 and also Shintaro Fuji who is a great scholar and also a dramaturg in Japan who also flew in from Japan just for this evening to be here with all of us and his a graduate student also works at the university with him Christina Rosner who is a Hungarian and a dramaturg also a young director and who her research also is in this film so I think this is truly an extraordinary lineup and we will hear things that has not been as much talked about as it should be it's a great field robots and the idea of robots will be changing our society will be part of a second industrial revolution and to find out what it might mean for our field is truly exciting thank you all also for coming thank you for the Japan Foundation we have three representatives here maybe you can wave to say thank you this is the ones who helped us this truly luxurious in a way that happened to bring all this everybody over just for this evening and for this exchange is extraordinary but I think it's truly worth it and it's real research and transatlantic artistic encounter that is invaluable so thank you for the Japan Foundation and our admiration for the great work the Japan Foundation does check out their websites what they do in the program it is truly I think a leading organization in the world when it comes to global and cultural exchange thank you we also have a great audience here so so many great people are here so thank you all for coming and taking time out on a nice day maybe another last warm Monday Thursday evening so this year so thank you all my name is Frank Henchker and I'm the executive director and director of programs at the Cedars Center and we bridge academia and professional theater international American theater and this event is truly all what is our work about the evening shouldn't last longer than 19 minutes and if you have a cell phone I'll do the same just to take a moment there will be also a little reception after the event here in case in the Q&A you were not able to be able to ask all the questions you can do that afterwards again thank you all for coming and now I hand over to Peter thank you thanks so much Frank and once again thank you to the Japan Foundation for supporting this event this is actually an event that's a new experiment for the program the theater studies program at the Graduate Center and in partnership with the Cedars Center and we have here very distinguished artists from the United States from New York and from Tokyo and Japan and a group of people who are both working in scholarship on aspects of Japanese and Western performance and who also working in performance practice as well so we're kind of working in between the kind of ideas about theater and performance and and their practice this is an event that's going to take place over two days today we had the wonderful performance from liberal now we're having a symposium tonight and then tomorrow we'll have a workshop where we'll engage in a sort of longer conversation I think around ideas of robot dramaturgy and object performance and we can talk more about that at the drinks after the session if you're interested I just thought I'd give you a little bit of a background to the project so for a number of years now we've been working around ideas of robotics in performance as a I mean there's a lot real robots in performance now active robots being used in various ways there's of course Hidata Oizawa's famous robot theater where he has a mixture of live actors and actual robots on the stage acting in in real time in in a dialogue with each other but there's all sorts of other forms of robotics that are being used in performance whether it's various kinds of augmented robotics or whether we can talk about objects that activate the space in certain ways like for example the beautiful work with the houses here and the way that that all met the reality of the performance space and creates a certain kind of object performance and so today we're going to talk about the robot but we're also going to talk about the broader context of that and the way in which objects themselves non-human forms are starting to perform in the space in all sorts of ways and we also have this interesting dialogue now with theater makers where very often many of them are no longer distinguishing for example between a live actor and a robotic agent or an object in performance and when you talk to theater makers they say well of course live humans and robots are different things and they have different needs and you know they require different forms of directing perhaps but when when they start to think about the way in which these things operate in an aesthetic format in an aesthetic frame the way in which they perform there's a kind of leveling out of the difference between the two and in many instances they're working in very close symbiotic relationships where the kind of difference between the human agent and the robotic or object agent has significantly declined or there's a kind of strategic blurring between them so that's that's sort of a little bit of background to some of the ideas that we're going to explore in this robot drama 30 forum tonight but I'm I've got the privilege of chairing this panel and the panel will each each of the presenters will have 10 minutes to present some of their ideas about these questions and I've asked them to respond to these questions in a very broad way so we'll get quite a diverse set of responses I think so we haven't actually organized a running order of things but I am going to introduce Professor Cody Poulton first because I know something about what each of these people are going to do so I'm going to do a little bit of drama 30 years ago and try and construct some kind of relationship