Yes, yes, I know. You’ve had your fill of David Attenborough’s jeremiads, you’ve heard enough already about climate change catastrophe. You’ve got the message, ordered the electric car and solar panels: now can we talk for a moment about something less unthinkably apocalyptic?

But the quiet triumph of Figures in Extinction [1.0] is to make the crisis seem freshly urgent and emotionally engaging. The first of three scheduled collaborations between the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité’s theatrical magician Simon McBurney, presented by Nederlands Dans Theater 1, it focuses on endangered or defunct species – a subject first addressed balletically in 1988 by David Bintley in his whimsical Still Life at the Penguin Café, but treated here with a darker sense of doom and a richer, angrier poetry.

The format is deceptively simple – an animated picture book in which 22 neutrally clad dancers impersonate everything from a melting glacier and a spider orchid to a herd of caribou, a shoal of smooth handfish and a selection of magnificent lonely specimens such as Bachman’s warbler and the Pyrenean Ibex (both irretrievably gone).

It may sound like something more suited to the wall of a primary-school classroom, but Pite is too wise an artist to let it get sanctimonious – the point is as much to celebrate the grace and beauty of these phenomena as to mourn their passing, and the effect is light-footed rather than heavy-handed, and all the more potent for being achieved without hi-tech trickery.

Only the broadcasting over the Tannoy of McBurney’s six-year-old daughter asking naive questions about why the birdies are flying away struck a needlessly sentimental note: the tragedy in the annihilation of these exquisite creatures had been more poetically rendered in Pite’s delicately imaginative choreography. Much more abrasively effective is the brash intrusion of a climate-change denier, blaming it all on God and bleating about the loss of his personal liberties – a figure wittily characterised by Pite as a hyperactive attention-craving jester, attended by a pair of idiotically cavorting rabbits.

Two other slighter pieces preceded this special treat: Gabriela Carrizo’s La Ruta exudes a surreal film-noir atmosphere: it’s a foggy night at a bus shelter on a lonely road, where inexplicable disconnected things are happening to a variety of people who would be better off tucked up in bed. Eventually there’s some sort of electrical storm and a lunatic runs amok, stoning everyone in sight to death with a huge boulder before being transfigured into a totem. The significance of all this may remain deliberately elusive, but it’s an intriguing exercise, stylishly staged and performed with vivid conviction.

More conventionally satisfying is Gods and Dogs by Jiri Kylian, one of a trove of works he’s created for a company that he ran for nearly a quarter of a century. He describes it as ‘unfinished’ and an exploration of the terrain between normality and insanity, but it seems refreshingly low on concept and high on polish, charged with Kylian’s facility for making dance that is both virile and supple, elegant and muscular. Drawing on one of Beethoven’s Op. 18 string quartets and set against a shimmering curtain of gold beads, it was danced with passion by a cast of eight led by Pamela Campos and Cesar Faria Fernandes.

Rivalled in Europe only by Rambert, Nederlands Dans Theater’s three troupes have amassed a superb record over half a century for presenting modern dance in all its guises, from neo-balletic classicism to upside-down inside-out weirdness. This was a typically strong programme showcasing both its broad repertory and its marvellously resourceful dancers at their best.