Mythomania

This may be hard for European readers to believe, but former Royal Ballet star and English National Ballet director Tamara Rojo was not well known to any but the most serious ballet diehards in California before she accepted the artistic directorship of San Francisco Ballet two years ago. Press coverage about her appointment to lead the U.S.’s oldest and second largest dance company tended to skip over the fact that Rojo holds a Ph.D.

with distinction in theatrical arts – a biographical point that feels salient after the smash-hit success of her first production here, «Mere Mortals», in late January.

Consider the shrewdness with which Rojo conceived this package. In the winter of 2022, after an ad campaign for San Francisco Ballet’s «Nutcracker» caught flak for using promotional images generated by Artificial Intelligence, Rojo didn’t cower from the controversy. Why not court the conversation instead? After all, the San Francisco neighborhood of Hayes Valley, just adjacent to the company’s studios, has now been dubbed «Cerebral Valley» as an epicenter of A.I. start-ups. For her first production at San Francisco Ballet, Rojo seized on A.I.’s buzz. She tapped the British electronic composer Floating Points, AKA Sam Shepherd, for music. She paired him with choreographer Aszure Barton, who had previously made the hit «Fantastic Creatures» for Rojo at English National Ballet. And she tasked them with re-inventing the myth of Pandora’s Box as a meditation on the perils of new technology, with a feminist tilt.

Opening night brought a rumble to the capacious War Memorial Opera House, lit red like the bowels of hell as Shepherd’s synthesizer-driven soundscape rose in volume. The night ended with an excited standing ovation. It matters hugely that Rojo chose «Mere Mortals» as the launching point for the first season she’s curated at the company, rather than beginning with «Swan Lake» or a triple-bill. Over the 37 years that former New York City Ballet star Helgi Tomasson led the company, evening-length dance theater works in the Expressionist vein well known at almost any small European opera house were just not done here. Neither was much post-modern or electronic music embraced, beyond a shorter work on a repertory program. True, San Francisco Ballet was one of the earliest companies to commission William Forsythe, premiering his «New Sleep» back in 1987, but by and large the subscriber base has preferred neoclassic elegance set to Bach and Beethoven – even Forsythe’s «Blake Works I», in recent seasons, drew grumbles for its loud pop music from longtime company supporters in the upper balconies.

«Mere Mortals» blasted through all that. A new audience filled the opera house – shouts of «This is my first time seeing ballet!» could be heard at the nightly afterparties. Shepherd’s score gave these attendees the sonic provocation they’d clamored for, making great use of the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra (one of the best in the business) by mixing the composer’s live playing of sci-fi instruments like the Therevox 5 with gorgeous harp and violin solos. Other sections of the music highlighted the percussion section, with driving rhythms pounded out by synth drum, wood block, and timpani. Meanwhile, the glowing LED-screen visuals by Hamill Industries and the brilliantly designed militaristic costumes by Michelle Jank (sleek bodysuits for the three main players, terrifying padded shoulders for the massive ensemble) lived up to the word «immersive», and dropped the audience into a dystopian near-future remixed from popular movies like «The Matrix» and «Mad Max».

A disquisition on Artificial Intelligence, its promises and its dangers, this was not. Nor was the Pandora myth used as much more than scaffolding. Dramaturg Carmen Kovacs simplified the story, dispensing with Zeus, and launching the conflict with Prometheus (a glowering Isaac Hernandez on opening night), who steals fire from the heavens in an explosion of what looked like a cauldron of boiling red cranberries. Soon after, Pandora rises from a heap of humanity (she is created at Zeus’s command by all of the gods, though you wouldn’t know it from this production) with a spectacular video of A.I.-aided imagery, smoke and dust whirling until the tall but somehow delicate and vulnerable dancer Jennifer Stahl rises, hovering almost horizontally above the piled ensemble as the dancers pass her body about. In the myth as originally told circa 800 BCE by Hesiod, as Kovacs has noted in interviews, Pandora has no voice; here she is given a solo, and she is not wily and deceptive as the male-written myth would have it, but innocent, playful, dropping to the floor in splits and then testing out her limbs.