between the conversations here tonight so first 10 minutes is a professor Cody Poulton from Victoria University in Canada and Cody if you don't know his work is very much focused on I think the whole of the modern and contemporary literary and performance field of Japanese he's an extraordinary extraordinarily wide-read scholar in the field and also doing historical studies as well so thank you very much and thank you for coming Cody thank you could you run the clip that I wanted to show first please thank you so what we just saw was the preview to a film that was premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival this fall and it's film adaptation of two short Android plays by Hirato Orisa using the Android that was designed by Ishiguro Hiroshi and you can get a sense here that it's kind of post-apocalyptic kind of setting there has been a nuclear disaster and evacuation this American woman is left behind with an Android and in fact she's suffering for a mortal disease so she's facing death and I wanted to mention and no doubt this was something of a gimmick but the Android was nominated for Best Actress Award at the at the Tokyo International Film Festival which I think was an insult to Briar Lee Long who was the American actress who has consistently ever since the beginning and from the safe place onward to the film version has been performing so my question is can a post-human theory of acting exist can an Android win the Best Actress Award Peter and I were at a conference this summer in Paris where Philip Oslander was talking about Andy Serkis' renderings of Gollum and Caesar in Planet of the VHs and dealing with the debate as to whether somebody like that could get a Best Actor Award and he said his his conclusion was no he shouldn't get it there's no interiority in the performance of Andy Serkis in these things and it's all about motion capture perhaps the people who do the CG for that kind of thing should get technical awards but it's not acting I asked Briar Lee did she think that Geminoid F was acting and what was it like to act with an Android is it different from acting with a human being and I got some interesting answers back from her and she said that Geminoid F is an actor in the same way that a puppet or a master actor she has a strong presence and identity however she only comes to life when she's operated by people in the same way that masks and puppets do so for Geminoid F to act is for life to be given to the inherent form and character that she has again she can't do this alone but the identity of the character on stage is defined by her body as it is for anyone else who's acting is it possible to act without subjectivity as the audience usually imposes their sorry it is possible one of the questions I asked is can can an Android act if it doesn't possess agency subjectivity will consciousness all of these things and she says it is possible to act without subjectivity as the audience usually imposes their own subjectivity on the characters and the reactions to Geminoid F for example have been very different in the US or in Japan so in the sense we project our emotions on to the blank screen somewhat blank screen of the Android's face and if she's manipulated she herself is a kind of a shell but if she is manipulated well then she acquires a soul in the same way that a mask would do and she has adapted her style of acting to the Android in order to create a consistent atmosphere on stage now Hirata has said a couple of things about his collaborations with Ichigo one thing is that if you go to one of these big technical exhibitions to see androids perform you might have androids playing the violin androids walking up and downstairs androids I don't know singing Daisy Daisy you know but these are just kind of tricks and they don't move this emotionally so he wanted to create a kind of an environment the setting in which robots and androids could move us emotionally in a kind of a theatrical performance and that can only be done within the context of some kind of dramaturgy and his directorial style is famous for creating a kind of a hyper realistic atmosphere on stage but with means that are the antithesis of the kind of Stanislavski and method acting so there's no interiority in the in the directorial or the dramaturgy dramaturgical style and he programs his actors in the same way that he would program machines his directions are extraordinarily precise so that performance time from from from one night to the next of a play may differ by no more than a few seconds less than a minute things court incredibly precise precise now I want to throw out a couple of theories which I think are analogous that will allow us to kind of unpack the the the notions of the human the non-human the subject of the the object things like free will and determination sort of heavy philosophical idea and one that the character works with certainly has been influenced in his in his in his work is the environmental psychology of James J Gibson what he calls a theory of more emotional affordances put simply what a person thinks says or does is profoundly determined by his or her environment both physical and social and I want to link that to another theory of the philosopher of science science Bruno Latour in the actor network theory which holds it all all things both human and non-human both act and are acted on caught up in the web of social material or technological relations so I think maybe I'll stop at that point thanks Cody that's that's a really good place to stop I think because you've given us an idea of the way in which it out is trying to operate on the robot in a way that is act alike and also he's operating in a in a way that is aware of a kind of network