Last and First Men is an ambitious work of science fiction set two billion years in the future, coming to Melbourne Recital Centre.
Written by Olaf Stapledon and first published in 1930, the novel encompasses civilisational collapse, genetic engineering, cannibalism, the emergence of a telepathic hive mind, and the expansion of the human species into a multitude of sub-genders.
Stapledon’s book was the basis for the first and only film directed by the late Icelandic composer, Jóhann Jóhannsson. Also titled Last and First Men, the 2020 film combines Jóhannsson’s score with narration by Tilda Swinton.
Last and First Men – Neon Dance
- Sat 7 June
- Melbourne Recital Centre
- Get tickets here
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There are no actors in the film – rather, the visual action centres on roaming, black and white images of World War II monuments in the former Yugoslavia, from the Croatian village of Podgarić, to Bihać in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Mitrovica in Kosovo.
Last and First Men is now also the name of a contemporary dance work produced by English experimental dance company Neon Dance. Director and choreographer Adrienne Hart first saw Jóhannsson’s film at home during COVID lockdown.
“The minute I watched it, all of these images spilled out of my brain in terms of moving bodies and imagining how they could respond and work with those images that [Jóhannsson] so beautifully presented,” Hart says. “It felt that there was space there to work with those images and do something that would add value to what Jóhann produced.”
Last and First Men will have its Australian premiere at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Saturday 7 June as part of this year’s RISING festival. The work builds on and incorporates Jóhannsson’s film, retaining the images, Swinton’s narration and the original score, which Yair Elazar Glotman completed after Jóhannsson’s death in 2018.
Hart worked on the choreography for Last and First Men with the work’s three performers, Fukiko Takase, Kelvin Kilonzo, Aoi Nakamura. Hart initially imagined the work would feature several more dancers, but given the dystopian nature of the text, three felt like the right number.
“[It’s about] the human race slowly falling apart and I quite liked that there was almost just these relics of bodies left fighting it out to the end,” Hart says.
Last and First Men was first performed at the Science Museum in London in May 2023. The same three dancers have stayed with the work ever since, and their input has been essential to the work’s development.
“They’re really committed to the work, they really believe in it,” Hart says. “Fukiko, for example, she can extend her legs into the most incredible poses you could possibly imagine, but then I also got her doing stuff that was really drawing upon her history in her family and embedding that into the work in relation to the story.
“Kelvin has a range of different techniques from urban dance styles as well as contemporary. What he was able to do with his body in terms of embodying those ideas, it was just phenomenal. It was very much a dialogue between us, but it was what he could offer that really helped translate, in a genuinely interesting way, that text.”
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Collaboration is central to everything Hart does with Neon Dance, the company she founded in 2004. Her background is in contemporary dance, but Neon Dance’s work stretches beyond the confines of this medium.
“The founding principle was to bring together artists, technologists, scientists,” Hart says. “So, people from different disciplines to work together to create something that we couldn’t create alone.
“I’ve always said that I work with design and technology, but the body is a central tenet. So that’s the guiding principle – not necessarily dance per se, but the body.”
One of Hart’s regular collaborators, the artist and designer Ana Rajcevic, also contributed to Last and First Men. Rajcevic created body extensions for the dancers, drawing inspiration from spider morphologies and spiders’ ability to create web structures.
“She really expands upon possibilities of the moving body with these body extensions, or artefacts as she refers to them as,” Hart says.
Hart adds, “Me and Ana have this common interest around the future-body and exploring what the body is and what it can do.
“Being able to channel this sci-fi novel that was very much around the future-body meant that there was that nice kind of throughline for us as a company.”
Last and First Men – Neon Dance plays at Melbourne Recital Centre on 7 June. Get tickets here.
