The robots are coming in this year’s Manipulate festival. 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; and so it goes with several shows in the festival’s 2024 programme. 

Ruins sees the Megahertz company in association with Feral Arts fuse choreography and digital technology inside a video cube to explore the potential for new ways of living beyond an 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 Takahide Hori utilises technology in his vision, which here took seven obsessive years to reach 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, while performer and machine skirt around each other. HOVER forms part of a work-in-progress double bill (alongside I, Honeypot) developed by Surge Bursary Programme.     

Flesh-and-blood/tech interface is most explicit in works by Belgian theatre company Kwaad Bloed and France’s Compagnie Bakélite, who both tackle potential robot wars head on. In L’Amour Du Risque (which translates as ‘Love Of Risk’), Compagnie Bakélite’s Olivier Rannou sets up a ballet for robot vacuum cleaners that serve a romantic candle-lit dinner with increasingly erratic returns. Kwaad Bloed’s Simple Machines, meanwhile, sees choreographer Ugo Dehaes demonstrating 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 his production’s roots. ‘For 20 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 learned about robotics and programming, and had this idea of the simple machines.’

For L’Amour Du Risque, 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 work. ‘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 robots after the main show where they can attempt to teach them new movements. Often, audiences see beyond the emotion-free gizmos and put 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 our lives, 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 multimedia affairs was sniffed at. Today, 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 us 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 1% chance of being replaced by a robot or a computer. A dancer has up to 2 or 3%, because there is some CGI going on in cinema that can reproduce their movements. 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.

Manipulate, various venues, Edinburgh, Thursday 1–Sunday 11 February; L’Amour Du Risque, Fruitmarket, Saturday 3 February; Simple Machines, Fruitmarket, Sunday 4 February; HOVER/I, Honeypot, The Studio, Tuesday 6 February; Junk Head, Summerhall, Saturday 10 February; Ruins, The Studio, Sunday 11 February.