Inside the San Francisco Ballet Chris Hellman Center for Dance on a late fall afternoon, the top-floor studio sounded less like a practice space for pliés and tendus and more like an agitated beehive. Between run-throughs of the latest work in progress, a mass of 40 dancers broke into huddles and murmured, comparing counts. 

Meanwhile, in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, as a phalanx of rehearsal directors and assistants looked on, Aszure Barton sank to her knees.

“OK, 11 is the new 13,” the Canadian choreographer announced, reeling off numbers that refused to obey the conventions of eight-count movement phrases. “So let’s do that again, for our brains.”

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Cue the music: ominous electronic chords building to sneaky percussive tappings, then erupting into a timpani’s deep pounds. The sounds were rhythmically complicated, yet the action they stirred in this run-through was anything but dry or cerebral. 

Lines of dancers snaked by, feet stomping, formations criss-crossing until the horde faced front. Legs flew in flagellations that could have passed for a deranged tap dance. Then the lower bodies froze, and the hands swirled in a fury, fingertips joining on the pulse to form frenetic infinity signs.

Standing back on her feet, Barton laughed with delight. 

“That’s good!” she called. “Let’s go now from our pyramids moment. Let’s do that again.”

It’s been an intense fall and winter at San Francisco Ballet. Behind the scenes, as tutu-clad snowflakes seemed to leap effortlessly through “Nutcracker,” the company has been preparing to launch its 91st season — the first programmed by Artistic Director Tamara Rojo. It launches with a fundraiser gala of short works on Wednesday, Jan. 24, themed “Pandora: Curiosity Unveiled,” and then proceeds with the world premiere of Barton’s “Mere Mortals” on Friday, Jan. 26. 

Much is unknown, but a few things are clear. 

Yes, San Francisco Ballet has a well-established reputation as a boldly creative company, known as an exemplar of balletic innovation for its early commissioning of dance world iconoclasts like William Forsythe and its ambitious new works festivals. But in its nine-decade history, the company has never looked like this.

“I hope people come in with an open mind,” said Barton, who at 48 is the first woman to receive a full-length commission from San Francisco Ballet. 

She spoke to the Chronicle in a follow-up interview by phone on a recent January afternoon as she enjoyed a rare day of rest at home in Seattle. Soon, she would return to San Francisco to fine-tune her creation.

“It’s a lot,” she said of the work’s scale. “It’s going to be alive. It’s going to be stimulating. I hope it makes people excited about what Tamara is doing.”

If Barton invokes Rojo’s name readily, it’s because the two women are closely yoked in this gamble.

Barton, whose work is danced by prestigious companies around the globe, usually chooses her music and visual collaborators. For this project, Rojo came to Barton with a musical collaborator in mind: Floating Points, the stage name for British electronic music producer and DJ Samuel Shepherd, known for genre-busting collaborations with artists like the revered American saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. Together, Rojo, Shepherd and Barton all worked out the new ballet’s subject matter, artificial intelligence, in the form of a loose retelling of the Pandora myth.

The topic isn’t what Barton would have chosen on her own.

“In the past, I cringed every time I heard ‘Pandora’s box,’ because the character didn’t seem to have any agency and seemed to be just a puppet,” Barton said. 

But as Rojo and Shepherd began to discuss it, Barton began to see an opportunity to reframe the old story.

“I’ve come to think that Pandora is humanity itself, our emotionality. She represents the truth that the beauty of what we are able to create in this world is unbelievable — and yet scary,” she explained. “There’s the Prometheus possibility of a man-made creation that can doom us.”

“Mere Mortals” presents plenty of risks beyond its hot-button subject matter, as Rojo seeks to unveil the new San Francisco Ballet of her tenure.

Traditionally, the company’s season launches with a conventional story ballet or a triple bill, often featuring at least one work by a choreographer well known to Bay Area audiences — something by George Balanchine or former artistic director Helgi Tomasson. This coming season, which runs through May 5, does offer safer fare in later months — along with company premieres of ballets by British giants Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan, Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is coming in February, and Tomasson’s staging of “Swan Lake” returns in March — but by launching with “Mere Mortals,” Rojo is leading with something very unusual. 

“Mere Mortals” is an immersive, intermissionless 75-minute work with electronic music mixed by Shepherd from the pit alongside the live orchestra, followed by a nightly after-party through the production’s run, which ends Feb. 1. There are also video visuals by Barcelona-based design team Hamill Industries, designed to envelop audience members from the moment they enter the lobby.

Will longtime subscribers accept such an experiment? Will new audiences come?

Such questions are familiar to Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Her surrealistic exploration of painter Frida Kahlo’s life, “Broken Wings,” was commissioned by Rojo when Rojo directed the English National Ballet. It’s now scheduled to have its San Francisco Ballet unveiling alongside a radical new version of “Carmen” by rising Cuban-born choreographer Arielle Smith at the War Memorial Opera House later this season.

Asked via a separate video interview with the Chronicle why women still lag behind men in full-length ballet commissions (the percentage of full-length commissions by women actually declined in 2023, according to the Dance Data Project), Lopez Ochoa offered a thought-provoking take.

“When you look at female choreographers that tell stories, we don’t like to be literal,” she said. “We like to take risks in how we tell our stories, and not all directors can allow themselves to take those risks.”

But Barton and Rojo have made hits out of such risks in the past. In 2016 at the English National Ballet, Rojo commissioned Barton for a triple bill of female choreographers, resulting in Barton’s acclaimed “Fantastic Beings.” 

“Aszure is an expert at abstract narrative, at leaving a lot to the imagination and to personal interpretation,” Rojo said, sounding coolly assured. 

Growing up in Edmonton, Alberta, with “hippie” parents and two sisters — both also choreographers — Barton recalled, “We used to go in the basement and make dances, and that was my happy place.” She went on to train at the National Ballet of Canada in the early 1990s before dancing with Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal and making her way to New York. 

Her big break arrived in 2005, when famed dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov chose Barton as the first resident choreographer at his then-new Baryshnikov Art Center.

The works she’s lauded for are usually driven by long-term immersion in music, obsessive movement experimentation on individual dancers in the studio, and a willingness to follow wherever the movement itself might lead. But in 2022, for Ballett am Rhein in Germany, she created “Baal,” based on a play by Bertolt Brecht. The experience opened Barton up to the possibilities of character development and linear plot, though she said it still feels very new for her to collaborate with a dramaturge, Carmen Kovacs in the case of “Mere Mortals.”

As far as working with music producer Shepherd, “I didn’t know who he was,” Barton admitted. An early-process meeting and a creative residency together in San Francisco before she ever choreographed a step proved crucial in thawing her wariness.

Barton’s openness has inspired the dancers to put their egos aside and work in new ways, too.

“I think the moment I walked in it was clear I wasn’t going to work in a hierarchical way,” she said. “And for the dancers to be that hungry, open, and willing — to see the principals work alongside the corps members and the apprentices — was probably the most satisfying part of the process.”

It’s surely an auspicious sign that the dancers have been abuzz about “Mere Mortals” both inside and out of the studio.

“We’re all having a kind of ‘pinch me’ moment,” said corps member Pemberley Ann Olson, who counted herself a big fan of Shepherd’s musical work as Floating Points even before the project was announced. “I’ve never seen our company so in tune and together.”

Correction: The name of the ballet commissioned by Tamara Rojo at the English National Ballet by choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa was misidentified. It was “Broken Wings.” The story has also been updated to note that Aszure Barton’s work has been shown in San Francisco before.

Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.