to a striking soundscape that mixes in snippets of music, and as it progresses the performance emerges as an intimate duet. This is a remarkably physical piece, often breathtaking in the way it presses the dancers together then pulls them apart with synchronicity. The movement is light and fluid, offering a celebration of freedom within a union.

Angels’ Atlas
choreography Crystal Pite
with Svetlana Lunkina, Ben Rudisin, Alexandra MacDonald, Spencer Hack, Hannah Galway, Siphesihle November, Genevieve Penn Nabity, Spencer Hack, Donald Thom
music Owen Belton, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Morten Lauridsen
costumes Nancy Bryant • lighting Tom Visser

As usual, Crystal Pite stuns the audience with visual spectacle that carries a powerful emotional gut-punch. The main event in the Frontiers programme, this piece is staggeringly expressive on multiple levels, challenging gifted dancers who rise to the challenge to put their bodies into a range of insistent positions. There are some 35 performers on the stage at times, moving together in waves of choreography with attention to the finest detail, flowing, surging and offering standout moments for individuals. This takes place in front of a screen featuring jaggedly refracted light that shimmers above the performers, combining with choral music to create an almost magisterial spectacle. As the light and music shift, the dancers do too, creating seemingly weightless movements that express a vibrant sense of yearning, as if they are battling for their lives. Unusually visual and visceral, this piece features heart-stopping breakout sequences that cleverly use both the intensity of the light and the large group dynamic for context. Pulsing rhythms also bring out enormous emotional resonance in a story that grows in its impact. In the end, it feels both devastating and hopeful. And the audience is almost as out of breath as the dancers.

For details, SADLER'S WELLS > 

photos by Johan Persson, Karolina Kuras, Bruce Zinger • 2.Oct.24

Dance: An epic final battle

Assembly Hall
by Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young
produced by Kidd Pivot
performers Brandon Alley, Livona Ellis, Rakeem Hardy, Gregory Lau, Doug Letheren, Rena Natumi, Ella Rothschild, Renée Sigouin
music and sound Owen Belton, Juliani and Meg Roe
set Jay Gower Taylor • costumes Nancy Bryant
lighting Tom Visser • video Cybèle Young
Sadler's Wells, London • 20-23.Mar.24 ★★★★

Thrillingly rendered as a collision between dull annual meeting and wild adventure fantasy, this show is visually outrageous, wildly hilarious and fairly impossible to grasp. Choreographer Crystal Pite, writer Jonathon Young and Pite's Vancouver-based company Kidd Pivot are taking on big ideas about how people work in groups, especially when threatened with oblivion. And their witty approach is thoroughly entertaining on multiple levels, even as we strain to understand why it should feel quite so momentous.

The performers act out the recorded dialog with their entire physicality, punching key words and playing up the hilarious banter. Eight people gather in a run-down assembly hall, the Benevolent and Protective Order is holding what some are calling its last meeting. But they still need to put the club's dissolution to a vote, once they get through some minor points of order and a report on a new member outreach programme. Dwindling interest means that they are struggling to pay the bills. And as some members refuse to accept defeat, the meeting spirals out into an epic medieval battlefield.

Each performer creates a vivid character with a specific point of view. At the centre is Gail (Ellis), the primary instigator rebelling against the closing of the society. And then there's the languorous Dave (Lau), who ends up as a knight in very shining armour, while Sean (Lethern) assumes the role of the triumphant king. Essentially, are waging a war for their own identity and community. Or maybe they've decided to go out with a very big bang.

An often staggering combination of sound, lighting, costumes and choreography, this show continually takes the breath away with its glorious tableaux and darkly resonant emotions. The movement is expressive, especially in a number of spinning solos and duets that shift effortlessly between liquid fluidity and jagged spikiness. The zippy dialog pushes the physicality to move at a slightly accelerated pace, which sometimes evokes the tone of a madcap silent movie. And there is a steady stream of jaw-dropping visual freeze frames.

All of this is performed with remarkable precision and a huge blast of humour, from the refreshment break to a full-on sword fight. It's absolutely mesmerising, conveying a sense that there is method to the enormous dramatic madness. The final section feels like it contains a series of big cathartic moments, but because we can't quite follow the thread, they end up feeling intense and beautiful, but utterly bewildering.

For information, SADLER'S WELLS >  

photos by Michael Slobodian, Sasha Onyshchenko • 20.Mar.24

Dance: Life is but a dream

Nederlands Dans Theater
Gabriela Carrizo / Jiří Kylián /
Crystal Pite & Simon McBurney 
dancers Alexander Andison, Fay van Baar, Anna Bekirova, Jon Bond, Conner Bormann, Pamela Campos, Emmitt Cawley, Isla Clarke, Thalia Crymble, Cesar Faria Fernandes, Scott Fowler, Surimu Fukushi, Boston Gallacher, Aram Hasler, Nicole Ishimaru, Chuck Jones, Genevieve O’Keeffe, Kele Roberson, Yukino Takaura, Luca Tessarini, Lea Ved, Theophilus Vesely, Tess Voelker, Jianhui Wang, Nicole Ward
voices Simon McBurney, Mamie McBurney, Max Casella, David Annen
music Raphaëlle Latini, Dirk Haubrich, Owen Belton
puppets Jochen Lange
Sadler's Wells, London • 19-22.Apr.23

The NDT brings three pieces to Sadler's Wells this spring, each featuring a distinctive style of liquid choreography. Dancers move with an almost supernatural physicality in these performances, while conveying bigger ideas that will resonate in distinctive ways throughout the audience. It's a magical evening packed with dazzling moments.

First up is Gabriela Carrizo's provocative La Ruta, set along a surreal Lynchian highway where gravity and time seem to have no meaning. A variety of figures appear from the mist, expressing their internalised angst and attempting to assist each other. But in this dreamscape, things continue to take shocking twists and turns. All of this is visually spectacular, with inventive lighting and sound that evokes a pungent sense of the isolated, imaginative setting. And the performers move in ways that are often brain-bending, seemingly shifting forward and backward in time at different speeds and with a varying weightlessness that brings out a stunning scream of internalised longing.

Gods and Dogs is subtitled "an unfinished work" because choreographer Jiří Kylián finds beauty in something that is incomplete. It starts with a single lamp on stage as dancers appear on their own or in pairs, cleverly playing with balance as they intertwine in a series of scenarios. While centring on the astonishing physicality of the performers, this piece echoes the arc of birth, life, partnership and death, tapping into essentially human feelings and expressions. The stage is simple, expanding through light and projection into a mesmerising shimmering backdrop. And the choreography mixes modern movement with classical dance in ways that are both jaw-droppingly complex and simply beautiful.

Finally, Figures in Extinction [1.0] by choreographer Crystal Pite and theatre director Simon McBurney is a thoughtful and wrenchingly emotional exploration of the impact of climate change on animals, glaciers, lakes and humanity. It travels through a series of tableaux in which dancers perform pieces that echo specific extinct species or vanishing places, interrupted by a lively climate-change denier (who is also cheekily designated for extinction). These are gorgeously designed scenes that bristle with tactile imagery, recreating natural movements through an extremely clever use of light, physicality and puppetry. What emerges is a celebration of life as well as an elegiac comment on how humans change the world. And the quickening momentum provides a striking sense of urgency.

For details, visit SADLER'S WELLS >

photos by Joris-Jan Bos and Rahi Rezvani • 19.Apr.23