EIF Review: Mere Mortals

Mere Mortals opens on an epic scale. Strong red light cuts through smoke across the stage as Mingxuan Wang, dancing Hope, appears alone. His lightness carries a slight nervousness. A few balances seem unsettled, and some movements seem not always to reach their fullest technical finish. Whether intentional or not, that fragility suits the moment. Before everything erupts, his solitary presence feels like the calm before the storm.

Then Prometheus, danced by Fernando Carratalá Coloma, brings fire to humankind, and the scale suddenly expands. Hamill Industries’ visuals take over a vast LED screen stretching from floor to ceiling, magnifying fire into something almost cosmic. At different moments, it resembles flowing lava, an erupting volcano or a seething red sun. A mass of dancers dressed entirely in black then surges forward from the back of the stage. Against the intense red light, the sheer force of so many bodies advancing at once is a sensory shock.

Using the ancient story of Pandora’s Box to examine artificial intelligence, Mere Mortals rarely tells its story literally. Instead, Aszure Barton builds through bodies, scale and atmosphere. Dancers twitch, ripple, run and reorganise themselves with almost mechanical precision, while large formations rise and dissolve with the growing force of Floating Points’ electronic score and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The scale of the ensemble makes the music feel visible. Forty bodies can suddenly become a wave, a wall or one enormous moving organism. Out of that mass, Nikisha Fogo’s Pandora stands apart. She emerges from the crowd and, in a series of striking solos, gives the work its clearest human centre.

It is exhilarating, but after a while the intensity settles into something almost hypnotic. The dancers continue to display extraordinary technique, and the choreography keeps producing new formations, but I begin to feel that I am seeing the same kind of power in different forms. There is always more movement, more bodies, more information.

Searching for the Mortal in the Machine

One image, however, cuts through this mass. A single dancer stands with their back to us, facing the vast screen as hundreds of images of the sky flash past at extraordinary speed. Clouds form and dissolve in milliseconds. Against it, the human figure suddenly looks very small. It feels like watching years, histories, and entire worlds pass in a single glance, as if everything we accumulate — information, memory, knowledge — could eventually become something fleeting, absorbed back into nature. Moments like this made me look harder for the “mortal” inside Mere Mortals. The dancers are undeniably human bodies, yet I rarely felt much warmth in them.

“It is exhilarating, but after a while the intensity settles into something almost hypnotic. The dancers continue to display extraordinary technique, and the choreography keeps producing new formations, but I begin to feel that I am seeing the same kind of power in different forms.“

Later, the company returns in gleaming gold instead of black. The bodies look brighter, harder, almost newly manufactured, but choreographically I could not find an equally clear transformation. Are we looking at some kind of human golden age, or have these bodies simply become even closer to machines? The work leaves that question open, and by its abrupt ending I was still unsure what this transformation was meant to bring.

Perhaps some of that uncertainty is the point. In a ballet about AI, knowledge and our constant push towards whatever comes next, being overwhelmed by speed, scale and information feels strangely familiar. Maybe the difficulty I had finding the human inside all this machinery is itself part of what the work is showing us.

Still, I wanted more room to feel the people caught inside it. The work eventually reaches towards hope and human resilience, but for me that hope arrives more clearly as an idea than something I have emotionally travelled towards with the dancers.

Mere Mortals is an impressive vision of the AI age. This may be what the AI age is doing to us, making us colder, overloaded and increasingly alike. And perhaps that is exactly why I found myself craving emotion and intimacy even more.

Featured Image: Mere Mortals – Image Andrew Perry