Pre-Pandora, the mass of humanity already seems dominated by discord and evil. Barton’s choreography is at its most inventive in these sections, sending the 40-member ensemble shuffling with swinging, jabbing elbows, hurtling them in running actions that then flip direction mid-air, snaking them through in fast turning sequences and inducing great kinetic excitement when the group simply shakes their hips and hands in opposite directions on a fast, syncopated beat. The balleticism is saved for Wei Wang, as Hope, who opens the ballet with a birdlike solo that showcases both his light, high jump and his pristinely turned out high ronde de jamb. Later, though Prometheus warns his brother against accepting a gift from Zeus, Epimetheus (the tremendously gifted young corps member Parker Garrison) welcomes Pandora and the two cavort in a gentle pas de deux full of clever floor partnering, their pawing of each other’s bodies bordering on lewd but counterbalanced by childlike sweetness.

The actual moment of opening Pandora’s box (or jar, as a truer translation of Hesiod’s original text would have it) is curiously dramatized. There is no clear action, and no literal jar or box onstage. The video effects take over and dominate for some time, transfixing imagery of clouds and weather patterns zipping at high speed to the electronic effects of the music as Pandora stands in black silhouette. After, in what seems to be her lament, an overwhelming bright white light expands and collapses to the eerie cries of the Therevox. Pandora presses her face to the floor, like a sad, shamed dog.

In discussing her dramaturgy, Kovacs has spoken of Epimetheus as a co-conspirator with Pandora, equal to her in curiosity, which would seem to re-think the myth’s original misogyny of blaming everything on a woman (a welcome re-reading with applications to Adam and Eve). But this was really not clear on stage because of the absence of a concrete box/jar focal point. With abstraction in this case comes obfuscation, alas, and a muted causality that tends to squash any attempt to think further on the ballet as a commentary on ethics or morals. The long final scene is especially peculiar: Hope, the only power left intact in the vessel, returns in neck-to-toe gold, all liquid luminosity. The ensemble is transformed to gold, too. Despite the length of the scene, the ending is still abrupt, the dancers rushing to the back, off the stage. Is this ambiguity meant to add nuance or just offer easy audience escape? One local reviewer wrote that perhaps the end implies Gen Z will save us. Wouldn’t that be convenient.

A lack of substantive questioning clearly did not trouble the cheering audience. And one could argue that whatever tough conversations the ballet avoids, Rojo has given space to in other smart ways: “Mere Mortal’s” initial run also offered separate panel discussions on A.I., and a signing and Q and A with Natalie Haynes, author of «Pandora’s Jar», the book that instigated Rojo’s interest in the myth.

Certainly, whatever one hopes or dreads for the A.I. future, the word-of-mouth excitement has been good for San Francisco Ballet’s future, which does also show significant continuity with the company’s nine-decade past. This change in leadership has not thus far generated the heated public spectacle of conflict that Tomasson’s appointment brought when he took over as artistic director in 1985, replacing the heir-apparent Michael Smuin and occasioning a mass departure of loyal dancers.

A few top San Francisco dancers defected after Rojo’s takeover (most notably Dores Andre and Max Cauthorn, who joined Cathy Marston’s Ballett Zürich), leaving the principal ranks thin as Rojo chose to hire new talent into the corps. This season, the company’s unofficial prima assouluta, Yuan Yuan Tan, will also retire, marking the end of an era for her devoted fans. But judging from interviews and private conversations, the dancers remaining (and it’s a large company, with more than 70 dancers) seem fulfilled and optimistic as San Francisco Ballet heads into its first go at Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 masterpiece «Song of the Earth». It’s also notable that in hiring new rehearsal directors, Rojo chose former company member Joanna Berman rather than new blood, and that all the rehearsal directors have connections to San Francisco Ballet dating to early in Tomasson’s era, or before.

As to the more distant future, though the company has yet to announce it, Rojo has accidentally let slip in at least one interview that Akram Khan, choreographer of English National Ballet’s breakthrough «Giselle» under her tenure there, will make a work with San Francisco Ballet next year. «Mere Mortals» announced boldly that the next steps for ballet in California will be stimulating.