Crystal Pite extends associate choreographer contract through a four year-long collaboration with Complicité director Simon McBurney
Crystal Pite, associate choreographer to Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) since 2008, will extend her commitment to the company through a unique, four year-long collaboration with director, playwright and actor Simon McBurney and his company Complicité.
Methods of exchange
We are living in an age of extinction: of animals, of language, of our connection with nature and of age-old ways of knowing. 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 perpetrators and victims?
Across continents, choreographer Crystal Pite and director Simon McBurney have exchanged ideas reflecting on their fears and cautious hopes for the age we are living in, and how artists can meaningfully create in the face of mass destruction.
Now NDT and Complicité present a major new collaboration that will see these world-renowned artists work together over four years to create three new works, each developed in response to the last. Their process draws on a rich and surprising array of source materials, from the sound of ice-caps melting and tree roots growing to the clarion calls of climate change deniers.
Together, Pite and McBurney will nurture a new method of exchange, embracing uncertainty and looking for sparks in the darkness.
“We have been trying to RE-CONNECT for so long and have been cut off from our sense of being ‘home’ since we left the world of animals and began to make this earth in our own image.” Simon McBurney
Cross-disciplinary
At the heart of Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) is a commitment to collaboration, curiosity, innovation and community. This includes the way the company operates as a collective; how it approaches artistic projects; the way it elevates the creative process; and enriches collaborations with international choreographers and artists that connect audiences and communities in the Hague, the Netherlands, and all over the world.
Artistic Director of NDT, Emily Molnar says: “Crystal and Simon coming together to join their creative forces is an extraordinary privilege and pleasure for us as a company. This exchange is exemplary of our new direction and vision, which is rooted in research and experimentation that extends space for cross-disciplinary approaches. We are deeply grateful to Crystal for extending her commitment to NDT and inspired by what this new chapter with her and Simon will open in us creatively.”
The piece that will premiere on 6th May as part of Dreams 360 is the first of a triptych of collaborations between these artists to be presented between 2022 and 2025.
30th March 2022
