Written by Moses Garcia

Throughout its history as an art, theatre has adapted and embraced emerging technologies. The Greeks introduced the eccyclema, today’s contemporary sibling, to scenic automation. Limelight changed theatre-making in the 19th century as the first tool used for indoor stage illumination. The most prominent recent addition to the technological theatrical toolbox is media/projection design. Emerging technologies transform theatre-making, and affect a variety of stakeholders from artists to audiences to arts managers. Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominates the conversation and is causing much disruption in sectors all over the world. Some sectors such as information technology and finance have welcomed AI with open arms. Other sectors such as the arts, and theatre more specifically, have yet to fully comprehend how to implement artificial intelligence in the industry. Despite the theatre industry’s AI skepticism, several theatre-makers have experimented with, instigated, and explored the realm of possibilities that AI presents.

Co-Creating Theatre Experiences with AI

Annie Dorsen is a prolific theatre director whose work is co-created with artificial intelligence as a creative partner. Dorsen’s artistic curiosity creates theatrical experiences without humans but rather the star of the show is algorithmic technology or AI. Her work uses custom algorithms to generate unique scripts, with varying degrees of machine and/or live performance, resulting in a new experience every night. Annie’s innovative body of work has created a new genre of theatre, Algorithmic Theatre, which interrogates the digital world’s effect on society by marrying artificial intelligence with classical theatrical techniques.

In addition to Annie Dorsen, a cohort of Doctoral Game Intelligence candidates at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte investigated how to utilize artificial intelligence as a directorial tool for theatre and virtual environments. Their research tool, the Artificially Intelligent Director (AID) aimed to spatially position characters in a virtual theatre utilizing psychology’s spatial preposition research findings, natural language processing, robotics-influenced work, play-scripts, and theatre rules. To develop the AID tool, the team used Hamlet as a source text to capture the blocking indicated in the script for their tool to eventually spatially position characters.

The purpose of using the text was to see if their tool would respond to certain phrases in the script to trigger the actor’s movement. Unfortunately, because of the iambic pentameter and the Shakespearean language, their tool did not perform successfully as they expected leading them to conceive an alternative solution. In their research report, it is stated that the group decided to implement force-guided graph technology in their next experiment to optimize the AID tool.

Playwriting and ChatGPT

Aside from the role of the director, playwriting is one of the most essential components of theatre-making. Recently, tools like ChatGPT have risen in popularity to help humans write pieces of text. Of all the research conducted in regard to artificial intelligence and theatre, using AI as a playwriting tool was the most popular result on Google. Theatre-makers know the unique formula that playwrights employ to write plays and musicals. The craft of playwriting is specific, challenging to learn, and most of all, difficult to execute well. In 2020, a group of Czech scholars at The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague introduced the THEaiTRE project, which aims to produce and stage the first computer-generated theatre play. Their data resources consisted of an unspecified number of untitled plays in English and Czech for their algorithm to learn from. Because the team knew that plays come in many different formats, they devised a standard format to convert and normalize the data from the scripts marking character names, lines, scenic notes, and scene settings. To build their script via artificial intelligence, the team employed a hierarchical approach that started with a brief description of the play, then expanded it into a more detailed act and scene synopses, and finally generated the individual scene dialogues.

The team of scholars focused on developing the ability of the language model (GPT-2) through a series of experiments so it would eventually be capable of writing a play. While the 2020 report does not provide further updates on their work, the report states the premiere of the group’s AI-written play was set for January 2021, and for 2022 with the premiere of another AI-written play generated from an improved version of the team’s algorithm.

Not far from Prague, and not far after THEaiTRE’s AI-generated play premiere, a group of theatre-makers at London’s Young Vic came together to create, “the world’s first play written and performed live with artificial intelligence.” While that statement may not hold true as one could argue Annie Dorsen introduced some form of an artificial intelligence play a decade prior. The most illuminating revelation from their theatrical AI experiment was the racist tendencies that their AI algorithm expressed throughout the production process. Even with the GPT-3 iteration of the technology, which is improved from the previous version (GPT-2), the technology has serious flaws that cannot be looked over. The director of the Young Vic production, Jennifer Tang, said to TIME that, “the technology would reliably cast one of their Middle Eastern actors, Waleed Akhtar, in stereotypical roles: as a terrorist, as a rapist — or as a man with a backpack full of explosives.”6 This incident poses a huge concern, especially after the racial reckoning the theatre industry underwent during the Black Lives Matter movement. If the industry can barely prevent other humans from harming one another in a production process, how can the industry and its theatre-makers prevent a piece of technology/tool from creating more harm when they’re not the creators of the technology?

