Last and First Men at the Coronet Theatre

At the intimate, yet austere Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill, Last and First Men presents less as a conventional dance performance and more as a sombre reflection on humanity’s distant future. Created by the contemporary company Neon Dance and directed by Adrienne Hart, the production draws its inspiration from Last and First Men, the visionary 1930 speculative novel by Olaf Stapledon. What unfolds onstage is a hybrid work of dance, film and music, anchored by the haunting cinematic legacy of composer director Jóhann Jóhannsson and the cool, otherworldly narration of Tilda Swinton.

The premise is strikingly grand and harrowingly whimsical: humanity, billions of years hence, reaches backward across time to address us the “first men”. This future civilisation, the last remnant of humankind, speaks from the brink of extinction, contemplating evolution, memory, and the fragility of existence in a dystopian Sci-Fi frenzy.

The staging mirrors this sense of temporal vastness. Jóhannsson’s black-and-white 16mm film looms across the stage, its monumental sculptures, Yugoslav “spomenik” memorials rising like relics from a civilisation that might have already forgotten itself.

Against this cinematic landscape, three dancers, Fukiko Takase, Aoi Nakamura and Kelvin Kilonzo, move with an uncanny precision. Their choreography suggests bodies that are recognisably human yet subtly altered, as if evolution has reconfigured the grammar of gesture. Limbs unfurl in elongated arcs, communication seems almost telepathic, and emotion is stripped to a base minimum. The effect is less storytelling than speculation: movement as anthropology of the future.

Last and First Men ultimately feels less like a traditional theatrical event and more like a philosophical, futuristic installation: austere, meditative and occasionally elusive. It demands patience and a willingness to sit with ambiguity and embrace abstraction. For some viewers, that austerity may verge on detachment; for others, it opens a rare space for reflection in an age of relentless narrative and spectacle.