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11 hours ago
5
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.
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) being 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 is really impressive, a hybrid of electronics and orchestra (played live by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra). It’s full of drama and contrast, tension, propulsive urgency (hints of Stravinsky) and fascinating textures: slippery strings, woozily lurching or ricocheting arpeggios.
