DancephereOctober 10th – 11th, 2025 Livestreams
On October 10 and 11 you can watch RESONANCE, the first NDT 1 programme of the season, as a livestream from the comfort of your living room. Experience Jiří Kylián’s Mémoires d’Oubliettes (2009) up close, find yourself right in the middle of Crystal Pite’s satirical boardroom drama The Statement (2016), and be moved by Marco Goecke’s emotional Woke up Blind (2016), set to the music of Jeff Buckley.
February 20th – March 12th, 2025 Royal Ballet & Opera, London
90 minutes with one interval
Masses of dancers move as a mesmerising whole. Bodies, fluid and yearning, are bathed in shafts of light. A single voice emerges, a lament that distils the magnitude of human suffering. A journey begins…
Crystal Pite, in her distinctive choreographic style, grapples with themes of safe passage, displacement, community and mortality. Set to Gorecki’s affecting Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, this award-winning work is a reminder of the power of human connection in our turbulent times.
approx. 150 minutes
Pite and McBurney were transfixed when they saw each other’s work. But it was the ecological theme with which they found common cause. “Straight away we decided we wanted to make something centred on the climate crisis,” says Pite. “Which is not,” stresses McBurney, “separable from human crisis. We are all inescapably part of this living world.”
Sanjoy Roy (The Guardian)
We are living in an age of extinction. Can we ever hope to give a name to what we are losing? What does it mean to bear witness to a violence in which we are both perpetrator and victim?
Across continents, choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité Artistic Director Simon McBurney have exchanged ideas reflecting on their fears and cautious hopes for our age. Their process has drawn on a rich and surprising array of source materials: from the sound of ice caps melting to the clarion calls of climate change deniers, from scholastic lectures on the neuroscience of the brain to the cacophonous clatter of Instagram influencers.
Over a span of four years, the two world-renowned artists have created three works together for NDT 1, each developed in response to the last. Figures in Extinction [1.0] confronts us with everything that is dying on our planet, while [2.0] is a searing examination of our need for connection in a separated world. The third and final work will continue this cross-disciplinary exchange, making its world premiere in the UK in February 2025, and will offer a spark in the darkness as to where we – collectively, spiritually, and imaginatively – might go next.