revew: Crystal Pite & Simon McBurney – Figures in Extinction
Figures in Extinction/
Nederlands Dans Theater & Complicité/
Crystal Pite & Simon McBurney/
Factory International/
Aviva Studios/
19-22 Feb 2025//
Vain can mean a lot of things.
It is vain for instance to presume that we can understand animals. Jacques Derrida, in his The Animal Which Therefore I Am:
I often ask myself, just to see, who I am – and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment.
He continues to riff and slip about semantically for a while, but a mantra runs through this passage: ‘The animal, therefore, is not naked because it is naked.’ Cats, animals, exist outside of the category of nakedness because they are unconcerned with clothedness, nudity and their associated levels of shame. Naked even of nudity. Derrida’s encounter with his cat gives him cause to reflect on his (/our) belief in nudity – in a sense our nakedness, our shame is given to us by animals, by our belief that we are separate from them. Perhaps vain to show off that one is the sort of person that thinks about Derrida sometimes (depending whether we believe that’s impressive or embarrassing, vain of one flavour either way). I invoke Derrida because Figures in Extinction has me reflecting that when we believe we are observing something about animals we are in fact observing it about ourselves.
Figures in Extinction is in three parts. The first section is a menagerie of naive physical interpretations of animals which have become extinct. It’s quite beautiful, and by far the stand-out third in a show which becomes weaker the longer it goes on. It feels appropriate to summarise the first third with the juvenile question:
What if animals were made from human bodies?
A title bar displays the names of different species as the company depict them variously en masse or in small numbers. A herd of beasts strides across the stage, a heat lamp bears down on at squirming amphibian which as the title card changes becomes many different such squirming vertebrates. I am particularly struck by the smooth handfish, depicted as a ray of light, dipped in and out of by the dancers’ hands, floating, fishy, in the cool, blue light.
The handfish doesn’t actually swim like that. It doesn’t float, it walks along the sea floor. This would be a catastrophic slip-up only if FiE was interested in the nature of handfish. It is not. It’s more important that the handfish is transformed into the neat visual pun of a school of floating hands. Indulge me: Thank goodness, that so many creatures have gone extinct. For if they had not, what could we make art about? If they had not gone extinct, what reason would we have to listen to what Simon McBurney reckons? The true premise of Figures in Extinction is that Simon McBurney Has Been Reading And Consequently Has Some Thoughts He Would Like To Share With Us. A load of animals and lakes and glaciers have disappeared forever. Horror. What a huge thing to comprehend. Probably any associated ideas in this show are also huge and important. The second and third parts of FiE ask the bold questions, ‘What if Simon McBurney talked for ages?’ and ‘What if Simon McBurney read John Berger to us?’ Turns out it makes John Berger bad when that happens. It makes John Berger cringe.
One could trace a direct line from the beginnings of ‘western civilisation’ to the death of the last passenger pigeon in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Such a ‘civilisation’ as Christopher Columbus’s was driven by a genocidal ideology of expansion, colonisation and genocide which was expressed through to the 19th and 20th centuries and certainly remains expressed in the 21st. This show is uninterested in drawing any such link. Instead, we are treated to a thesis on the ‘science’ of the left-brain versus the right-brain. According to McBurney, western civilisation used to be great because we used both sides of our brain equally(?) but now we’re all sad and on our phones too much because ‘civilisation’ is using its left-brain too much(?) I don’t really care where his research was conducted, the chief sins of this section are it is boring and hollow. Although to be fair, how could we relate the subject of extinction to human life? How could we relate the subject of extinction to human life? How could we relate the subject of extinction to human life? How could we relate the subject of extinction to human life? How could we relate the subject of extinction to human life? Search me. Only animals, lakes and glaciers go extinct. You use your phone too much it’s making you sad. Western civilisation used to be good but now it’s too analytical or something.
For a show explicitly about genocide it was baffling that indigenous people got zero mention. Vain to wish otherwise. The third section is about human death, about ancestors, about the many dead people who in some way still exist, echoed through their impact on us, their impact in the world. I’m disturbed by this coupled with McBurney’s eulogy for a fallen West. Vain to wish that this show had said something it didn’t. Vain too, that the work quite so relentlessly repeats itself, states something twice, three or four times. Often this repetition is in the form of dull and literal movement direction. McBurney uses the word ‘together’, the dancers move close to each other; he uses the word ‘collapse’, everyone falls to the floor. Do they think we don’t know what these words mean?
Part 2 is most responsible for stripping me of my goodwill; it makes parts 1 and 3 feel more like drivel than they might have done. There is more beautiful dance in the final third (generally across the work the ‘dance’ is beautiful, if shallow, the ‘movement’ inane and uninteresting) but by this point as I watch the dance all I can think is ‘So? Is this about brains then? Is this about how did you know people can die?’
The nakedness of the animal, the nakedness of the human, are both clothed by NDT and Complicité in scientistic guff. This guff slowly transformed my experience of the show from ‘not a bold idea but smartly executed’ to a sensation of being pinned beneath a bloat of grasping for something large and profound to say. A show embarrassed to appear in front of an audience, its insecurity reminiscent of those ‘GCSE Drama’ meme tiktoks: overly demonstrative, clichéd and tired, searching for marks scored. Ultimately when Figures in Extinction attempts to speak something deep about the nature of humanity, it reveals all the shallow parts of itself. Vain to believe you have something to say.
What if animals were made from human bodies? Well, turns out they are.
[previous post: revew: Caryl Churchill – Escaped Alone and What If If Only]