FIGURES IN EXTINCTION

Edinburgh International Festival

★★★★★

“Figures in Extinction transcends story: it is a thesis danced, a living meditation on extinction, existence, renewal”

Act I

Dancers stand facing us. A single breath — then movement. Crystal Pite’s choreography speaks in precision, clarity, and the eloquence of gesture. A second breath, and they dissolve offstage.

Simon McBurney and Pite create the world of this work where words and movement merge. Where dance and theatre become a beautiful duet.

We enter a bestiary of absence: animals no longer among us, their names projected above the stage. They return in abstraction — a horn, a pecking head, hands becoming a shoal of fish. Curtains lift, architecture shifts, and creatures of air, land, and sea flicker briefly into being.

This is a mourning of what has vanished: animals, glaciers, lakes swallowed by history. A sly humour surfaces when a climate change denier appears — we wonder wryly when such figures might themselves go extinct.

We observe these apparitions, reminded that they once observed us, though we seldom notice. Pite moves forward and backward, gestures revisited and reframed, never bound by linearity. Great art is never straightforward.

Her language is movement: a reach of the hand, both subject and predicate, potent and symbolic. Time folds. This is a dance of the now, but also recalls early 20th-century choral forms, when space itself was a partner. Negative space dances as much as bodies do. Pite is a sculptor, freeing presence from stone.

A puppet cheetah, built of bones, crosses the stage — fragile yet regal, a monument to extinction.

The curtain descends.

Act II

Stillness. Dancers in chairs. A child whispers, When will they move? We are watching ourselves — humans transfixed by screens, fascinated with our own reflection.

A table becomes a mountain. Fluorescent light falls. A voice lectures on the brain — two hemispheres, divided yet yearning for union. A sudden ballet phrase bursts forth, tossed like a blossom in ikebana: startling, dissonant, necessary.

The stage fills with dancers in business suits. Thought collides with movement, the brain a battlefield of visions. Then, integration: a duet emerges, tender, immediate. Harmony is revealed not in division, but in union.

The world unravels — shifting lines of weight, collapsing order. Within the chaos, connection: a figure embraced, right and left merging. Urgency floods the stage. Balance arrives, fleeting, fragile. Humans, it seems, are but a “fluke in the universe.”

The curtain descends.

Act III

Street clothes. It is we who watch, not all humanity, only ourselves. A hospital bed. Doctors change sheets with ritual precision — one person’s grief, another’s work. This act confronts dying, loss, and the unseeable next.

Mozart’s Requiem reverberates. A vast black cube lowers, shadowing the stage like mortality itself. In the umbra, where no light reaches, we realize vision is only possible from the light we are given. At the penumbral threshold, we glimpse what lies beyond.

Decomposition unfolds: five stages of return to earth. The puppet cheetah reappears, then shatters — fragments dissolving into a landscape of grief. Solo dancers emerge, luminous, breakable. Repetition circles us back to the beginning — but now the extinctions are our own: loved ones, ourselves.

The curtain descends.

Coda

Few works of such ambition achieve coherence. This one does. Pite and McBurney are masters of gesture and space, weaving narrative into kinetic poetry, always exact, never indulgent, never distracted by itself. Figures in Extinction transcends story: it is a thesis danced, a living meditation on extinction, existence, renewal.

Twenty-four dancers from the Netherlands Dans Theatre inhabit this world with fierce commitment. Duets devastate with intimacy; solos mesmerize. Light, projection, and design conspire seamlessly, revealing the theatre as a collaborative art form. A reflective light backdrop descends, shimmering like the very idea of a ghost. Ethereal. Otherworldly.

If there is a flaw, it is in the ending, which circles and lingers with multiple closures. Yet within the sublime, lingering becomes forgiveness — or perhaps the point itself.

Genius.

FIGURES IN EXTINCTION

Edinburgh International Festival

Reviewed on 22nd August 2025 at the Festival Theatre

by Louis Kavouras

Photography by Andrew Perry

FIGURES IN EXTINCTION

AS YOU LIKE IT RADICAL RETELLING

Edinburgh International Festival

★

“The movement of the piece is clumsy: clichés, borrowed gestures that feel appropriated rather than considered”

We enter a jewel-box theatre. Birds chirp, a troubadour sings. The red drape, gold fringe, and footlights evoke a sense of tradition. But the question lingers: will this truly be a radical retelling? Calling something radical sets expectations.

