The robots are coming in this year’s Manipulate festival of animation, puppetry and visual theatre. As AI technology increasingly takes over the world in a way that goes beyond sci-fi paranoia, Manipulate’s constituency of international performance makers are already playing with the possibilities of hi-tech.
Puppetry, animation and object-based theatre are arguably halfway there already in terms of incorporating non-human players into the mix. Out of this comes an ongoing series of pas de deux between man (and woman) and machine. So it goes with several shows in the 2024 Manipulate programme.
Ruins sees the Megahertz company in association with Feral fuse choreography and digital technology inside a video cube to explore the potential for news ways of being beyond ecological disaster.
On film, Junk Head is a stop-motion sci-fi action thriller set in a distant futurescape in which mankind has forgotten how to procreate, while a human created species has rebelled and developed its own society underground. Like Megahertz, Junk Head director Takehide Hori utilises technology in his vision, which here took seven obsessive years to bring to fruition.
HOVER, meanwhile, is a duet between American performance artist Althea Young and remote operated drone DJI Mini Pro 3. Young uses the drone as a puppet to explore increasingly prevalent surveillance culture and Silicon Valley capitalism as performer and drone skirt around each other. HOVER forms part of a work in progress double bill developed by Surge Bursary Programme.
Flesh-and-blood/tech interface is most explicit in works by Belgian theatre company Kwaad Blo and France’s Company Bakélite, who both tackle potential robot wars head on. In L’Amour Du Risque, which translates as Love Of Risk, Company Bakélite’s Olivier Rannousets up a ballet for robot vacuum cleaners that serve up a romantic candle-lit dinner with increasingly erratic returns. Kawad Blo’s Simple Machines, meanwhile, sees choreographer Ugo Dehaes demonstrate how he grows organic-looking robots in his basement, raising and training them as dancers, only for them to make him redundant.
‘Simple Machines is a show that grew organically,’ says Dehaes of the roots of his show. ‘For twenty years I worked with human dancers, then I started to imagine it would be fun to make dance with objects. I started playing in my basement with moving boxes and putting motors into plants. Then I learnt about robotics and programming, and had this idea of the simple machines.’
For Love At Risk, Rannou’s initial intention was to do something about love. The robot vacuum cleaners as waiters came next, with the imprecision of their movements creating a comedy of errors that are absorbed into the show.
“Each show I do.” Rannou says, “I play with some technical things, and if I have some problem with it, or if something breaks, I like to play with it.”
Dehaes first presented early versions of his robots as an installation, and in Simple Machines the audience is invited to take part in a presentation of the robots after the main show and attempt to teach them new movements. Responses often see audiences seeing beyond theemotion-free gizmos and putting a human face on things in a way that recalls the title of sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury’s 1964 short story collection, The Machineries Of Joy.
‘I noticed that whenever I show my little robots, everybody has this tendency of projecting emotions on to them,’ Dehaes observes. “Everybody wants to see something alive, something human or animal. I think it's a tendency we have as human beings to project ourselves onto everything we see. Some people watching are scared for them, like they might be hurting when they fall over. But I say “don’t worry, it's just a simple machine. If it breaks, I will fix it. I will make a new one.” We have this tendency for projecting humanity onto non-living things.’
But maybe even focusing on how AI is absorbed into performance is missing the point. As with every other development that promises to revolutionise things, its benefits are quickly absorbed into the process and cease to be seen as a threat as we await the next new innovation.
It isn’t that long ago, after all, when the use of video projections in anything other than avant-garde multi-media affairs was sniffed at. Today, however, it is hard to envisage a mainstream commercial touring show without such attributes embedded into the work. With this in mind, how likely are Dehaes, Rannou and the rest of the humans really likely to be made redundant by robots?
‘Not very,’ says Dehaes. ‘There is a website called willrobotstakemyjob.com, which said that a choreographer has one per cent chance of being replaced by a robot or a computer. A dancer has up to two or three per cent, because there is some CGI going on in cinema that can reproduce their movements. So I think we're still a very, very long way off, because when robots dance they are very stiff, and it doesn't look like dancing. I think we're still light-years away from there being any problem that I might lose my job.’
As for AI in the long term, ‘Maybe if you have a dictator they will do terrible things with it,” Rannou muses, “but we can do something funny and cool with it as well, so artificial intelligence is a good thing.’
The future starts here.
L’Amour Du Risque (Love Of Risk), Fruitmarket, 3rdFebruary, 3pm and 5pm. Simple Machines, Fruitmarket, 4thFebruary, 1pm, 3pm, 6pm. HOVER/I, Honeypot, The Studio, Festival Theatre, 6thFebruary, 7pm. Junk Head, Summerhall, 10th February, 7pm. Ruins, The Studio, Festival Theatre, 11thFebruary, 6pm.
The List, February 2024
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