theory and after network theory where as the tour would suggest the performance is a very complex environment where the kind of agency of the performance is circulating within a room within a within a theater setting it's it's very complicated and interactive and one thing is not determining the other but things are operating on each other and as a kind of assemblage and and I wonder whether you could speak a little bit Marianne about your work with builders association because your recent performance for example was just in terms of your recent work which had this experience of reaching out to an audience in a really quite spectacular way so thank you so I might show a touch of video while I'm talking that makes it more interesting so as Peter said we my company recently launched this production called elements of Oz which maybe you'll see the picture of I don't know but anyway in terms of robotics it really was about or what we did oh thank you first collaboration thank you so listen so now it should be happening we might need assistance technical assistance really okay all right I don't want to take any time more time so what I was thinking about as a point of departure for the Wizard of Oz was one of the most intimate robots that we that we own currently so it's a robot that you can't stand to have out of your sight it's a robot that tells you where to go and what to do and you panic when you can't see it and you depend upon it for so many things including entertainment and that is our smartphone so we wanted to engage smartphones as a kind of entryway into Oz and playing off the idea that Oz itself is a kind of the apex of escapist entertainment so the book which was written by Baum in the late 19th century was written in a way to kind of escape from the depression at that time and then of course the MGM Technicolor movie was all about the great escape and being able to go into this other world and Technicolor being a part of that the sort of heightening of fantasy and the heightening of escape that was very much intertwined with the idea of Oz and as you might recall Dorothy goes from black and white Kansas to this very lush world so we created a version of a lightly you know laced version of the Wizard of Oz that what sort of operated on many levels technically one was we were reproducing sections of the film the other was that we were sort of mining YouTube for various interpretations of Oz because essentially what I was interested in is that Oz is a kind of cultural artifact and that everyone has some relationship to it it's still one of the most globally watched films in the world and everyone has something to say about so on YouTube like every net job has some theory that they're circulating about the Wizard of Oz and so it becomes this kind of beautiful cacophony of interpretations and ownership I'm sorry so for instance some of the theories that we run through this through our production are I'm sure people are familiar with the idea that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is the soundtrack to the Wizard of Oz and if you start that when the lion roars that it's it totally lines up depending on how much you drop that night and or there's the theory that Baum wrote the Wizard of Oz during this great bimetalist debate in the US where the farmers of the Midwest were pitted against the bankers of the East in terms of the silver standard and the gold standard and there's this idea that Baum's allegory was that the farmers were if are the scarecrow the hapless helpless scarecrow and the bankers of the East are the Wicked Witches of course so that kind of thing but what I so those are various elements but what I wanted to show you share with you tonight is an app that we created for the show with no money and basically just blood sweat and tears and was is a integral part of the performance so we made this app that you can download on your iphone or android and that people were asked to kind of activate before they came to the theater and then we have a little like seminar at the top of the show where people are in this keyboard you know cover looking at the so basically we have to set up this idea that everyone needed to point their phones at that target in order to have the is the layer lineup so what we were doing is using augmented reality so it's not Oculus it's not virtual reality it's not about shutting off it's about this kind of addition of layers transparent layers so that it's really playing between the live stage and your experiences the viewer and this kind of mixed reality so that's what it looks like before you start and then this is what happens during the show so as you can see there's Glinda the Good Witch and so I'm just gonna zoom in if you can see down below right down here there's Glinda so what's happening is there's a big bubble that's floating around and it ends up encompassing Glinda on the screen and on your screen you're gonna I'll show you in a second so anyway these are just images of how it looked and then I want to just play a tiny bit of a trailer because I think hopefully it'll help explicate this in touch so this means that basically when the audience would see this sign that says look up and they would all pick up their phones and point it to the target on stage so what you'll see now are some of the things that people saw through their phones that were different than what they saw live in the proof on it right night double major in both food and history the version I and most people nowadays are familiar with is the 1939 film in all its technicolor glory okay here's that sad middle-aged internet lady with all of her wizard of all stuff so this is the film that we were making and then on top of that is so that's what