“Mere Mortals”: Davide Occhipinti, of San Francisco Ballet. From Hamill Industries; source photo: Lindsey Rallo

The Ballet of Terror

Mere Mortals

San Francisco Ballet

War Memorial Opera House

Reviewed by Christopher Bernard

Early on the gloomy day of the performance I attended, I noted it would be an unusually short evening – a mere hour and fifteen minutes, without even an intermission. And I grumbled to myself about short shrift and lean pickings.

But the city has been pasted for weeks with black-and-white photos, scored with the vaguely ominous title and its allusion to ancient gods and goddesses, of a bare-breasted dancer ensnarled in a swirl of white sheet, like a larva breaking from a chrysalis or an angel caught in a damage of wings, flogging the new work – and so my curiosity was keen.

And, as it turned out, with more justification than I could possibly have known.

“Mere Mortals,” the first dance commissioned under San Francisco Ballet’s new artistic director Tamara Rojo (the War Memorial Opera House was illuminated in red in her honor), was introduced to the world on that chilly January evening just before a weeklong train of atmospheric rivers threatened to pummel the Bay Area with reminders of nature’s (or the gods’) ultimate sovereignty.

As it happened, we didn’t have to wait for her salutary raging: the first tempest was brewed, quite satisfactorily, thank you very much, by her most gifted, and most rebellious, child inside the compact, baroque precincts of the War Memorial Opera House.

If you didn’t read the program, you might never have guessed that this dance, which seemed entirely abstract yet was radiant with an urgent and perfectly clear meaning, was in fact about the early Titans of Greek mythology, or Pandora and her cursed jar. Or that the dance drew parallels between the fraught liberation of human power found in those ancient stories, and today’s invention, by “mere mortals,” of something that may render obsolescent even our own highest gifts – namely, artificial intelligence.

But no matter: it was clear within minutes that we were witnessing an allegory about the entwining of liberation and evil at the heart of the human experiment, and the two-sided blade that is hope itself. And it was also perfectly clear that we were in the firm and steady hands of masters of dance, music, and stagecraft; at least one spectator was left in a trance of admiration at what these “mere mortals” were able to magick in a mere hour and a quarter.

The dance unfolds in half a dozen acts, at a rough count, each broken into short scenes, most of them led by Pandora (danced with a darkly inflected, impeccable grace by Jennifer Stahl), the infinitely curious woman who unleashed woe upon the world while also freeing a Hope that encompasses a touch of that creativity of the gods that menaces as much as it promises.

Pandora danced, solo, in a long opening scene until, at its apparently tranquil conclusion, she opened her infamous jar, out of which irrupted a plague of dancers, the Evils she has freed, swarming like an ink of insects onto a stage whose primary colors throughout the evening were the starkest of whites and blacks.

From then on, the dance is an intricate play of the dialectic of ferocious good and implacable evil whose paradoxical result is an endless invention: the evils themselves are provokers of beauty, and Hope itself is serpent-like, ophidian, menacing – freeing.

The Titans –  a dark Prometheus (Isaac Hernández), bringer of fire and liberator of the most gifted of species (the program will inform you this character combines the rebellious Titan with his arch nemesis, Zeus, king of the gods and ruler of the world), and, later, his boyishly joyful brother Epimetheus (Parker Garrison) – compete to dominate the story, but fail to in the end: at the brilliant heart of the piece, Pandora and Epimetheus perform a remarkable pas de deux that actually embodies the romantic drama many fail to capture: most pas de deux are signs of romance but rarely persuade that the couple onstage actually is in love: this one did, profoundly, alchemically.

In the final act, Pandora is resorbed into the cosmos after a lengthy “2001”-inspired odyssey into a chaos of futurity, and the evils (or are they angels now?), dancing like ghosts glittering in silver, ring like an ouroboros and seethe like a horde of bullies and mean girls around the golden boy Hope (Wei Wang), who seems, briefly, triumphant over the chaos.

But even he, with his suspect minions, is finally sucked back into a darkness that remains, beyond either divinity or humanity, absolutely sovereign yet infinitely creative.

The choreographer of this dazzling evening was the Canadian Aszure Barton, who seems to have taken up the ink-black mantle of William Forsythe. In fact, this was one of the most powerful new dances I have been privileged to see since Forsythe’s “New Sleep,” premiered by the Ballet in the 1980s.

