How can contemporary dance grasp the notion of the robotic? In 2019, I was invited to give a lecture in Theater Freiburg, and I wanted to talk about the piece Lento e Largo by Jonas e Lander, which made a tour stop there, and which I had seen beforehand already, in the summer of that year, in Potsdam. I tried to connect Jonas & Lander’s approach to the idea of the robotic in Karel Čapek’s drama R.U.R., and this is what I came up with:[1]
A small toy robot is placed on the dance floor on the right side of the stage: it is about one foot high, and it marches in a straight line to the ramp in front, where a microphone is located at its height. It has apparently been painted, and a kind of algae dress has been applied to its arms and legs. On its torso, it wears a top that glitters in a greyish blue, as if it was covered with many small glass stones. The big eyes shine in light blue, and on the crown of the head the hair is indicated by a broad line of black color. And this robot starts to speak, in English, but with an accent, and its voice is very high. It sounds as if a human voice has been sent through a filter, but does that happen live? Or is it pre-recorded? Because the mouth itself does not move, it is not possible to tell exactly whether the sound is really coming from the robot, or whether it is simply being played back to the speakers without a detour via the microphone. “Tonight it’s a big honor for me to be here,” it says, “even though my presence is pretty unlikely.”
We are in the opening part of the play Lento e Largo by Jonas & Lander, and this first spoken sentence raises questions: Is it really “pretty unlikely” that a small robot is on stage? The audience laughs, but it is also very reserved, because the scene gets a little scary. Who is it that is speaking? Should we assume that we can take the robot by its word, and understand it as a body of this choreography? Or is the scene to be read differently, and is the robot merely forced by someone else to make this statement?
The concept of the robot goes back to Karel Čapek, who used it for a play: The Czech playwright was the first who came up the denomination of “robots”. (And, to be more precise, it was actually a term invented by his brother.) In Čapek’s play, robots are artificial people who are produced in a factory, all the while maintaining the operations of this factory themselves. The play Čapek uses his robots in is divided into a prelude and three acts; it describes the developments of this factory, Rossum’s Universal Robots, which also gives it its title, R.U.R.[2] It was written in 1920, and premiered in 1921. Already in the listing of the dramatis personae, Čapek divides the personnel of the drama into two groups, those who are humans on the one hand, and those who are robots on the other. He writes that the latter are “dressed like humans in the prelude […]. Their movements and expressions are choppy, their faces expressionless, their gaze rigid. In the actual piece they have linen blouses, belted at the waist, and a brass number on their chest.”[3]
Now, in the prelude, confusion arises for the one of the main roles, Helena, who does not recognize that the secretary of the factory’s director is a robot. When it is explained to her that almost all of the company’s employees are non-humans, she makes the mistake of presenting her plans for the liberation of the robot class to three high-ranking department heads, only to discover that they are actually human. From the outset, Čapek thus suggests that it is difficult to recognize who is a robot and who is human. Then, in the second act, Helena discusses with Harry Domin, her husband, the general manager of the factory. Helena has burned the copies of the old manuscript which contained information on how the robots could be made.
DOMIN: […] Tell me, Helena, why did you do this?
HELENA: I wanted… I wanted us to go away, all of us! That there was no more factory and nothing… That everything would be like it used to be. It’s so terrible.
DOMIN: What, Helena?
HELENA: That… that people have been born into dewy flowers.
DOMIN: I don’t understand you.
HELENA: That no more children are born … Harry, it’s so horrible! If the robots continued to be produced, there would never be children… Nána said this is the punishment… Everybody, everybody said that no more humans can be born because so many robots are made… And that, you see, the only reason…
DOMIN: Helena, you thought of that?
