On the first Saturday of May, I entered San Francisco’s opera house clothed in the style I always wear there— formal and modest— staying at the respectful distance I was taught to approach ballet with. Yet throughout the classical marble opera house was an audience of people who had not arrived to listen to centuries-old classical music, but electronic beats mixed by DJs in the same orchestra pit. The shift in the traditional setting was not only being carried by the people in festival outfits, but the long hum of static that filled the auditorium. When the warm lighting faded into a thin line of red LEDs across the stage, the last presence of a classical did as well.
A single dancer standing centerstage was backlit by the electronic lighting, her torso too was curved by the music mixed feet away from her.
The story whose premise contorted the stances and gaits of the dancers before me is both a product of the world anxiously waiting for us, and the ancient world whose warnings we turned away from. In the Greek myth, the gods created the first woman, Pandora, and gifted her with a myriad of attributes in effort to make her “perfect.” Though Pandora was also gifted a jar, which when opened, all of the spoils and evils of the universe were released onto the Earth. Only the figure of “Hope” remained in Pandora’s, and the possession of greater humanity.
On the stage, the corps de ballet marched in identical black outfits, the discordant electric beats they moved in cohesion to allowed them to embody the feeling of evil overtaking the world, such as the one unleashed by Pandora. Only this body of relentless evil was fashioned to represent the AI technology which has risen in influence over our society, and seems to have an endless grasp of our futures. Like the myth, only Hope remained amongst the corps de ballet of spoils and doom. She danced freely on stage, suggesting how our chance to escape a future taken over by technology may be our ability to live independently from it.
The ballet that unfolded for only 67 minutes onstage reminded me how a craft like ballet, primarily seen as stiff and old, can be morphed to tell the stories of our present day and use the past as its foundation. Creativity is one of the most important freedoms we have as people who live in an increasingly profit-driven society. Our human gift to create being passed onto computers could easily rob us of that freedom and turn our world into something like the cold dystopia I watched on stage. Though, our ability to create and ultimately tell our own stories may be the Hope who Mere Mortals suggested can live on in a world of greed and hatred.