Figures In Extinction is a rare beast in the world of dance. It’s not just a breathtaking spectacle, it’s also a symphony of ideas that come together with an extraordinary coherence to form a keening lament about the mess we’re in. It’s a co-production between leading contemporary dance company, Nederlands Dans Theater and leading theatre company, Complicité. The love child of these two was always going to be something special but choreographer Crystal Pite and director Simon McBurney have created something extraordinary.

It’s a work in three sections, featuring nearly thirty dancers, another twenty (pre-recorded) voice actors, spectacular scenic design, puppetry from Toby Sedgwick and Jochen Lange, set design magic (Michael Levine), and a moody, eclectic soundscape crafted by Owen Belton and Benjamin Grant that takes us to the end of the world and back again. The first section looks at what we’ve lost, the second, why we’ve lost it and the third, some of what we need to do about it. Throughout, words and movement are woven together so seamlessly that it’s impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends.

Pite’s choreography is an outpouring of love for the natural world. She gives us orchids and icebergs, birds, beasts, a shoal of hand-fish, and the world’s last passenger pigeon, Martha. The choreography and the execution of it by the languid yet feral dancers is an achingly beautiful work of art. The dancers in this first segment, ‘[1.0] the list’ are lyrical, spiky, inquisitive, wide-eyed, ferocious and fleeing, always fleeing.

‘[2.0] but then you come to the humans’ opens with the company seated, besuited, motionless on ranks of chairs. Until one of them whips out their mobile phone. This choreography is sharper, more angular, unforgiving – the language of status and progress and striving for more. ‘3.0 [requiem]’ is an adrenalin shot of grief: keening loss and the sort of yawning emptiness that can’t ever be filled.

Voiceovers and selective captions signpost the co-creators’ hypothesis just enough and, alongside some quirky movement, bring much needed levity to this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. The Climate Change Denier makes a perversely welcome appearance, bestowing his extravagant foolishness onto a temporarily lit audience – for we are complicit in this. Tom Visser’s lighting design is nothing short of magnificent. Whether we are underwater or within a glacier or on a desert plain, the crepuscular gloom allows the elusive creatures to make their flitting, sinuous, precious presence felt. Projections offer pinpoints of light amongst fronds of weed, a distant sunset and a final pulsating tableau – the closest we might get to the ever after (Jay Gower Taylor, Will Duke, Arjen Klerkx).

Hope is in short supply in this magnificent work but it’s in there, courtest of beautiful lyrical duets. The weary, the overwhelmed, the terrified and impotent clutch on to each other as if they are drowning. For we are. On sighting a rare bird, a child’s voice echoes eerily through the darkened theatre: “when will we see her again?” Thanks to us, the architects of our own extinction, she won’t.