you would see on your phone and pick it up and then this is what you would see in your phone and this is what's happening on stage so there's a couple of other examples of things you would see this is entering Oz and there's the poppy field the opium field there's a couple more examples so this is you know the finale Oz is unveiled and there's a final engagement with the phone so I think it might leave it there I mean it is kind of a double-edged sword that we were presenting to the audience where you were certainly able to experience the performance without your phone but there's this layer that we're using as a kind of temptation to bring your phone out and turn it on and have that be an active part of the performance thank you thank you very much it's a really kind of I think this is something very new it's a new application of technology it's actually a new putting together of bits of technology that pre-exists such as the iPad and the possibility for micro broadcasting into a small location and also 3d technology and the augmentation of a live act through this kind of 3d visuality I think is really interesting and it reminds me I read in the paper the other day that companies like Google are currently spending billions of dollars on headgear to try and develop that technology to make it more cheap more portable more usable and you know imagine in the future that that might be a possible way of seeing this this kind of show with some kind of virtual reality headgear on and it's very hallucinatory and the intensification of the experience through these kind of visual hallucinations I think is something really interesting and with that in mind I think I might go to Tina now if you wouldn't mind coming in there Tina's work is not hallucinatory at all it's very grounded but Tina's very interested in the kind of way in which objects speak to us in very powerful ways and so Tina Rosner is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Wassey University in Tokyo and we've got just a little bit of technology there. Good evening. This is going to be a slightly different presentation from the others. I've been researching the non-human participants in the agency in theatre starting from examining the concept of presence and silence of the performer through the appearance of animals in a theatrical situation turning to the inorganic other the robots and androids to see how a concept of theatrical presence is challenged. So today I'm going to focus on insights and androids. In the deeply problematic notion of Western images the onstage presence of the human being celebrates the primary and distinguished position of the man as an image of God. The theatrical, dramatic representation of animals is either degraded to a metaphor of a suspicious handle pole, a barrel of forbidden and secret knowledge, a dog, or a cute show. This anthropocentrism is even more evident in the relationship of theatre and insects. As Choudhury points out the human nature of insects is deeply connected to spatial aspects to the idea of home that is secure and free from invaders and the insects that are constantly disregarding its boundaries penetrating through the walls through the skin. Based on this we can say that our reaction to the stage fly that specific fly that flies through the beam of the stage light during the show the animal that accidentally enters the performative space a territory which is carefully marked by human is a deeply imprinted reaction keeping the insect out tamed by the socially traditionally framed theatrical event but not actually getting out of our seats and taking the animal out. In the case of Kafka's famous insect however theatre adaptation already is from insect to human in the majority of the stage productions of metamorphosis the insect Gregor Samsa is played by a human actor not an insect of course or is it of course. In his latest piece of the robot theatre project the metamorphosis Orisa Hirata sets Kafka's stories in a near future and a small town in France where one morning Gregor Samsa wakes up to discover that he has transformed into an android. Instead of showing the intensified physical disgust so strongly present in Kafka's work the purpose of anything can happen and the importance of facing the given situation are emphasized in Hirata's version. The repulsion towards the creature is shifted the repulsion towards the android the uncanny valley by Masahiro Mori. The absolute focal point of the stage is the neutral white lava-like face of the android which by Hirata's intention evokes the traditional no masks. Hirata's longtime collaborator Ishiguro's primary research asks what human is whether a core and essential quality exists by which it's possible to define human. In this concept the shape of the humanoid robot is considered as a shell. The programming and timing of the gestures spatial expressions and vocal utterances are done by Hirata. In his opinion programming of emotions refers both to the narrow theatrical sense and the wider humanist approach to the question of reproducing socially pre-programmed and acquired emotions. The most emphatic gestures in the performance are the moments when the mother in the jacob hoists the android's regular hands touches his, its face. The gestures emphasize the direct proximity between the human and the android, the physical contact between skin and shell. In this divided closeness only the voice that connects the two layers of reality, the voice of the android originally belongs to the actor who plays the role of the tenant. Also in terms of fictional mode how does the mother in the jacob relate to the Gregoire Sansa IPAS1 android statement. What sort of critical remarks can be made in regards of the android's