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Creature review: Human nature is key to a sci-fi ballet

The ballet Creature, adapted for film, worries about how we treat other primates, but its subtleties are overwhelmed by simple moralising and a metaphor that doesn’t work. The dancing is superb, though

By Simon Ings

5 March 2023

New Scientist Default Image

Jeffrey Cirio as the Creature, in a still from Asif Kapadia’s film adaptation of the ballet Creature.

Courtesy BFI Distribution and English National Ballet

Creature

Asif Kapadia

On limited release in the UK and Ireland

 

In an isolated research station, lost amid snow and ice, a highly disciplined team of would-be astronauts is putting an experimental animal through its paces. Will the Creature (deliberately left ambiguous so as not to spoil things) survive the tests thrown at it: the cold, the isolation, the asphyxia?

This is a science-fiction ballet (adapted for film) loosely based on 19th-century dramatist Georg …

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