I’d guess that there’s no question that the dancers of the San Francisco ballet are world class. But how do you depict the advent of AI in dance? “ In the curators words” on the programme, it tells us that it resembles the pain and suffering which entered the world when Pandora opened her famous box.
The music provided by Sam Shepherd aka 'Floating Points’, was, unusually for modern ballet, performed live by the Scottish National Orchestra in the pit. It was kind of techno-Shostakovich. We are treated to flowers and spangling starbursts on video screens as the backdrop to the dancers.
Wearing dark, padded jerkins and the black baggy skirts of Russian dancers, Orwellian ingsoc Party grandees resembling praying mantises move sideways with regimented, mechanistic jerks like relentless typewriter carriages. They scrum down into conflab huddles with only their heads lit. I'm guessing they're supposed to represent oppressing impulses on a circuit board. Who knows? Becoming one creature, they form into anthills of lava out of the top of which a sole figure emerges.
The lead female dancer is sinuous to the point of liquidity with pipe-cleaner limbs. In her spandex, she resembles shiny, black electric flex.
At one moment she stands motionless, like a numinous Gormley figure, for several minutes in front of a video screen on which appears the making and unmaking of cosmoses and worlds - all racing storm-clouds, lightning bolts and volcanic eruptions; geology speeded up. This morphs into an achingly beautiful pas de deux with the principal man. The two dancers interact like the mating ritual of stick insects.
The rest of the company then re-emerge, molten in sparkling gold lamé, spinning and circling around the couple like a Matisse whorl. It's all curving lines, beauty and humanity until the twitching Party grandees reassert themselves at the end.
Rather than evoking AI specifically, it could have been about any routine crushing of the human spirit by dehumanising industrial processes going right back to Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. They made a damned good fist of it though and the dancing was arresting and magnificent.
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