Aszure Barton's ballet Mere Mortals, which reimagines the myth of Pandora's box as a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence, is finally getting its European premiere at this year's Edinburgh international festival. The show, which opened in San Francisco in 2024, is inspired by the myth but reimagines the box as unleashing the perils of AI rather than the evils and sorrows of humanity.
Collaborative creation
Barton recalls the creative buzz of the studio at San Francisco Ballet, where the work was made. “Sam was fiddling around making magic in one corner,” she says, referring to Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician known as Floating Points, who plays live in the show. Digital art duo Hamill Industries designed visuals for giant LED screens. “I was in a corner with the dancers,” says Barton. “Principals and apprentices, everyone working together. It was a really shared experience, which I loved.”
It is a “curiosity for real collaboration” that drives the Canadian-American choreographer. “If it was just about me,” she says, “the work wouldn’t be as powerful.”
Pandora reimagined
The idea for the ballet came from San Francisco Ballet's artistic director Tamara Rojo, who took over the company in 2022 after 26 years in the UK, notably as a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet and artistic director of English National Ballet. “She was very hands-off in terms of the work itself,” says Barton, but Rojo assembled an international team for the commission, which garnered rave reviews for the intensity of its scale, score and visual impact.
Barton had worked with Rojo before, choreographing Fantastic Beings for English National Ballet in 2016. The 50-year-old isn't well known in the UK, although she has been choreographing for more than two decades with major companies worldwide, as well as for her own company, Aszure Barton & Artists. She was mentored by Mikhail Baryshnikov at his Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York. “On day one, he said, ‘Never ask me for money’ and ‘I like your willingness to work your ass off.’”
In making Mere Mortals, the richest conversations were not about AI but about the myth of Pandora, “a myth that had been misconstrued”, says Barton. “A false story spread throughout history of this powerful being who didn’t have any agency and was toxic.” She says, “One of the things I was really driven by was the fact that she was an agent of change.”
Human connection
Barton also drew on the dancer in the lead role, Jennifer Stahl. “Ab-sol-utely incredible!” she says of Stahl. “This stunning, powerful, amazing woman that I was getting to create with made my job very sweet.” Stahl, who has danced with SF Ballet for 20 years, will return to the Pandora role, having had a baby between premieres.
The show's theme was all around her in San Francisco, the AI centre of the world. “You're living the reality,” says Barton, “the systems and the chaos and the beauty, and I was really intuitively responding to that moment.” She uses lots of tech in her working life, especially video, to document and analyse her creative process. “I love dance because it's so human and so beautiful. You can do some cool stuff with technology, but there's nothing like sharing a space with a dancer.”
She is not anti-AI. “That's cool,” she says of AI as a creative tool, but her own creativity is sparked by interacting with dancers. “You never have choreographer's block if you're open to what's right there in front of you,” she says. “Dancers are heroes. They don't get credited enough for their input.”
Barton hopes the creativity that went into Mere Mortals is tangible to the audience, wanting them to be “showered with energy”. She says she has to be at the back, “bouncing up and down like I'm at a rave”. There are 87 performers in the show, including dancers and musicians from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. “Masses of people sharing themselves, sharing this raw beauty,” says Barton. “It's delicious.”
Mere Mortals is at Edinburgh Playhouse, 28-30 August, and Sadler's Wells, London, 9-12 September.