acting? The questions raised and discussed by the characters focus on the cognitive processing of unexpected radical change. My son is a robot. He's French even if he's not a French man. Do I have the right to decide who is human and who is not? And most importantly I think it's me, says Gregoire the android. This sentence with Ishiguro's concept of shell reflects on Descartes' idea of human animas and natural animas operating as machines and raises again the question of the need for profound security. How can we relate to each other? Is it possible to make statements concerning one's own existence? But the meaning of the famous sentence shifts with the context and the person who acquires them from confidently stating Kogito ergo sum. It becomes a hesitant and insecure. I think it's me, said by an android in the voice of a human in a theatrical situation. Eventually it even might be somewhat comforting to think Chaudhuri's remark of quote, no stage is ever free of insects. Invisible or nearly invisible, they are always there and quote. In this sense that specific stage fly would become a reminder. Gregoire sums up the character that is ripped off of not only his human but its fictional, its insect self. Provisions a sterile and infertile environment where one would be grateful for any insect that crosses the stage as a trace, proof or hope of an organic presence. Thank you very much, thank you. Really beautiful images and I think this relationship between humans and non-humans is something that's becoming very powerful in the theatre now. Also the concept of technology as a kind of alienated thing which we saw very powerfully in active this afternoon in the performance is something that I think relates to that idea and certainly Kafka's idea, Kafka's metaphor is something that is at the heart of a lot of our anxieties about these kind of transformations that are not only taking place in the world around us but are also entering and transforming our own bodies and making us much more robot like or cyborg like. So with that link in mind or segue I'll introduce now the artistic director of Nibrol, Mikuni Yonihara who's going to show us some of their work and talk a little bit now too. Sorry you're doing it together, I apologize. Also presenting is Keisuke Takashi who's the designer and co-founder of Nibrol and was up in the bio box for the performance this afternoon so this is a joint presentation by Nibrol. Thank you very much. We have the company named Nibrol, Musician, Set Designer and Nibrol have collaboration. Nibrol have collaboration video artists, musicians, Set Designer and various artists. We product dance, theatre and video art, video installation work and we have no single over all director and we try to make performance of an conventional framework. And we explore the possibilities of visual and physical expression and we also try to explore a new field by having active communication. Also we're making a skater. This one I joined at the first time so I'm making for outside so audience is just outside screen for the three parts of the story at the same time. So audience choose which story. And after that just into the theatre. So I just change many play writing. My theatre is, many people think it's too fast. So speaking is really too fast. So in the many theatre in the producer, please try to watch slowly. So audience not understand too fast. So I choose to do fast. Because I really don't like to act slowly. I don't like the feeling. Emotion, so then I just everything cut. So try to do more faster. So maybe opposite for the Orisa Theatre. I know him too so much. Because I have a festival director and Orisa Theatre has some small theatre. So they have always making some festival. So I working with Orisa Theatre. But I just saw the one time in rehearsal. He's a robot and actor. But at that time the robot is a crazy movement. And I'm really surprised. Because usually the robot is correct for the movement. But at that time the robot is a crazy movement. So it's happening. But I like this movement. So I choose different. But we are something is very close. Because I'm not... One minute. So maybe because I'm a choreographer. And after I became a playwright. So then I just get a very famous playwright. So then I make the theatre a lot. But we are talking about body. So robot is just nothing. But after time slowly comes up. So something here. I just using some movement. Because actor is usually movement is really not good. So because I'm working with dancer a lot. So at first I'm surprised. Actor is nothing. Nothing is really so bad. But after maybe one month. So just comes up to movement is not good. But so then we are talking. So then robot and really bad body comes in close. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. That was really delightful. I think you've really given us some good things to think about. Some really interesting things to think about there. In relation to first of all the hyper expressive nature of the bodies in your work. Because of course if we see a performance like the one we saw this afternoon. We could choose to read that as a kind of reaction to a certain kind of alienation to a certain city or urban life. A certain experience of trauma is being enacted. Not just in the text but actually through literally through the body. And through that kind of hyper expressive way of speaking. But of course this is also a question of embodiment. And the way in which actors and dancers embody experience differently and express reality differently. But also with the introduction of the robot itself. We have hyper expressive but very exact movement available for the first time. A robot does things absolutely precisely in the same way every time. And