Mere Mortals
San Francisco Ballet, Edinburgh Playhouse
⭑⭑⭑⭑☆

WITH Mere Mortals, the San Francisco Ballet reframes the intrinsic by tapping into timeless myth. This time round, it’s Pandora’s box.

There’s submission involved in the practice and performance of ballet. Close resemblance to compulsory figures is an abiding goal. A nascent ballet dancer’s realm of development is relentlessly swayed by evaluative authority. We shouldn’t be surprised at the perennial outcome: a continuum of dances that enact the dominance of implacable external forces.

Mere Mortals is an 80-minute non-stop dance production that manifests ballet in our current time by replacing the form’s preponderant evil magicians, controlling queens and Sun Kings with notional artificial intelligence.

It would be a mistake to look to this artform for an exposition of the eco-catastrophe of tech silos, an examination of AI book-pulping, or of how San Francisco’s tech-hub status and ensuing top-dollar citizenship has made the city unrecognisable to many. No can of worms, this outfit’s cultured and pragmatic gesture crafts a pageant-like event, as devised by a strong core team determined to pull off adventurous work in their designated media.

We hear the visceral pulses and eerie glissandi of an orchestral/electronic score by Floating Points that, with a timely KERRANG! and wild aftermath introduces a vast display of AI-generated cloud-pattern miasma (compiled by Hammill Industries), before which a lone dancer freezes in silhouette.

Excellent white-knuckle ensemble choreography by Aszure Barton offsets her involving and inventive writing for the principal figures: Pandora (danced, at the show I saw, by the compelling Jennifer Stahl), Prometheus, Epithemius and Hope.

As legend would have it, hope is all that remained in Pandora’s box, after all the evil and suffering had been allowed to escape and colonise human life. 

Given this ballet, where Hope-the-dancer (a sinuous Wei Wang) is found early doors jostling with dancers, orchestra and punters, within Edinburgh’s hangar-like Playhouse Theatre, it’s possible to see our evening as spent collectively, within the loaded box itself. 

Thereafter and metaphorically, exit portals fly open. We spew out on to the pavement and into the Lothian night, preferably as bearers of elevated impressions rather than as vectors of global suffering.

My own impressions varied. I’d witnessed uniquely achieved perpetual-motion set-pieces. I’d also regretted how no interactions had stepped beyond a stylised flow. 

Effective human alternatives didn’t materialise: a finale of animated Oscar statuettes did. I’m not automatically wowed by golden youth, but when Mere Mortals had accessed a collaborative strong suit, morale flew.

Mere Mortals will play at Sadlers Wells, London September 9-12. Box office: (020) 7863-8000, sadlerswells.com.