We went to see a dance/multimedia production of Last and First Men last week, which was pretty cool. Dance is one of those areas that I’m interersted in, but know very little about and have actually not seem a whole lot of, outside of your standard musical. Contemporary dance even less. I’ve also not read any Stapledon, as it turns out, so I fully intended to do that before the show, but of course got distracted by Hugo reading and other shiny objects

The production is itself an adaptation, or maybe expansion, of a film by Jóhann Jóhannsson which Wikipedia describes as multimedia, though originally that seems to have just meant featuring a live orchestra for the score. The film itself is pretty much exactly what you might expect when I say “Icelandic black and white 16mm film narrated by Tilda Swinton based on a 1930s science fiction novel” but it works well with the dance element to focus the audience.

To my uncultured eye, the dancers (Fukiko Takase, Kelvin Kilonzo, Aoi Nakamura) were incredible, with intense control over movement, stillness, and what appeared to be every muscle in their bodies as they portrayed far-future adaptations of humanity in convicingly strange ways. There are a handful of costume-props, used sparingly to good effect, the huge backdrop screen is filled with slow shots of Yugoslavian memorial monuments, and the narration and score lull you into a bit of a dreamlike state well-suited to the vastness of the vision.

Did I come away a hundred percent sure that I grasped the whole plot, okay not really, but at a tidy 65minutes it’s worth experiencing if it comes your way and any of this is up your alley.