Jeff Mills

Three dancers depict the twelve stages of reincarnation in the UK premiere of Techno DJ Jeff Mills’s Life to Death and Back, choreographed by Michel Abdoul, with a film accompaniment and live electronic score from Mills.

Written and directed by Mills, and the first film to be shot in the Egyptian Wing of The Louvre, the performance explores the Ancient Egyptian belief in Pharaohs taking on a human body to live on Earth before dying to be reborn. Mills’s electronic soundscapes replicate the wind, the film shows tunnels of clouds and dust swarms and the dancers arrive into life revealing their human form. Still water reflects green forests as electronic tones rise and fall – ascend and descend – and the dancers enter and retreat from shapes of light.

Visually beautiful and sonically stirring, the performance causes us to consider our own finality in the eternity of life – as the dancers remain lying on the stage, we get the feeling that they have moved on to somewhere else.