REQUIEM FOR HUMANITY

DANCE

13 June

Recently landed: Requiem for Humanity

Gracia’s written response to Neon Dance’s Last and First Men, especially for Fjord Review.

Subscribe to and support Fjord Review.

Taking the historian’s long view, the message within Last and First Men, that “the whole duration of humanity, its evolution, and many successive species, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos,” is, to me, ultimately a comfort.[i] And so, sat in the warm confines of the Melbourne Recital Centre, will this still prove so?

There are many threads that have been woven together to create this incarnation of Last and First Men performed by Neon Dance, with choreography by Adrienne Hart in collaboration with Fukiko Takase, Kelvin Kilonzo, Aoi Nakamura, and Makiko Aoyama, presented as part of this year’s Rising Festival.

While the story may begin two billion years from where I am currently located, in true sci-fi melding of time and place, the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson initially created his multimedia response, Last and First Men, with narration by Tilda Swinton, in 2017, when it was performed live by the BBC Philharmonic at the Manchester International Festival. True to the score, ‘Task No. 2: Communicating with the Past’ could describe what evolved: Last and First Men became a film of the same name, released posthumously. Under the careful guidance of Yair Elazar Glotman, Jóhannsson’s first and last film had its world premiere at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival. Of course, the origins of Last and First Men is some years prior, again. It was, in first form, a novel written in 1930 by Olaf Stapledon. In lockdown, I had streamed Jóhannsson’s Last and First Men on my computer, and I recall longing to one day see it on the silver screen. One day, now, having dawned, it is the beginning of winter, and I am ready to be drawn into “existence transfigured” and “encounter creatures recognisably human.”

[i] Transcribed from an abridged version of the last two chapters of Last and First Men (1930) by Olaf Stapledon, narrated by Tilda Swinton in Last and First Men (2020).