While writers, illustrators, and artists have cowered in fear for the past two years, theatermakers have felt safe from the threat of generative AI. In a medium defined by physical performance, what role does AI have to play on the stage?
From March 17 to 22, the (Un)Making AI Worlds exhibition was displayed at the Huret and Spector gallery for Emerson Contemporary, which includes various artworks and a live performance that incorporate generative AI in various ways. The exhibition included performances and art pieces by the Data Fluencies Theatre Project, a research project by a coalition of performers and researchers across the country.
The works featured in the exhibition are all taken from their play “(Machine) Learning to Be,” which will have its final performance after running in Vancouver this May. On March 18, visitors could watch “The Secret Hyena,” a one-person play taken from the upcoming show.
The performance on Tuesday was followed by a Q&A with some of the artists involved in the project, which included rapper Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo from Brown, creative developer Aidan Nelson and media artist Yuguang Zhang from NYU, New York-based dancer Jae Neal, and Vancouver-based director Gavan Cheema. The panel was moderated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Emerson Contemporary’s distinguished curator-in-residence.
“I’m always curating with the Emerson student in mind—exhibitions that speak to the values we have at our institution,” Bradbury said. “A project like this critiques AI but also embraces it in a way that I think is really interesting.”
The Data Fluencies Theatre Project is led by assistant professor Ioana Jucan, whose goal with the project is to explore the benefits and the costs of using AI creatively.
“The reason why I love theater, and why I became a theater maker, is because it centers embodied experience that brings together people in a time and space that they share,” Jucan said. “I think theater has specific affordances that allow us to explore questions about AI—how can we bring ourselves into a space and think about how AI feels in our bodies, right?”
Throughout the live performance of “The Secret Hyena” on Tuesday. Tushar Mathew interacts with an AI chatbot he programmed over two years to play the character of the Secret Hyena, a hyena who “mines the souls” of people who feed him secrets.
While the play follows an overall structure, Mathew is fed specific instructions about what to do minutes before the performance by the AI chatbot, which reacts to audience prompts—this makes every performance completely unique.
“I was exploring what it is like as a performer to be a vessel for an AI chatbot,” Mathew said. “90% of the words I say and the actions I do are given to me by the Secret Hyena chatbot—I had very little agency of my own, which I think is really interesting.”
Though the use of an AI chatbot in “The Secret Hyena” is new, other works of experimental theater have toyed with spontaneous performance. For example, the 2011 play “White Rabbit Red Rabbit” employed a new actor for each performance, with each performer reading the script from an envelope they hadn’t seen before.
“It can be a good sounding board, and it can give you certain prompts or suggestions that you didn’t think of—I totally see how AI can be a good creative partner,” Mathew said. “But personally, I love partnering with people. A lot of my work doesn’t come from a preexisting script, so a lot of my stuff is improvising with human collaborators.”
Mathew said in the Q&A that he was still “existentially opposed” to the use of AI for creative purposes. In his two years collaborating with an AI chatbot, he’s had to filter through a lot of cliché direction and generic dialogue. But what he finds scary are the moments where the Secret Hyena stumbles onto emotions that feel eerily human.
“I forget the exact words, but I remember getting a response where I was really like, ‘Oh, wow, this is profound’—And reading those words and seeing the audience have this moment where they were like, ‘that’s beautiful,’” Mathew said. “Later, someone came up to me and said I improvised a beautiful line. I told them, ‘Nope, that was the Hyena.’”
