Review: MERE MORTALS, Sadler's Wells

Seven years is a long time to keep a London audience waiting. San Francisco Ballet is the oldest ballet company in America and was founded in the middle of the Great Depression and the year Prohibition ended, something that perhaps tells us about the national appetite for spectacle even in lean times. 

They’ve chosen to end the wait with a show about a woman who really should have left well enough alone. Mere Mortals marks the company's first appearance in the capital since 2019, and its first under artistic director Tamara Rojo. She arrived from English National Ballet trailing a reputation for turning institutions upside down and shaking them until something interesting fell out. 

She’s handed her inaugural commission to Aszure Barton, a choreographer whose considerable career had, remarkably, never yet produced a full evening's ballet. Barton duly does the shaking and the result reimagines Pandora, not as the box-opener of the popular imagining but someone closer to the original version: a first mortal woman fashioned by the gods and handed a sealed jar along with a single piece of advice she was never going to follow. 

Barton relocates the myth to the present tense of server farms and generative panic, so that Pandora's curiosity becomes our own: the modern appetite for building magnificent new things and only later wondering what, exactly, has been let out into the room. It’s a clever concept that centres AI as the new “box”, a marvel that is proving to be as dangerous as it is intriguing.

There is a species of theatrical evening so visually overwhelming that criticism itself starts to feel like heckling a fireworks display, and Mere Mortals belongs to it. You have to admire the ambition on display here, even if you can’t work out what it's really for. Barton's ensemble writing has real menace to it: jittery, mechanised, the dancers moving as if their nervous systems were running slightly out of sync with one another, which is a more eloquent statement about our relationship with technology than anything Barton’s storytelling spells out.

Floating Points, whose unusual route to composing a ballet score was through a doctorate in neuroscience rather than the conservatoire, supplies a live score of considerable menace, and Hamill Industries' permanently-collapsing projections of weather patterns and starscapes detonates behind it all with the confidence of people who have spent a decade making festival crowds believe they're witnessing the sublime. 

Michelle Jank’s eye-catching costume design picks up the ball that the dramaturgy department dropped. Maybe she should be picking up two paychecks too. The company is initially dressed as a rather chic occupying army — a moving midnight-black mass of kilts, jackets, any individuality invisible from the uppermost tier of Sadlers Wells — and then, just as the thought that this is unintentionally a better dance interpretation of The Matrix than Danny Boyle’s intentional one, everyone reappears in gold lamé so reflective you could shave in it. Pandora, wisely, is kept apart in black leather throughout and Barton makes Jennifer Stahl the only person in the building not required to double as a dystopian extra or a disco ball.

The trouble is the myth keeps losing the fight. Strip away the synopsis in the programme notes and you're watching gorgeous, well-drilled dancers do something to do with technology and catastrophe. Wayne McGregor solved a near-identical problem in Autobiography by letting the structure itself be generated by an algorithm, presenting form as argument. Barton's form is spectacle as mood board, gestured at rather than built.

This all leaves Mere Mortals in the odd position of proving its own thesis by accident: humanity keeps building magnificent new machines and never asks whether their latest invention is more dangerous than it is worth. Zeus never explained the box either. At least he had the excuse of being a god with better things to do.

Mere Mortals continues until 12 September.

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