The brilliantly original score, by turns driving and lyrical – part electronic, part orchestral, with solos by violinist Cordula Merks,  timpanist Zubin Hathi, and harpist Annabell Taubl – is by Floating Points (known, more pedestrianly, as Sam Shepherd). Conductor Martin West led with thrust and panache. Equal on the bill is a breathtaking production design and visuals by Hamill Industries: Pablo Barquin and Anna Diaz, who helped shape the evening into a complex and satisfying whole. If I have any complaint, it is that the soloists were not identified in the printed program notes or the usual printed fill-in (the tyranny of the cell phone continues apace: a scrambled QR code will sesame you to the neglected information).

The gods of the Ballet were even more generous than giving us a mere work of genius: to make up for a “short” evening, they added an hour-long disco party in the lobby after the performance, with DJ, light-bearing dancers, and cash bars, that was attended by a few hundred dazed-looking audience members, some of whom let down their hair and joined in the dancing. In my mind I called it “The Party at the End of the World.”

I still felt in a bit of a trance when I got home, and posted the following on Facebook:

“I sit here at the computer, feeling relatively speechless, battered by an evening at the ballet. . . .

The words come with even greater slowness than usual, as if from a pit black as pitch, with a silence that . . .

. . . mere mortals break at their peril.

Dance needs to be cautious about evoking such gods.

Pandora danced open a treasure of evils.

Leaving, at the bottom, Hope.

Savage. Demonic. A kind of catastrophe.

If a magnificent one.“

I was left, at the end of the night, with a final question: who, after all, is Pandora? 

Friend reader: is it us?

Is it you?

_____

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. His most recent books are the children’s books If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia, the first two stories in the series “Otherwise.”

Cosmos

Then Cosmos spoke: 
“I have no end.
I have no beginning.
Nothing gave birth to me.
Nothing will bring an end to me.
I am everywhere.
I am all that was, that is,
all that will be.
I am Eternal Being
and Perpetual Becoming.
I am peace and I am war.
I am hate and love.

There are two roads to find me:
withdraw to the depths of your mind,
the darkness where nothing outside you enters,
and there we shall meet
and be One.
For you and I are One,
and have been for eternity.”

“But, Lord, you say there is a second road?”

“Yes. Look at a stone,
a flower, a leaf, a cloud,
and let it fill your mind
until your self has disappeared,
and stone and flower and cloud
fill you as though you were not there.
And there you will find Me,
and you shall know peace.”

“And when I am weary of peace,
and hunger for thrill and deed?”

And Cosmos smiled his deepest smile:
“Then you will find Me
in flexing body, ingenious mind,
in conquering will.
I am the god of tenderness,
and I am the god of power.
I am changeless stillness
and endless transformation.
Nothing is lost where I am,
nor is there any death:
there is only sleep
in dream’s eternal city.
All things I am.
Everything am I.”

Then the voice vanished in darkness
and silence of the night,
and I listened and wrote down
these words lest I forget.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a co-editor of Caveat Lector. His collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of “The Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two books for children – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia, from the series “Otherwise” – are now available.

Shopping



A sky of pigeon gray. The sun a beautiful stain.
Air without a breath. Crowds in motley,
cheerful, insouciant: no one is worrying
too much. A little girl
falls and cries out, her white shoe
behind her on the sidewalk. But her mother’s there:
no tragedy, just a few small tears.
I can smell oil, leaves, soft pretzels, grass.
The day moves like a parent
trying to carry too many presents.
Several fall, and one or two are definitely lost,
but, surely, there are more, many more, where they came from.


_____

Christopher Bernard’s collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two “tales for children and their adults” – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia, the first stories in the “Otherwise” series – will be available in December 2023.

An Ode to My Appendix

O you useless thing! excrescence waggling
at the dead end of the bag of anatomy
that sits like a judge’s wig on the maze of small
snaking intestine, waiting there like a bandit
to trap the unsuspecting on their long journey to the sewer,
and then inflate out of all proportion to sense or nonsense,
cause earthquakes across the belly’s terra firma,
send waves of fever to cloud the imperious mind,
and bring the mighty down over an undigested tomato seed!

O rag of flesh! O slippery traitor! O itchy little Finger of Fate!
O miserable reminder of our weakness and God’s power!
One cannot get rid of you soon enough! 