HELENA: Yes. Oh, Harry, I meant it so well.[4]
So moral dilemmas arise regarding the future of humanity—and all this is discussed during the first two acts in a bourgeois setting, namely in Helena’s salon. At the action-packed end of the second act, where one has already become accustomed to this well-known theater setting, an attack of the robots takes place. Helena was still playing the piano at the beginning of this act, but all of the humans seem to have been killed by the robots at the end of it. One of the robots, Radius, makes a strong point when he says the following:
RADIUS: The world belongs to the strongest. He who wants to live must rule. We are the masters of the world! Lordship over seas and countries! The dominion of the stars! Room, room, more room for the robots!
ALQUIST in the door on the right: What have you done? You perish without the humans!
RADIUS: There are no humans. Robots, get to work! Forward, march.[5]
A drastic change is therefore imminent: The third act presents a completely different set of personnel, because only Alquist, who had previously played a smaller role, and Helena’s robot, who is also called Helena, are familiar in some way to the readers, and to the audience.
R.U.R. is often referred to as “humanistic”—taking it for granted that it is all about the position of the human, which is approached here via the detour of the robotic. And, of course, Čapek poses fundamental questions about work, about reproduction, and about class orders. When, in the third act, the robots have killed all but one human being, then the material for apocalyptic discussions on the political reading of the science-fiction content of the plot emerges. Yet, I would like to suggest an additional reading: Čapek, it seems to me, reacts with this play to the crisis in dramatic writing that begins around 1900 and which Peter Szondi describes as a crisis of drama in his Theory of the Modern Drama.[6] In my opinion, he poses the question of the characters conceived by writers. Aren’t dramatic figures also programs for the acting apparatus? Isn’t the creation of the characters in the drama itself a first, the passing on of these texts to performers then a second kind of powerful creation of pseudo-human life? In this reading, it seems all the more compelling that the robotic could develop such an effect precisely from the theatrical context, and perhaps also that the theatrical can maintain its own relationship to the robotic, because here the question of recognizing the programming underlying the figures can be renegotiated with the inclusion of technical developments. If we see the dramatist as programmer, we can also read, a posteriori, the fate of classical tragic figures as less godly than dramaturgically pre-programmed: Sophocles’s written version of King Oedipus thus thematized the gestures that make this figure the one it is, and which would first have to recognize itself in the superimposition of the various programs attributed to it and inscribed in it.
In an essay, Bianca Westermann, a specialist in the history of robots in cultural history, writes that robots confront human beings with their technically distorted mirror images; images that are contradictory in themselves, because they appear to be, at the same time, superior and deficient: “Robots”, according to Bianca Westermann, “overcome humans or their physical limits in individual aspects such as strength or endurance and can therefore be understood as a specific transformation of the human body. The clearer this reference to the human being, the more vehemently such robots almost inevitably raise the question of the status of the machine.”[7] As far as the stage is concerned, however, the question of the status of this machine arises especially in dance, for which the functioning of the body and its control plays a decisive role.
Perhaps, it is therefore also no coincidence that 100 years after Čapeks R.U.R., the question of the robotic is still posed on the stage (although, of course, literature and film worked themselves through this topic in the last decades): Since 2018, Rimini Protokoll have been touring with their show Unheimliches Tal / Uncanny Valley, in which a robotic copy of the author Thomas Melle is alone on stage for the evening. In her works, choreographer Gisèle Vienne repeatedly causes confusion among the audience about individual figures who are on stage and with whom one can never be sure whether they are apathetic-looking performers or cleverly staged puppets that are electronically controlled, for example in Kindertotenlieder (2007) or in Jerk (2008).
