Requiem for Humanity

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.[1] And so, sat in the warm confines of the Melbourne Recital Centre, will this still prove so?

Performance

Neon Dance: “Last and First Men” by Jóhann Jóhannsson and Yair Elazar Glotman, narration by Tilda Swinton

Place

Melbourne Recital Centre, Victoria, Australia, June 7, 2025

Words

Gracia Haby

Neon Dance in “First and Last Men.” Photograph by Parcifal Werkman Photography

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.”

Neon Dance in “First and Last Men.” Photograph by Miles Hart Photography

Takase and Nakamura stand facing one another, each wearing a mask which covers their entire faces. A distance apart, they are connected, literally, by the long white threads which gently run between them. Calling upon spider morphology, in which moored threads attach to different surfaces, the lines of the web hang in a soft curve.[2] Their movements convey their communication through telepathic means, with fingers stacked one atop the other in suggestion of an evolutionary twist. Attuned to one another and their surroundings, they rely on prompts beyond the visual. With each thread indicative of a separate line of meaning, how I read what unfurls is wide open.

The film, projected directly onto the plywood panels of the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, in this context, reads like the contour lines of a map. Just as the film is a collaboration with many, a new component, the warm and ribboned surface of the hall, adds to the collage. While the timber linework transforms and skews the vantage point to echo the “strangely distorted and perverse” materiality of the film, I miss being able to read the subtle mid-tones in Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s cinematography. To increase the ambiguity of time and space, Jóhannsson had elected to shoot in 16mm film; perhaps the resulting darkening of the palette, when projected over honeyed timber, will amplify this sensation? As shapes loomed only to dissolve into the walls, as film and dance continued to meld, anything more concrete, it transpires, might have clipped the cosmic theme. What I lost as a film screening, I gained as a regenerated amalgam. In costumes designed by Mikio Sakabe and Ana Rajcevic, echoing the black and white palette and “revealing the underlying muscles,” dancers Takase, Kilonzo, and Nakamura became “these fantastic beings . . . covered with fur or mole velvet”. With their hands raised overhead, searching, they suggest “the upward-looking astronomical eye” that “when fully extended… reveals the heavens in as much detail as [our present-day] astronomical telescopes.”

Neon Dance in “First and Last Men.” Photograph by Miles Hart Photography

Kilonzo, pitched high and forward, with legs bent, and body extensions like long ankle spurs the colour of exposed bone worn smooth by the elements and time, makes visible what lies within the body. He pierces the negative space at the heart of the matter. With his silhouette layered over the projection, affixing human form where there is an invitation to do so, this requiem is about human nature, and the end of humanity.[3] In a measured tone, Swinton informs (by speaker), “some characteristics are common to all of us.” Filmed at several memorial sites—spomeniks—which seek participation through their design (staircases, pathways, platforms) and meld into the landscape, Kilonzo’s active silhouette serves as a memory repository.[4] Before the Novi Travnik spomenik —a known, living repository, decontextualised and presented as an unknown, otherworldly site two billion years away, in film—dance simultaneously draws roots to the past while speaking to the present. As Nakamura explains, “the integration of past experiences within the present body” creates a series of diverting pathways.

In fusing chimera-like fabrications, cast aside earlier, the dancers summon memories from deep within themselves. Takase and Nakamura, each with single-limb elongations now sprouting from their left and right hands, alter their movements to reflect the shared space their unified extension imposes. “Great are the stars, and humankind is of no account to them”, concludes Swinton, and I leave content in my role as a small pebble in the giant universe. But a flash, quite.

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

First and Last Men (1930) by Olaf Stapledon, narrated by Tilda Swinton in “Last and First Men” (2020).
“The sculpture mimics a spider’s web, which is moored threads connecting different surfaces. This represented the human capacity for telepathy introduced in the book. It references the mind-to-mind connection humans evolve to share. Its tenuous nature also made the movement challenging for the dancers to share.” Adrienne Hart in interview with Laura Tooby, “The Dance of Last and First Men,” To Be magazine, https://tobemagazine.com.au/the-dance-of-last-and-first-men/, accessed June 6, 2025.
“Maybe it’s a big ask for people to sit for 70 minutes and look at concrete and hear about the end of humanity, but hopefully we’ve taken all these elements and made something that is beautiful and poignant. Something like a requiem.” Jóhann Jóhannsson in interview with Andrew Male, “Jóhann Jóhannsson: Last and First Men,” The Barbican, https://www.barbican.org.uk/digital-programmes/johann-johannsson-last-and-first-men, accessed June 8, 2025.
Translated from the South Slavic languages of Slovenian, Macedonian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, the word spomeniks, refers to memorial sites built during the Yugoslav-era. “Spomeniks: A Heroic and Terrible History in Concrete,” GreyScape, https://www.greyscape.com/spomeniks-a-heroic-and-terrible-history-caught-in-concrete-2/, accessed June 6, 2025.
Designed by Bogdan Bogdanović and located in what is now Bosnia & Herzegovina, the Necropolis memorial “commemorate[s] the roughly 700 civilians who died at this site in a brutal massacre committed by occupying Ustaše forces in August of 1941.” Spomenik Database, https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/novi-travnik, accessed June 8, 2025.

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