Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney's Figures in Extinction wins Sky Arts Award
Former Ballet BC head Emily Molnar praises artists in acceptance speech for Europe’s Nederlands Dans Theater and Complicité
Nederlands Dans Theater artistic director Emily Molnar (centre) receives the Sky Arts Award with British theatre company Complicité senior creative producer Tim Bell (left) and Simon McBurney. Photo by @rahirezvanistudio
Figures in Extinction [3.0] requiem. Photo by Rahi Rezvani
VANCOUVER CHOREOGRAPHER CRYSTAL Pite and celebrated British theatre artist Simon McBurney’s trilogy “Figures in Extinction” has just scored a Sky Arts Award for Dance for Nederlands Dans Theatre and the London theatre company Complicité.
Presented at London’s Roundhouse yesterday, the celebration of British and Irish arts and culture honours achievements in classical music, film, and poetry to popular music, TV, visual arts, and dance.
“This recognition celebrates the power of collaboration across disciplines, and the importance of giving voice to the urgent questions of our time,” said Emily Molnar, current artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater and former artistic director of Vancouver’s own Ballet BC, in accepting the award. “Working on this four-year project with our associate choreographer Crystal Pite, and Simon McBurney and Complicité, has been a profoundly inspiring creative journey for NDT, one that continues to challenge and expand how dance can engage with the world around us.”
The poetic work explores extinction and humanity’s relationship with the natural world in the face of environmental crisis, ultimately offering a space for hope and reconnection. Each part of the trilogy interweaves dance, text, film, and music. Pite led the creation of the first, McBurney the second, with both partnering equally on the third. Vancouver audiences witnessed an excerpted study of the final Figures in Extinction [3.0] requiem at Arts Umbrella Dance Program’s season finale in late spring. The Guardian praised its culmination as “a work of serious thought, urgent entreaty and utterly sumptuous dance around the questions of human-made climate change and its effect on the planet”, calling the premiere at Manchester’s Aviva Studios in February “hugely moving” and “a towering achievement”.
Speaking to Stir before the opening of her Frontier at Ballet BC’s DAWN last October, Pite was preparing to head to NDT in The Hague to create the third installment of “Figures in Extinction” with McBurney. (The first installment, Figures in Extinction [1.0] the list, received the top prize for a dance production at the 2022 Nederlandse Dansdagen.) Tom Visser created the lighting, Owen Belton and Benjamin Grant composed the sound design, and Jay Gower Taylor and Michael Levine created the scenic design.
Last fall, Pite, whose own Kidd Pivot has performed critically acclaimed works like Betroffenheit, Revisor, and Assembly Hall (co-created with Jonathon Young), told Stir last fall that working with McBurney on the massive-scale, whole-company work was a welcome step out of her comfort zone. “I learned a lot from working with him, and that was the whole idea,” said Pite, who explained the project taught her a lot about letting go. “I wanted to discover other ways of working and other ways of thinking. I’m so fortunate to be working on it.”
Apparently the work paid off. “Figures in Extinction” returns to the U.K. this November at London’s famed Sadler’s Wells, where it’s already sold out; it will also feature at Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville in October. 
Related Articles