An article from IndustryWired provides an update on the artificial intelligence artistic journeys of the theatre-makers in Prague. The article mentions that the group of scholars was successful in getting their AI to write a play. However, the current challenge that they’ve yet to solve is getting their AI to understand that characters in a play are living with their own goals and motivations.7 This realization is not surprising given the historic difficulty AI has with emulating emotional intelligence.

Musicals

Writing a musical is a beast of its own, but is AI up for the challenge to execute a well-written musical? The musical theatre writing process is not for the faint of heart. Musicals are more complex than plays demanding poetic lyrics sung to a complex score that fits within the musical theatre story structure while integrating acting scenes and dance numbers. Journalists at BroadwayWorld put OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the test by feeding the software the prompt, “to create an all-new, original Broadway musical.” The software produced a full outline including suggested musical numbers of a musical titled, “Codebreakers.” However, the software produced a plagiarised version of a 2011 film of the same. Producing a musical from a generic prompt is no challenge for ChatGPT3 but the main concern from this experiment is how the software’s output abides by (or in this case, infringes upon) copyright law. Cases like the one above rationalize the theatre industry’s hesitancy to implement artificial intelligence.

Improv

Aside from utilizing artificial intelligence as a playwriting tool, the software is also making waves in the theatrical improv world. Companies like Improbotics collaborate live and respond to prompts created by AI chatbots during their shows. According to one source, the artificial intelligence software employed by Improbotics was trained on over 100,000 films. Unlike Annie Dorsen’s approach to AI where the software is the main focus, Improbotics co-stars with AI to provide audiences with exciting, unpredictable, and imaginative theatrical experiences. Chatbots interact with the improv actors by feeding them prompts but audience members have the opportunity to engage with the chatbots through a text message conversation. The texts from the conversation made by the humans are then integrated into the second half of the show elevating the audience-actor relationship.

Stage Design

Stage design is an integral part of theatre-making that builds worlds onstage for audiences to immerse themselves in the story they’re watching. David Forsee, a professional theatre designer, conveys the power that AI holds as a creative tool for designers. Much of theatrical design is iteration. Production processes can be condensed or elongated, creating pressure to iterate quickly, or iterating too long and leaving artists with a creative block. AI websites such as DALL-E and Midjourney open up endless possibilities for designers to draw inspiration from. In the HowlRound article, Foresee provides an example of how powerful these AI tools can be. Foresee feeds the following prompt from a script he’s worked on, “the mysterious Fairyland, whose moon glimmers and dewdrops rest on the forested grasses.” DALL-E produces four frames of aesthetic possibilities for Foresee to draw inspiration from. Utilizing artificial intelligence in this context for theatre-making is the most effective way to implement AI into the theatrical industry.

management and ticketing

From an arts management perspective, producers on Broadway are looking to AI to optimize the ticket purchase experience for customers. Broadw.ai is introducing virtual ticket agents that act as concierges to elevate a ticket buyer’s experience from recommending restaurants, parking, and other essential aspects to attending a Broadway show. These agents are accessible on the websites of Broadway shows and act as advanced intelligent chatbots. In addition to serving the customer, the software will also collect data that helps producers make decisions informed by consumer trends.

looking ahead

As mentioned, AI has been utilized throughout the theatre industry in playwriting, stage design, and business administration. How it develops and whether it proliferates is still to come.

Theatre professionals are experimenting with AI from creative processes to Broadway business deals. Artificial intelligence technology is rapidly evolving, and how the theatrical industry decides to embrace or reject this emerging tool is dependent on further experimentation, ethical examination, and the educational motivation of all professionals in the field.