Is it possible for the apocalypse to be boring? Because this one is, a bit. It’s placid, indifferent, certainly resigned. There are so many elements going into this multi-genre performance, but the result is less than the sum of its parts. The basis is a production originally made for Manchester international festival in 2017, a film and score by the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (best known for Arrival, Sicario and The Theory of Everything), with text adapted from the 1930 sci-fi novel of the same name by Olaf Stapledon.
The narration is coolly voiced by Tilda Swinton, describing the last humans, two billion years from now. They have evolved way beyond current Homo sapiens, communicate only by telepathy and create a few select offspring, each 20 years in gestation. But obliteration is coming. The new element of the production is three dancers (Fukiko Takase, Kelvin Kilonzo and Aoi Nakamura) from choreographer Adrienne Hart’s Neon Dance. Their place is less certain: advanced creatures – with costume props like a glove that extends a hand into a spear – but also fragile humans fiddling while Rome burns.
The four elements don’t synthesise. What works very well is the film and the score, played by live string quintet. Dense chords simmer into life and fade to silence, like a fissure opening up in a rock revealing a deep well of sound inside. On screen, in black and white, huge hulking structures come into view against greyscale clouds. They are spomeniks, monuments built in the former Yugoslavia in the 20th century. With their great carved curves framing the sky, some look like Oscar Niemeyer’s futuristic architecture, others like ancient standing stones. They are looming, powerful, mesmerising too.
Whereas the dance feels the opposite of monolithic, in a way that must be intentional (and there’s only so much you can do with three dancers) but operates as a distraction. Against all that concrete solidity, presence and heft, their bodies are quiet, unimposing; individuals attending to their own small concerns, moving along their own rhythmic paths, busy typing on laptops while the sun explodes. (There’s social commentary there, but like the text, it’s not galvanising). In the end, it’s hard to compute all the inputs, and the dance and text can’t compete with the awe-inspiring scale of the visuals and sound.