Mere Mortals review – a dazzling, maddening ballet for the AI age

This is a spectacular show. Literally, it is full of spectacle: as much a visual extravaganza as it is a concert, as it is dance – and a gloriously maddening piece of dance at that. The dancers are as impressive as you’d expect from San Francisco Ballet, the US’s oldest professional ballet company, and the splashy concept is bold: artistic director Tamara Rojo commissioned choreographer Aszure Barton, composer Sam Shepherd (AKA electronic producer Floating Points) and multidisciplinary artists Hamill Industries, their starting point being the myth of Pandora’s box, transposed to the current world of AI technology and what unknowns we might be unleashing.

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’s intoxicating, easily dragging attention away from the dancers’ bodies (this may be the whole point – more on this later). Those 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, countless hands crafting this first woman out of dust.

Barton is a magpie of a choreographer, always unpredictable, classical virtuosity sewn in among countless other ideas in unstoppable phrases. Jennifer Stahl as Pandora is an impressive creation, for sure, and Wei Wang is great: supple, sprightly, puckish. He represents Hope, although you wouldn’t know that without doing a bit of research. Choreographers are not duty-bound to enact a narrative; the Pandora tale is merely a creative trigger, they’d say, 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.