BOMB Magazine | Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney by Ivan Talijancic  (2025)

Ivan Talijancic I am always fascinated by origin stories leading up to new theatrical collaborations. Can you tell me about the creative encounter that prompted you two to collaborate?

Simon McBurney We knew about each other and each other's work for a very long time, and we had been eager to work together. I remember seeing Crystal in New York when she was on tour with NDT 1 in 2016; I sawThe Statement. The experience was simply amazing. I was performing on Broadway at exactly the same time, and we were able to observe each other’s work on separate nights.

Crystal Pite I saw Simon there, and I remember that seeing his work was a life-changing experience for me. He was there forThe Encounter. I never forgot it. I never forgot the force of that performance, the impact it had on me to be in the audience. Then, we started talking and exchanging. We discovered a shared interest in the concept of extinction.

IT Both of you have amassed extensive performance oeuvres, in their own uniquely idiosyncratic ways. How did you combine your diverse approaches and performative languages to forge a unified vision for this work?

CP We start working with content, language, ideas, and big questions. We work to find the best way to express those things in different forms. Sometimes this part of the process happens through text: exchanging books, essays, papers we’ve read. Sometimes it starts through the body or sharing experiences from our own lives.

SM There’s a lot of impulse in making work. There’s an intuition that helps decide if something is “right.” We’re two people looking at the same thing, and both of us sense that. It’s like having your eyes open to something else, all of a sudden. A lot of new possibilities are brought out when working with someone like Crystal.

CP We have a constant feedback loop. It’s like tossing a ball back and forth when we’re in the studio. One of us plants the seed, the other adds water. Fluid, easy, intuitive, the process is organic between us. There’s also something very helpful in sitting back sometimes and being the observer when the other person is taking the leading position. In our own companies, we’re in a leading position all the time, but in this collaboration, we can alternate roles. Leadership happens in a different part of the brain than the creative part. It’s a joy to play with that.

IT At the core of this body of work is ostensibly one of the most salient issues at this juncture in our history: the climate emergency and its ramifications on all life on Earth. What was the impetus for this? What were the conversations that inspired you to explore this thematic terrain? Can you offer some insight as to how these notions are then manifested in the work that was on stage in Manchester?

CP Straight away, we decided we wanted to make something centered on the climate crisis—

SM —which is not separable from human crisis. We are all inescapably part of this living world.

CP The idea was to have me in the driver’s seat for part one. Simon would be the driver for part two. Then, we would work jointly for part three.

SM I had the idea of a simple list of extinctions. I imagined Crystal would take it into a more organic direction, but the more we looked at the list, the more right it seemed to have a simple list of extinctions because that’s what we do, as humans: we label and list, like in a museum.

ITFigures in Extinction has been several years in the making. Two parts of the trilogy have already been created; this premiere was the third and final installment. Can you share the ideas that shaped these works and how they might be in dialogue with one another?

SM In Figures in Extinction [1.0](2022), we created a series of portraits of animals and natural phenomena that have gone extinct. These portraits almost look like dreams. One of these amazing performers has extensions of horns on their arms, beyond what the actual animal had. It extends our human connection with the animal. The dancers are acting like these extinct animals, but not in a way where they’re trying to be the animals; instead, they’re showing us where the animal lives in the body. We also explore how we look at animals in our lives, such as pets, and how they look at us. We explore this specific relationship across the divide. There’s a sense of separation. But why are we separated from animals? Weare animals.

CPFigures in Extinction [2.0] (2024), as a response to the previous part, is a portrait of human beings. It is a mirror. We found inspiration inThe Master and His Emissary(2009) by Iain McGilchrist and his theory of the divided brain. In the process, we were interested in trying to understand humans and our own extinction. How did we get here? What is it about us, our brains, and our minds? What is at the core of the crisis that we’re in, and the damaged relationship we have with the living world? The disconnect from ourselves?

SM The second work felt like the launchpad forFigures in Extinction [3.0], the grand finale. The questions continued and a trajectory developed which made this final installment the lone star we were moving towards all this time. It happened outside of our bodies. We were asking big questions about the unknown as we focus on the transience of humankind and why we’ve distanced ourselves from the dead. Where are the dead now? How are we to survive as humans if we’ve lost all sense of connection to ourselves, each other, our ancestors, and nature amidst this climate crisis we’re in? In the creation process, we’ve worked closely with the NDT 1 dancers, and we’ve asked them about their families, their ancestors, and their histories. This has made it an extremely intimate process for everyone involved.

There’s an aspect of our society which treats death as a kind of failure. So, in part,Figures in Extinction [3.0] is dealing with our separation from death. That is to say, we’re dealing with a separation from mystery and from things beyond our knowledge. What happens to us if we eliminate mystery from our lives? What happens if we say the dead don’t matter? Or rather, they don’t exist?

CP The unknowable is not nothing. That has been a really inspiring thought for me. To live and to work with those great unanswerable questions. To feel expanded rather than diminished by them, and to try to create the conditions for that expansion in the theater.

SM I’m tempted to call it the extinction of the dead. The amazing thing about working with Crystal is that I can feel all these ideas surging up, unspoken, through the body. In the end, we are trying to communicate through a work of art; it’s the work which is speaking, not the ideas.

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