San Francisco Ballet's Mere Mortals, now showing at the Edinburgh Playhouse until 30 August, is a spectacular collision of dance, music, and digital wizardry that reimagines Pandora's box for the age of artificial intelligence. The production, a bold commission by artistic director Tamara Rojo, brings together choreographer Aszure Barton, composer Sam Shepherd (known as electronic producer Floating Points), and multidisciplinary artists Hamill Industries, with a starting point in the myth of Pandora's box transposed to the current world of AI technology and the unknowns it might unleash.
A Visual and Sonic Extravaganza
The show is literally full of spectacle: as much a visual extravaganza as it is a concert, as it is dance. The dancers are as impressive as expected from the US's oldest professional ballet company, and the splashy concept is bold. Hamill Industries, who used some AI in their creation process, unleash something transfixing on a giant screen above the stage: morphing, pulsating pixels that look like lava or the surface of the sun. It is intoxicating, easily dragging attention away from the dancers' bodies—which may be the whole point.
The dancers appear en masse in strict manoeuvres at driving tempo. Are they an army of mortals, gods, automatons, or lines of code? Who knows. But they are moulded into large-scale moving images by Barton, just as Pandora is moulded from clay in the best bit of integration between the digital and physical worlds, with countless hands crafting this first woman out of dust.
Choreography and Performances
Barton is a magpie of a choreographer, always unpredictable, with classical virtuosity sewn in among countless other ideas in unstoppable phrases. Jennifer Stahl as Pandora is an impressive creation, and Wei Wang is great: supple, sprightly, puckish. Wang represents Hope, although that is not immediately obvious without research. Choreographers are not duty-bound to enact a narrative; the Pandora tale is merely a creative trigger, but in a story with such clear dramatic beats and such a clever contemporary parallel, it does seem a waste to essentially throw that away.
There are a few scenes where humans come to the fore, with black-clad dancers just about visible against a black backdrop: Prometheus (Joseph Walsh) and Epimetheus (Harrison James) as competitive brothers who hug and shove in one motion; a pas de deux for Pandora and her husband in which Barton's unconventional choreography steers clear of romantic tropes, and their bodies make uncommon shapes that fold in on each other.
Shepherd's Score and the AI Imagery
Shepherd's score is really impressive, a hybrid of electronics and orchestra, played live by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. It is full of drama and contrast, tension, propulsive urgency (with hints of Stravinsky), and fascinating textures: slippery strings, woozily lurching or ricocheting arpeggios. At the moment that presumably represents the opening of the box (or the AI floodgates), the screens go into hyperdrive, vomiting up dazzling imagery. Then they go dark, and we are left with only bodies, a new world—black catsuits swapped for fabulous, shining gold.
Precious bodies—is this the idea? Or mere robots? What the dancers do—how they relate, how they move—does not really change between the two worlds. There is no choreographic revelation, no judgment, it seems. Perhaps an exhortation to stop being distracted by the sparkly baubles of the AI gods and notice the real people in front of you. Or perhaps no moral at all, just a wild sensory experience, and the strangest non-ending, with the most human thing of all—feeling—frustratingly absent.
Mere Mortals runs at the Edinburgh Playhouse until 30 August, then travels to Sadler's Wells, London, from 9 to 12 September.
