This event is part of the 2025 Rising festival.
A UK dance work set against the surreal and sumptuous sci-fi visuals of the late Jóhann Jóhannsson.
A future race is on the verge of extinction. Almost all that’s left are lone, surreal monuments, beaming into the wilderness. Across 2,000 million years, these last humans make contact to tell their story. To offer us help, and to ask for it.
Based on the ground-breaking 1930 novel by Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men was the directorial swansong from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. This dance performance unfurls against the backdrop of his film—an arresting, post-humanist meditation that he shot on 16mm black and white film, across windswept plains. Three performers merge and break apart against Jóhannsson’s stark and dreamlike images—orbiting each other like electrons—taking the sci-fi to cosmic new depths. The movement is framed by Tilda Swinton’s commanding narration and an original score by Jóhannsson and Yair Elazar Glotman, choreographed by Adrienne Hart, performed live for RISING.
Come sit among the ruins and heed their prophetic expression.