whether or not that will influence the kind of choreographic understanding that we have of human movement as well. Is something that we might consider in the question time. So thank you very much for the presentation. I'm going now to just cross over to Catherine Meza. Who's also been thinking a lot about movement and machines. And her work as Catherine is an independent scholar who's worked on Japanese performance for a very long time now. And she's been following contemporary dance in Japan for many many years. But also her work extends to dramaturgy and working with performers. And in the last couple of years she's become increasingly absorbed with the movement of machines. And thinking about the relationship between humans and machines through the kind of codes of dance. So in some ways this is a very good presentation to carry on from yours. I think in that there is this extension of the idea of movement into a kind of machinic or machinic construct. So thank you Catherine. And over to you. Well what I wanted to do a little bit is it is actually about what I'm calling material choreography. Or a machinic choreo dramaturgy. But I'm going to start with a little bit of sort of like laying out my field of study. Because if I'm talking about material I think it's really important to know that I'm talking about stuff. And that stuff is physical, animal, machinic and it's all around us. And a lot of artists are working with materials in really interesting ways. I think from the little houses to lights as well as screens are all material things. And that's part of what I think we need to sort of look at. Let me read you one thing so I'm grounded. Okay. What is the choreographic dramaturgy of a machine, an object, an animal or a person? And what might that examination reveal about subjectivity, perception and aspects in daily or theatrical events? What Rosie Brighody and Donna Haraway suggest when they both in different ways make arguments for a kind of post anthropomorphic philosophy that not only de-centers and shakes down the hierarchies of a human, but creates a level playing field of humans, animals, plants, objects, light, darkness. And that is at the center of the somewhat minimalist exploration of building a machinic choreo dramaturgy. Now my background, however, crosses over several fields and I'm really involved in the material cultural skew, which makes for really fascinating, in a sense, sensations. And then that of course, we're going to have this wonderful talk tomorrow about the Karakuri or the machinic doll that started over 300 years ago. But spanning that, as artists today, this is Ai Wei Wei's piece that's called At Large that was intended to go. And it's actually a metal wing made out of the Tibetan, these metal plates to collect sun and make people's tea. I don't know if you can see the tea pot on there. But the wing is in a room where the wing can't move. So I'm talking also about the choreography of things, the dramaturgy of things, that the movement is still emotional. And I'd like us to think about that in all the works we see. I happen to get to Athens and I've been so fascinated here by the stones, not the representation, but the thickness of stones. Ai Wei Wei, again, this is his ceramics inside objects, the ceramic-ness of our toilet. Like what is that as an artist? How does it perform? What is that thickness? Is it a robot in the summer in Tokyo? And then because of this crossover to my work on what I call girl culture, it's looking at the thickness of the girl body. And what other, what different artists are doing with objects and things. This is an advertisement of this in art school. And then my interest in that crossover, so what does the machinic, the robotic, the stuff do to bodies? And are there any bodies there at all? And of course, the cute stuff. It's wonderful right now in New York. You've got teddy bears everywhere, so anyone can start thinking about, you know, what is this teddy bear robot? Let's go back there. These are actually objects in these wonderful toy game windows where there's a robot arm that comes down. You put in 100, 500 yen and you have to operate this robotic arm to kind of knock over the little fat chubby guy to win it. And people spend a lot of money on this. And then there's the girl cafes. These are these cat girls, and they're sort of animal robot life. And animation is another kind of in a sense of robotic animation form. This is Konohike Tomeko, who works with animality in drawings. She also, I don't have time to show her her sculptures. But this idea, again, sort of de-centering the thing, the human, and her fossils are all six-rated fossils. They're all also connected to mythology. And this idea of the splintering glass. Again, a kind of materiality that changes both the physicality and the distilness of choreography. Here's my cat robotic girl. Perfect, right? And stay tuned. Tomorrow, when I'm talking about becoming an attraction, it's suspended animation. You're looking at the ubiquitous cranes and the actual, the operators in the cranes and that kind of choreographic dramaturgies. But the only other thing I'm going to leave you with besides a little trick to tell a story out of, and going right through here, is that I think what interests me here also is what I call the ethics of things. Because no matter what the materialism here has to do with things that we own and touch and what kind of innocent rights do we have to those things. And in fact, if you take human out of rights, then that begins to expand the fields and make us think very, very differently about performance, both on stage and in our lives. So just to end that, I wanted to show you a group called Happy. And to me, what's wonderful about their