What a miserable twenty-four hours! Convulsed at 7 pm,
to the hospital next day for hours of tests,
then off to the ER, in suspense among a fluttering crowd
of nurses, MAs, doctors, surgeons, new patients,
then spirited to pre-op and OR, in suspense awaiting the outcome
of two emergency caesarians (women and children first!),
then, the last thing before going under, a glance
at a big clock showing ten minutes to midnight . . . 

No one still knows any reason
an appendix was ever there in the first place. Some say
it had something to do with the “immune system.” I say,
if that case, it was made to help immunize the world from the likes of us!

No, you are probably just one of God’s little jokes: 
to give idle surgeons something to keep their hands busy 
when they don’t have anything better to do on a Friday at midnight.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two “tales for children and their adults” – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia – will be available in December 2023.

“ ‘Dead’ woman bangs on coffin during her own wake in Ecuador”

—Recent headline in an English newspaper

By Christopher Bernard

It is so dark. Ay Dios!
What is that smell above my head?
I think it is candles. Yes?
Why so? And there is singing?  

No, it is sighing,
and moaning and weeping.
I think I hear
little Perdita with her husky voice.

My foot itches but I can’t reach it,
my arms are all wrapped up!
I can hardly move!
And what am I doing in a closet? 
    Graciela really needs to clean it out,
it smells of mothballs and bedbugs.
And what is it doing on the floor?

Am I dead?

But where are the angels?
Unless they are the ones weeping.
Or maybe they are devils,
and all their tears are lies.

If I am dead, I think it is very 
    uncomfortable.
My butt hurts! They really need to 
    consider adding a cushion.

I remember Beata’s face look 
    suddenly scared.
We were gossiping away – “When will 
    Teresa have her baby?
How is your niece in Nueva York?
Why did Alejandro do that terrible thing?” 
– in her kitchen? in my kitchen?
Ay! My memory is getting so bad!
Then suddenly nothing.

But I heard something fall.
Then I was asleep, yes?
But such dreams!
Such shouting
and rushing through the streets!
I thought I saw a bit of sky.
I have not looked at the sky 
    since I was little.
And there, there it was . . .

It is quieter now.
And the smell of wood is restful.
I think there is a door close to my face.
What will happen if I knock on it?
If only I could move my hands!
I think I will give it a kick.
My feet, they seem free.
Si! I could give it a big strong kick!
Even an old lady can give a 
    strong kick if she wants.

I will give it a kick,
and maybe it will open.
And then maybe I will finally see
whether there is a heaven or not.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Topic 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two children’s books, the first in the “Otherwise” series – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia – will be published by Regent Press in November 2023.

After Reading a Play by Aeschylus


Torn by the god
between the rocks of the Aegean
and the high wave of the Caucasus,
she falls on the black glass
of the stage –
Io, beloved of Zeus,
driven across the world,
maddened by jealous Hera;
turned, grotesquely, into a cow.

Prophecy lies:
there is no end
to the voice of her suffering.

The god’s love is the storm
of the ten thousand eyes of Argus.
He is blind as the sun
in its munificence
moving across the air
exalted after pleasure.

Humankind
is a child of water made of stone.
Their pain is darkness and silence.
The mouth of a hero
who knows everything and nothing
buzzes with gadflies and ashes.

Yet the woman’s cry is the daughter of generations.
It reaches us, gnarled in a distant wind.
It echoes long in the canyons of time.
It does not allow forgetfulness
or peace
in suffering traced 
in a poet’s words
wrought of gossamer and iron.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two children’s books, the first stories in the Otherwise series –  If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . (serialized in Synchronized Chaos under the title “The Ghost Trolley”) and The Judgment Of Biestia – will be published in November 2023.

Trump in Chains

It is well posed,
one must give the devil credit:
defiance shouts, frozen in fury,
at the top of grievance,
as petulant as it is silent;
the furious eye, triumphant in mockery,
disdains the camera and, through its harsh lens,
you.

But there is no gratification.
A dull ache, sequela from a blow,
taken long ago,
swells in the soul
of even the most opposed
when faced with this
humiliation.

No: no gratification,
only sorrow
at this portrait
of the folly of mankind
at war with itself, nature, and the gods,
taken in the bowels of a southern jail.
There, but for the grace of the devil,
go I.

Christopher Bernard's collection The Socialist's Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the "Top 100 Indie Books of 2021" by Kirkus Reviews. His two books "for children and their adults," If You Ride a Crooked Trolley . . .  and The Judgment of Biestia, the first in the series Otherwise - will be published in November 2023.