The Craft of Embodiment

Join us for a rare opportunity to hear directly from one of contemporary dance's most celebrated choreographers, as Crystal Pite talks about her creative process and shares video excerpts of recent work.

This event is free and open to the public. As part of the evening, we will be showing a recording of Figures in Extinction [1.0] — co-created by Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney, Artistic Director of Complicité. The award-winning Figures in Extinction [1.0] is a series of choreographic portraits; a catalogue of the disappeared. Losses in the living world are embodied by the extraordinary dancers of NDT in this elegiac and urgent work.

Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite is a former company member of Ballet British Columbia and William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt.

In a choreographic career spanning 35 years, Pite has created more than sixty works for companies such as The Royal Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theater, The Paris Opera Ballet, and The National Ballet of Canada. She is known for works that courageously address themes such as trauma, addiction, conflict, consciousness and mortality; her bold and original vision has earned her international acclaim and inspired an entire generation of dance artists.

She is an Associate Artist at three institutions: Nederlands Dans Theater, Sadler’s Wells (London) and Canada’s National Arts Centre. She has an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University, is a Member of the Order of Canada and holds the honour of Officier de l’Ordre of Arts et des Lettres from France.

In 2002, she formed Kidd Pivot in Vancouver, a company that strives to distill and translate universal questions into artworks that connect us to essential parts of humanity. World-renowned for radical hybrids of dance and theatre, Kidd Pivot tours internationally with critically-acclaimed works such as Betroffenheit, Revisor, and Assembly Hall (co-created with Jonathon Young), The Tempest Replica, Dark Matters, Lost Action, and The You Show.

Pite’s many awards include the 2022 Governor General of Canada’s Performing Arts Award, the 2011 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award and the Canada Council’s 2012 Jacqueline Lemieux Prize. In 2017, she received the Benois de la Danse for her creation The Seasons’ Canon at the Paris Opera Ballet. In 2018, she received the Grand Prix de la danse de Montréal. She is the recipient of five Sir Laurence Olivier awards for creations with Kidd Pivot and The Royal Ballet.

Note: the screening will be of Figures in Extinction [1.0]

From Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT):

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] the list (2022) confronts us with the loss of animals and natural phenomena, while [2.0] but then you come to the humans (2024) is a searing examination of our need for connection in a separated world. The third and final act [3.0] requiem (2025) continues this cross-disciplinary exchange and confronts our distance from death and those we have lost. It offers a hopeful spark in the darkness as to where we – collectively, spiritually, and imaginatively – might go next.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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