Danse Macabre – Death To All And Everyone
In Danse Macabre – Death to All and Everyone (2025), Fantich & Young conjure a digitally rendered, uncanny spectacle in which Death—personified and theatrical—leads a possessed procession of military fifers and drummers through a technicolour, cinematic dreamscape. This arresting animation stars Poppy the Majorette and Drummer Boy, flanked by a spectral military band composed of fallen soldiers. Clad in militarised ceremonial regalia adorned with the spoils of war—human teeth, hair, bones, red poppies and weaponry—the figures blur the line between ritual and horror. A reflection of the darker aspects of the human condition as portrayed in past and present military conflicts. Accompanied by a traditional fife and drum soundtrack this haunting work invites viewers into a world where digital performance becomes living sculpture and where Death ever triumphant, leads the eternal dance.
The work draws inspiration from Hans Holbein the Younger Danse Macabre woodcut series, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death, Francisco Goya’s etching series The Disasters of War, Siegfried Sassoon’s WWI poem Suicide In The Trenches, Richard Attenborough’s film Oh! What a Lovely War, and P.J. Harvey’s song All and Everyone. These references converge in a vivid vision of death and its entourage parading down a long and winding road strewn with skeletal remains—human and animal ribcages, spines, and bone fragments. A macabre victory march, this dance celebrates not the spoils of conquest, but the grim permanence of loss—a procession where death is the sole victor and war the eternal backdrop.
To animate this digital requiem, Fantich & Young captured their own movements using Xsens Motion Capture Suits and Manus Gloves, infusing each character with expressive physical nuance. Every detail—ceremonial masks inlaid with teeth, poppy-laden headdresses, towering equestrian statues, bone-paved roads, and a landscape of crosses and gravestones—was meticulously sculpted by the artists using ZBrush, 3ds Max, Maya, and Substance Painter, then fully realised within Unreal Engine.
At once grotesque and hypnotic, Danse Macabre – Death to All and Everyone continues Fantich & Young’s exploration of themes central to their practice: competition, hierarchy, imperialism and colonialism, winners and losers, invaders and invaded, persecutors and the persecuted and the grey areas in between A body of work that address’s parallels between social evolution and evolution in the natural world: Nature as model or nature as threat.
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