San Francisco Ballet bring Mere Mortals to Sadler's Wells from 9 to 12 September 2026.
San Francisco Ballet is the oldest professional ballet company in the United States, founded in 1933, and for the last decade it has been the most restless of the big American companies — commissioning heavily, programming new work against the classics, and importing European choreographers who would not otherwise cross the Atlantic. Tamara Rojo, who ran English National Ballet for a decade, has directed it since 2022, which is why a London visit under her name reads as a return rather than a tour stop.
Mere Mortals is Aszure Barton’s full-length retelling of Pandora, made for the company in 2023 to an electronic score by Sam Shepherd, who records as Floating Points. It is the largest thing the company has commissioned in years: a myth about the first woman and the box she was told not to open, staged with the box reimagined as a technology nobody can put back.
They bring it to Sadler’s Wells from Wednesday 9 to Saturday 12 September 2026, and four performances is the entire British run. It opens the theatre’s autumn season of visiting international companies, which continues with Alvin Ailey the following week and English National Ballet after that. A full-length American commission set to a British electronic score is not a thing London gets offered often. Floating Points has not scored a ballet before.