Zeus created the first woman out of clay, but that wasn’t enough. He gave Pandora what is often translated as a gift—a self-serving offering that, in contemporary hindsight, reads more like a method of control. Whatever you do, don’t open the box. Or: don’t bite the apple—knowing, of course, in his all-pervading masculine wisdom, that she would.
Zeus had little faith in the feminine capacity for self-control. And perhaps an even deeper fear: that if she did possess it, she might remain autonomous—no longer needing to subjugate herself to him.
In translations of the Greek myth of Pandora—the one the program notes for Mere Mortals ask us to loosely hold, treating the dance as a point of departure rather than a direct retelling—Pandora is described as “curious” and therefore opens the jar (later mistranslated as a box). But what if “curiosity” is simply another name for desire? Or greed? Or even aversion and hatred—the very forces the Buddha would later identify as the root of human suffering?
Of course, the gods themselves are not immune to these traits. Zeus passes them on to the woman he creates—both as a warning and as a test, one any mortal is destined to fail. What’s fascinating is how, even in a pre-social-media world of storytelling—long dominated by patriarchal authorship—Pandora’s act becomes the original sin of an unreliable, naïve, greedy, even dangerous woman. The blame for the natural woes of life shifts neatly away from the godhead.
But what if Pandora opened the box as an act of anarchy against authoritarianism? That possibility alone makes Mere Mortals feel urgently contemporary—beyond its more heavily promoted themes around artificial intelligence and technological uncertainty.
And it is precisely in that moment in the dance—among many indelible, breathtaking images—that the performance transcends time, or at least reveals time as continuous, recursive, endless. Pandora (Nikisha Fogo), having defied Zeus, opens the box. But instead of erupting into movement, she does the opposite.
She stands motionless.
Upstage, her back to the audience, silhouetted against a time-lapse sky that rushes past her. Or perhaps it is water flooding her gaze—an ocean of inevitability. Fogo is suspended as the visuals perform their own choreography, carried by a repetitive score that moves the dance she refuses to dance.
She remains statuesque far longer than stillness typically dares to last in performance. Instead, the dancers become the rushing sky, the rising seas, the passage of time, the spinning earth—while technology whirls like a dervish. In this moment, dance and technology are wed. The future is revealed.
And it is good—brilliant!
Hamill Industries, based in Spain, are the creative force behind the production’s design and onstage visuals, integrating artificial intelligence to striking effect. The imagery recalls the otherworldly visual language seen in Project Hail Mary, where light and color take on dimension and velocity—particles without origin, without a visible creator.
Three mobile LED panels shift, split, and reframe the stage, alternately dwarfing the dancers or rendering them god-like through piercing backlight. These digital environments are grounded by lighting designer Jim French, whose restraint offers a delicate counterpoint to the mesmerizing intensity of the screens.
Mere Mortals is not the first collaboration between Hamill Industries and composer Sam Shepherd—known professionally as Floating Points—but it does mark his first ballet score. Performed live by the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra alongside Shepherd, the music is an ominous, percussive electronic landscape enriched by orchestral depth. It drives the entire performance, only softening during Fogo’s central solos.
This visual and sonic architecture is matched by Michelle Jank’s costumes—black, Cossack-inflected, dystopian, perhaps even Dune-adjacent—paired with sleek, rubberized bodysuits. Within this world, Aszure Barton’s choreography commands the full company with confidence and precision, organizing dancers into grids, pathways, and interlocking chains of movement.
The choreography draws from multiple vocabularies, though solos and duets remain the most overtly balletic. Still, it is the chorus—nearly fifty dancers strong—that often steals the show, forming shifting landscapes through which the principals move. At key moments, the ensemble collapses into mounds from which soloists rise, as if ascending into a mythic realm.
Pandora’s story, however, cannot unfold without Prometheus (Joseph Walsh), whose theft of fire from Zeus sets the myth in motion. Walsh is striking in the role—angular, assured—partnering in duets with his brother Epimetheus (Parker Garrison). Their presence loosely threads the narrative forward, though they often function as interruptions to the massive choral staging, offering individualized perspectives within the larger machine.
Still, it is Fogo who remains the gravitational center. The mortal formed from clay, she melts and reforms—at times viscous, almost amoebic—then reconstitutes into human shape, seemingly lifted from the very fabric of her costume, from her pelvis to standing.
In the myth, Pandora opens the box a second time—an action only faintly echoed here as the chorus shifts into gold bodysuits for the work’s swift conclusion. This final gesture suggests the release of Hope, danced by Wei Wang with natural grace and luminosity. He both begins and ends the piece.
But perhaps Pandora opens the box again for another reason. Perhaps the myth’s creators understood something essential about storytelling: you must leave the audience laughing, or at least with a reason to go on.
Even when the weight of the future feels uncertain.
David e. Moreno
