Rehearsing the future

The age of intelligent machines is beginning, and — as we like it in the theatre — it begins with a conflict. For a long time we thought machines would take over the heavy, monotonous work while we kept the best part for ourselves: free time and creativity. Reality has turned out stranger. Among the first things neural networks changed was the world of cultural production. Already today every element of a performance can be synthesised. In prospect, without human involvement at all.

At the same time it is plain that AI has become indispensable across the most varied spheres of life. Its positive influence is beyond dispute. Virtual assistants, creative tools, robotics, the use of AI in industry, healthcare, transport and education all bring substantial results. An awareness of AI's role in the life of the present-day human being and in the future — together with the eternal, inescapable conflict inside this theme — is superb material for theatre.

We called our laboratory «Neurotheater: rehearsing the future» because rehearsal is theatre's method of investigating reality. Theatre advances hypotheses and studies the world through action and the word. Knowledge is born in the rehearsal room, is tested by an audience, and becomes part of culture.

Artificial intelligence is already changing how text, image, music and video are made. More than that — AI is changing the human being, the spectator included. Within a few years theatre will be working with a different audience. That spectator will talk to models, generate images, see synthetic faces and hear artificial voices every day. The mere presence of AI on stage is quickly ceasing to be an event. Far more important is to understand how the human being changes alongside it. So the central subject of the laboratory's research is the human being in the age of intelligent algorithms.

The age of AI has only begun, yet one thing is already clear: tools change faster than curricula. Professions are shifting shape. Knowledge manages to grow old while it is still being absorbed. What gains value is the ability to begin again.

In most professions the state of being a beginner is considered temporary. In theatre it is built into the very method of the work. Every production starts at the moment when the keys to it are still to be found. Even the most experienced actor comes to the first rehearsal without a ready answer. Rehearsal turns the beginner's state into a professional method: to try, to err, to change the decision, to start again and keep moving.

That is why theatre can pose one more essential question: how are we to live and act in a world where the ground we are used to keeps shifting?

Fear, bewilderment, exhilaration, the loss of professional certainty become material for the laboratory just as much as a digital twin, a generative text or an algorithmic character.

In our rehearsal room we are looking for a language in which theatre can speak about AI, with AI, against AI — through the body, space, time and the presence of an audience. We rehearse the future while the future rehearses us. And we ask ourselves:

What does neural-network technology change in the relations between people on stage?

Can artificial intelligence become a true medium for theatre — an environment that gives rise to its own language, its own forms of presence and its own ways of meeting the audience?

Can the aesthetics of generation — variability, probability, the absence of a final version — become such a language? And what other aesthetics might neural networks propose?

Which ethical, social and other conflicts around AI could become the material of new plays — what singular utopias and dystopias, plots and worlds is our time able to offer?

Who becomes the author of the stage if the machine proposes the material, the playwright chooses, the director assembles and the actor embodies?

What happens to the depth of theatre work when generation accelerates every stage of production?

Is a machine capable of improvising, or is its freedom born only in the eyes of the spectator?

What happens to live presence on stage when a digital twin, a robot, an algorithm appears beside the actor?

Theatre grew out of ritual. Can artificial intelligence give rise to a new rituality, a new processuality — the performance as a continuous process that changes together with the audience, the space and the time? If so, what will it be like?

What can theatre give to algorithms, and to the people of the age of intelligent machines?
Who gets the final line — the human or the machine?