But now to the emptiness at the center of all this. What is going on with the dramaturgy by Carmen Kovacs? Only enough to make the abstraction of the myth serve as a vehicle for all the spectacle, I fear. We don’t follow the characters as in a story ballet (I don’t think most of the audience knew who the characters beyond Pandora were). Fair enough, I like that sort of thing. But the interactions, even if hovering between the literal and the abstract, still need to have import, emotional consequence. Especially if the whole package is being sold as something that is going to make you think about the ethics of artificial intelligence.

In plunging the viewer directly into a vision of the near-future mashed up from sci-fi movies and Alien, Kovacs faces a difficult dramatic set-up. Blurrings of meaning feel more convenient than intentional. The universe before Pandora opens the box (or jar, as Hesiod’s original text has it) is already horrifying—how could the evil she unleashes make human life worse? What was there ever to save? True, it would be difficult to portray an early state of relative goodness without sentimentality, but worth the challenge. Otherwise, what moral questions are there here worth thinking about?

The emotional incomprehensibility of the protracted final section, when the ensemble returns in dazzling gold with Hope at their center, feels like a final shrug in the face of this problem. The passage plays out with baffling shifts. Hope dances with Pandora; she leaves. The lighting (by Jim French) shifts, somewhat dimming the gold bodies with a tinge of grey. In the most interesting moment, Hope picks up his own foot (as though teaching himself to walk?) and the mass ensemble (humanity?) imitate him. But there’s no sense of relationship between that undeveloped idea and the next moment, when the mass faces the diagonal and everyone stands in fourth position, rippling, before launching back into the goon-like shuffling run from the ballet’s early sections. They then rearrange into a giant arc, rippling rather crudely like fans at a football stadium as Hope flits and flutters in the center. It just feels like an attempt to vacillate the mood from major to minor (as happens in the music behind this all), to imply some mix of light and dark in the ballet’s resolution, perhaps—but a mix that has not taken us to any new plane.