The sorting hat of girlhood says: First, try ballet. And if you can’t do ballet, try jazz. And if that doesn’t work, then try contemporary dance or maybe, soccer.
The first time I watched Mere Mortals at the SFB, I hated it— for the reason that it was contemporary dance, decidedly “not ballet.” Too much swarming, androgynous dress, foreign movement. The elitist asks: Why do contemporary when you can do ballet?
One of my favorite moments in stage performance is the beginning of Act Two of Swan Lake. When the curtains open at the start of the second act to reveal an expanse of dancers in pure white, you are struck with a sense of awe, that what you see on stage could have only been born out of communion with the divine.
Swan Lake feels as if it were arranged by the hand of God. In contrast, with Mere Mortals, you can sense the striving. Behind it is a deliberate human effort to bring together art and technology via a choreographer’s search to find contortions of the body that fit the music, a musician’s making of sounds that both celebrate and warn against the advent of technology, and an artist’s experiment with tools to create imagery that captures it all. Not ethereal, but corporeal.
I watched it two more times. Mere Mortals withholds instant gratification. The divine inspiration we seek is not handed to us so easily, as it is in Swan Lake, but instead, takes time to develop. Mere Mortals asks the audience to make sense of what they see on stage, and it’s the thought we give to it that transforms it from a confusing coordination of music and movement into an enjoyable piece of art.