machinic performance is that it always fails. And I think a failure is something that is machine-like, that perhaps humans need to do better. Figure this look at it this way. This was post-311, and they told me those are the, to be the 3D blasters. They wear stockings over their faces. They wear wigs. They in a sense make their bodies into machine-like dolls. And all their movements are always something about falling and failing. Yes. So those are the colors. There's also their behavior in the sense that there's a choreography to the robot machine and to the doll, to the girl that's going on here. But I think it's important to change it. How we're dealing with the little houses out here, the way that they burn, you know. And what happened to people when they're sitting in their chairs? So what's the chair in this? What's the house? You know, what are we really doing with objects? Thank you. Thank you very much, Katherine. Thank you. We've gone from the robotic figure into, I think, some anthropomorphic forms and into some other forms of cultural production, I think, very much relating to Japan, including some of the commercial areas and kawaii culture. But it also points to the disappearance of the human from the performance frame. And we very often now, I think, go and experience performances that have no longer live actors in them. Or certainly the live actor's presence has been reduced or confused strategically with remote figures in some way. So for our last presentation, I'd like to introduce Professor Shintaro Fuji from Wasetting University, who's going to ruminate a little bit on this tendency now in some performances to present objects as the actor and scenery as the actor and screens as the actor and a certain kind of visuality or sensory experience as the actor. And what is lacking here is it's in a sense the opposite to the kind of hyper-present performance in liberals' performances where we have this meditation on absence. Thank you very much. Hello everyone. Sorry, I wanted to put my text in there some PowerPoint, but I think I was too jet lagged this afternoon. So I had to juggle with two computers at the same time. And I would like to begin by this quote by Metalink. It clearly states that distrust for human performers, which was shared by many of his contemporaries like Gordon Craig. I would like to come back to this quote at the end and excuse me again. It's my own translation I did this afternoon from French, so it could be a bit awkward. But I love the center, the stage is the place where the masterpieces die. And these artists dream of performances where human performers will be replaced by non-human objects, marionettes or super marionettes, shadows, projections or figures. And more than 100 years later, some of the most important performing artists seem to shift towards a performance without performers or towards the death of the performer. I think we can discuss today the death of the performer like we did with the death of the author half a century ago or the death of the dramatic characters. Even though the presence of living bodies used to be a necessary condition of the theatre or it still is the necessary condition of the theatre and these performances, human performers are literally absent or at least they point towards the disappearance of such physical presence. In Europe, Tadiusz Kantor with his Theatre of Death seems to me a pioneer in this shift towards a performance without performers not only in theory but in practice. Giselle Bien who graduated from French National Marionettes School may be a direct inheritor of Kantor. She creates mannequins herself which cannot easily be distinguished from human actors. I can't remember which one was a human actor and which one was the mannequins in this either. Romeo Castellucci created Tragedy in Gognitia in 2002-2004. It's a series of 11 performances created in different cities. In the second half of this M number 10 created in 2004 in Maxaye, France. M stands for Maxaye and it is the 10th out of the 11 pieces. The public will see the screens going up and down in different colours that keep changing but there is only a shadow of a woman who doesn't even speak. Le Sacre de Kantor that he created last year involved no performer at all but the ashes of burned cars coming down from the machines set in the ceiling and 33 rounds and a few seconds of the performance created by... Rappi Amurwe and Nina Sane in 2012 involved no human performers either. I would like to come back to this Duni Maburo's The Blind Peace at the end and now I would like to talk about shortly about Japanese artists. On the Japanese side, Nobutaka Kotake was one of the first to do shows without any human performers. I think it was around 1990. He was a collaborator of Shujiterayama and conceived the scenography with machines for him. And I also think of Oa or Memorandum by Dantai where the bodies of human performers are disappearing into immersive images. Ryōji Ikeda, a former Dantai member, gives concerts with no one on stage but with projections on the screen filled with computer generated images like this. And Hiroaki Umeda, his works go in the same direction in the holistic strata. The space generated by this projection in an illusionist way moves much more strongly than his dance actually. And in the end there was a video. So it's part of the technological phantasmagoria that Duni Maburo did in 2002 until 2004. It's made of three different pieces. The blind is what's the first. It is a short piece in one act written by Meadowling in 1890. There are twelve blind people, six female and six male, lost in the middle of a forest and they are just frightened by an invisible threat. There are no living performers. The only projected images of these faces of the two actors onto the twelve heads of mannequins, no bodies, just faces and six same faces. Even the heads were molded out of the actors' real heads. The details such as mouth do not move consequently with the image. So it gives us the sensation of the Freudian uncanny and put us in such an instable state that the twelve blind characters are in the play. And more cleverly this corresponds to the writing of Meadowling that we saw at the beginning. He thought about the stage with no human actors, but with masks, shadows, projections and marionettes. I still don't know what this performance robot dramaturgy can be, but this example I suppose is very suggestive. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for those really wonderful presentations. I think we began with the contemporary robot. We moved through hyper-expressive bodies. We moved through augmented reality. We moved through some contexts for technology and popular culture and the expressive nature of that. And we also had the animal aspect brought into our concern today. So I think we've really been around the world of robot dramaturgies and explored it from many different angles. And we ended with the screen. And I think this is a really important place to end. In some ways, the actual existence of the tangible body of the robot is mutating into another formation. And screens are coming into play, but also biological agents. I think if we look at the actual technological level of robotics now, biological agents are coming into being. And that might be a very spooky way to end our session. So first of all, I'd like to thank all our speakers. We do have one or two, we have about five minutes for questions, but just a round of applause for all of the speakers first. Thank you. So we do have five minutes for questions, and then we'll have an opportunity to follow up in a less formal way with conversations. But I can see in the dark somebody with their hand up the back there. Would you wait for the microphone to come to you please? Thank you very fascinating subject and presentation. And certainly very useful and relates to our reality for better or for worse. But I'm a little surprised that there's no nostalgia present for the human, the so-called human. It's just missing. So I wonder, does it appear in dreams, or it just seems to be that we think about that sometimes, that something has happened, that reality has changed. Another thought is that the idea that, or maybe it's a consulting thought, the idea that the robots are a human product. So the antipathy between the mechanical and the human might be some kind of illusion, or will a certain point come where the human is a product of the robot? So these are just scattered thoughts and kind of questions. Thank you so much. I'd like to say that this idea, there's a wonderful article on how objects become things. And within this, for the more philosophical idea, there's this idea to start thinking about how perhaps things came before humans. So then the idea of like how we make robots become, in a sense, how materials in a sense are already there. So is the shaping of it an indication of this human, or is it rather that we are kind of indicating the things? Yeah, it seems to be flipper. I was just wondering, this moved over so many different connections, not precisely robotics, but object-oriented ontology, the question of the object or the thing and so on. So it's so productive and so interesting to me. And I'm wondering, what it seems not to be, the question is the question of performance itself. So still that the optical model, or that somehow there's still, I hope this isn't too negative a kind of question, to the whole possibility of performance, or it could be for the performer, I hear that, but where is the, are we moving towards the death of performance? Does that have to be somehow retained as the last horizon of, you know, being or something? Oh really? Word performance is doubly inflected in relation to theatre and machines, because performance is a measure of machine already. And it's a constant measure of machine. We describe machines through their performance in there. The question of the live performance is, live performance free. And I wonder when, the performance that we're often seeing, a response to the... The western basis, you know, I can address that particularly in the case of Sio and Otto, which started with the case that he was 20 minutes long, and then after three of them, after the earthquake, he wrote a second part. And in that part, the human actor. I think in the first version that he did, there was a kind of a doubling alienation effect going on. First of all, there was the alienation effect of having a non-human performer. There was the other alienation effect of having a prepayment performer. And so there were sort of two levels of stranger for a Japanese audience going on in the production. And with the low light, initially it was very hard to tell where they were sitting in relation to each other and moreover, which one was not the human. So he played with that. We've read it the other time. I'm just going to make sure that this isn't so strange, you know, like robotic geometry or something other than what's on Broadway, what's down the street, what you do in this classroom. These are real questions to really wonder, like, with our phones, what is that performance? What do I see that we don't see? When the little houses are out there, the sort of multiplicity of things in my house, these things are really vital to all the world's performance and need to be asked. I'm going to say, in the Asian cultural process, the ACA was working the work of the dance, and perhaps in the afternoon. Thank you again.