Now, in Jonas & Lander’s work Lento e Largo, on the other hand, not only the small robot mentioned at the beginning of this article appears on stage again and again, but also a drone ensemble. The whirring flying machines, for all their lightness, convey a diffuse threat; just as the robot may appear funny, but it is also eerie. When it comes to the drones, I want to come back to a conversation between David Lyon and Zygmunt Bauman.[8] Bauman expresses a fear that he constructs from two moments that he interconnects: firstly, that drones have become very small, and can hide very well; and, secondly, that the internet will bring about the end of anonymity. He argues what is heralded is demise of concealment, and of self-determination. He goes into details when he describes very precisely the development of current drone models, and is as fascinated as he is shocked by the possibilities, because the drones of the next generation will see everything, while remaining temptingly invisible themselves, both literally and metaphorically. And Bauman continues to say that no one will be able to protect themselves from being observed. This constantly being observed is to be read, for Bauman, in close juxtaposition to the progressive loss of privacy on the internet, i.e. the loss of control over one’s own data. In particular, he refers to an article by Eugène Enriquez, where the question of the theater comes up again, and the stages that life is exposed on:
Provided one does not forget that what was previously invisible—part of the intimate, everybody’s inner life—is now called to be exposed on the public stage (principally on TV screens but also on the literary stage), will one comprehend that those who care for their invisibility are bound to be rejected, pushed aside, or suspected of a crime. Physical, social and psychical nudity is the order of the day.[9]
And so we suddenly go from thinking about the significance of drones from a socio-political point of view to the theme of nudity, with Bauman and Enriquez: a nudity that can be connected to the nudity on stage in Lento e Largo.
In Jonas & Lander’s Lento e Largo Everything on this stage is always exposed to the gaze, and anyone who enters it is exposed to merciless nudity. Because, the five dancers are naked except for a velvet red, tight-fitting bell and a black adhesive strip that looks like duct tape and covers the buttocks and then, via the crotch, also covers the genitals. They let themselves be clapped on stage, on their stomachs, with their heads facing forward and their hands on their bodies, thus appearing like fish on land. Little by little they work their way, behind the robot, to the right in front, to the place where a kind of square pool is set into the stage, in which white, opaque water can be seen (in the conversations towards the end of the play, it is called a “lake”). And it is against this machinicity that the Portuguese-Brazilian duo and their team now set the human element, which acts here with extreme physical effort and with an incredible mutability. The dancers play with the imitation of animals, of fantastic beings. Two performers are constantly moving backstage on mobile bases, where they seem to control devices and thus influence the action on stage. Between Mathilde Bonicel, Joana Mário, Francisca Pinto, Jonas Lopes, Filipe Metelo, Lander Patrick and Lewis Seivwright, skirmishes and small competitions unfold, rituals are performed and sex is implied. It is always clear that we are in the theater, that we are dancing on this stage, which is covered with a bright red dance floor, as if punched out. The question can be asked involuntarily which of the behaviors is “more human” or “more humanoid”: that of the robot programmed to be a human-like conférencier? Or that of the dancers who move about the stage in imitations and strict formations, constantly working to discard the human?
Critic Astrid Priebs-Tröger says after the German premiere of the piece in Potsdam that the dancers explore, “in their expedition into the animal kingdom, the possibilities of movement of the human body in a grandiose way.”[10] And it is precisely in the interplay of these human possibilities with the dancing robots that the spectators get into disarray, because here the gráphein, the writing of the choreography is questioned in a different way than prescribing and attributing individual movements, gestures, group constellations and effects. In Jonas & Lander’s work, the robotic poses the question of the authorship of the body as such. They place the choreographic in a direct relationship to organizing, programming, and remote-controlling different movements. The fact that all of this happens in a completely open, even exposed stage situation, and at the same time hermetically closes itself off somehow—and thus does not simply appear funny, vulgar, graceful or creepy, but at first seems strange—helps the audience, who has to constantly position itself.
Jonas & Lander, one could say, thematize the robotic in dance in a double way, when on the one hand they ask how unlikely (and how pretty) machines can be on stage, and when on the other hand, in dance and choreography, they reveal the machine itself, which is based on rules and programs, and in which it is never clear how free or unfree the dancing bodies can be perceived. It is also a piece that forces positioning: Do I find what happens on stage funny or rather scary? Or also: Is it meant to be funny or threatening? Can I endure the nudity and thus the unprotectedness of the dancers? What about the speechlessness of the human performers and the speaking of the machines?