Shakespeare is always ripe for reinvention; few modern productions dust off the doublet and tights. Most of the chunky medallions on chains look better on drag queens in contemporary theatre than on Hamlet.

Eight minutes late, actor–playwright Cliff Cardinal walks on. Nervous, he tells us he was born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and grew up in Canada. Pine Ridge is one of the poorest areas of the United States. We are not told this.

Cardinal has been asked to do a land acknowledgement – but here, in Scotland? Who are we acknowledging – the Picts? He adds that this acknowledgement contains all the Easter eggs for the performance. We listen carefully.

Except it isn’t really an acknowledgement at all. It’s a stand-up: part confession, mostly provocation. Cardinal admits he dislikes land acknowledgements, calling them pointless. He riffs on stolen land, privilege, and trauma. It feels like rough, unpolished Fringe material. At thirteen minutes, I realise this may not be Shakespeare at all. Perhaps a radical not-telling of As You Like It. I was right.

Fifteen minutes in, someone leaves. The actor notes it. More leave at twenty-five, thirty, and thirty-five minutes. Audience unease grows. Some are thrilled, others distinctly not. This is not the theatre we expected with a proscenium arch. It is certainly not the safe, cathartic theatre space Aristotle once praised.

We are told we are privileged, that our buildings were built with blood. We hear about intergenerational trauma versus wealth, about allies who do nothing, about oil, history, and religion. It is scattershot: fragments, half-thoughts, provocations. He forgets lines, wanders off stage, and re-enters. Each exit or fall out of character is another chance to escape. More do.

By forty minutes, the house lights are cut – perhaps because walk-outs were anticipated. I’m sure they were. The performance begins to feel like a test: who will stay, who will resist?

An older man with a cane tries to leave. He protests that he feels tricked. He has trouble leaving, and Cardinal supporters in the audience shout the audience member down with expletives and “Get Out.” I’m suddenly in that play we read in middle school, where a group condemns and stones one of themselves. You know the one. And I wonder, is this the thing that fixes the atrocities of the past?

Once the old man has gone, Cardinal claims he was frightened of him, and thanks those who defended him, leaving others to be condemned silently. All of this feels staged. Frightened by the old man, the one with the cane who could hardly walk out of the theatre and worked hard to get into it?

More people trickle out. The academic beside me, weary after a day of writing with only one paragraph to show for it, came hoping for Shakespeare. Instead, she left, perhaps to read some at home.

The movement of the piece is clumsy: clichés, borrowed gestures that feel appropriated rather than considered. When the curtain finally rises at Cardinal’s command, it reveals nothing but lighting rigs and boxes. Another contrivance. The performance is Cardinal himself. He tells us there is no As You Like It. That it was all a dupe. That he has never read Shakespeare’s play.

It ends with stories of his family, whom he describes as bad-assed survivors. Aren’t we all? At least we survived this performance.

Reviewing such a show, one is tempted to do as Cardinal did: talk about something else and avoid the task at hand. Crow’s Theatre and Cliff Cardinal’s As You Like It: A Radical Retelling is neither radical nor a retelling nor Shakespeare. The marketing promised Shakespeare with a ruff – classic yet fresh. It is neither. Cardinal himself says, “If you don’t like it, ask for a refund. And don’t tell anyone what happened tonight.”

Perhaps he wants to trick tomorrow’s audience, too. But honesty would have been more radical than misdirection – especially when dealing with such important themes.

My advice? Take the refund. Stay home. Read the Bard. Tell yourself the story you want to hear – and think about how to make the world better.

Tag Archives: Edinburgh International Festival

FIGURES IN EXTINCTION

★★★★★

Edinburgh International Festival

FIGURES IN EXTINCTION

Edinburgh International Festival

★★★★★

“Figures in Extinction transcends story: it is a thesis danced, a living meditation on extinction, existence, renewal”