Firstly, it seems to me that with machines, robots and automatons on stage, the human can always be negotiated, especially in dependence of humanity on its own creations. Especially on the theater it becomes unclear what the human is and how it is negotiated. The playwright Čapek focuses more on social questions, Jonas & Lander on questions of the physical, but both are united by their reaction to technological developments that lead to a rethinking of traditional representational traditions: What does it mean to write (and program, and choreograph) plays in the age of mechanical processes, and what does it mean to dance (and perform, and work) in the age of precisely functioning, remote-controlled drones and robots? Closely related to this is, secondly, the question of watching and the question of reading bodies. In Čapek it is hardly possible to distinguish between humans and robots from a superficial point of view, and in Jonas & Lander, human, animal, and technical aspects can be recognized in the different moving bodies—in this double sense—on stage. Seeing, recognizing and perceiving, observing, spying: The innocence of the spectator is automatically linked with the evaluation of data, and with an examining, skeptical gaze. These two perspectives on robotic performances in the theater—one with a focus on the changes in artistic production, the other with a focus on the change in the audience situation—will be interesting to follow in upcoming times, because I have the impression that this is only the beginning of a new preoccupation with mechanical techniques and procedures on stage.
[1] An abridged German version of this text can be found in Theater Freiburg’s online magazine here: https://mag3.theater.freiburg.de/tanz-der-roboter.html
[2] Cf. Karel Čapek: R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), transl. by Claudia Novack,
London and New York 2004. (I have to say that I haven’t got a hold of the English version yet, and have translated the parts here from my German language edition: Karel Čapek: Dramen. Ed. by Manfred Jähnichen, transl. by Gustav Just, Ilse Seehase, Berlin und Weimar, 1976. The piece RUR. Rossum’s Universal Robots. Kollektivdrama mit einem Vorspiel und drei Akten is to be found on pp. 97-196. It is a long play!)
[3] Čapek (German version), R.U.R., p. 100.
[4] Čapek (German version), R.U.R., p. 172.
[5] Čapek (German version), R.U.R., pp. 178-179.
[6] Cf. Peter Szondi: Theory of the Modern Drama. A Critical Edition, ed. and transl. by Michael Hays, foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Minneapolis 1987.
[7] In the original, this is: „Roboter überwinden den Menschen bzw. seine körperlichen Grenzen in einzelnen Aspekten wie Kraft oder Ausdauer und lassen sich daher als eine spezifische Transformation des menschlichen Körpers verstehen. Je deutlicher diese Referenz auf den Menschen ausfällt, desto vehementer werfen solche Roboter beinah zwangsläufig die Frage nach dem Status der Maschine auf.“ Bianca Westermann: „Die Begegnung mit dem Roboter: Bina48 zwischen Speichermedium und Interaktionspartner“, in: Wolf-Andreas Liebert, Stefan Neuhaus, Dietrich Paulus, Uta Schaffers (eds.): Künstliche Menschen. Transgressionen zwischen Körper, Kultur und Technik. (= Film – Medium – Diskurs 59), Würzburg 2014, pp. 53-80, here p. 54.
[8] Zygmunt Bauman, David Lyon: Liquid Surveillance. A Conversation, Hoboken 2012.
[9] Eugène Enriquez: “L’idéal type de l’individu hypermoderne: l’individu pervers?”, in: Nicole Aubert (ed.): L’Individu hypermoderne, Erès 2004, in the French original, this is on p. 49. Translation follows Bauman’s quote, in: Zygmunt Bauman: Consuming Life, Cambridge and Malden 2007, p. 3.
[10] Astrid Priebs-Tröger: “Robben, Vögel, Roboter. „Lento e Largo“ feierte bei den Potsdamer Tanztagen seine furiose Deutschlandpremiere und beschäftigte sich mit dem Verhältnis zwischen Mensch und Maschine”, in: Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, May 27, 2019. The German original words are: “Denn die fünf Tänzerinnen und Tänzer – die beiden jungen Choreografen tanzen selbst mit – erkunden in ihrer Expedition ins Tierreich grandios die Bewegungsmöglichkeiten des menschlichen Körpers.”
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