By Smokey. I really explored my adaptive storytelling stuff here – brought on by my solo-performer intimate-stage background, which I do not expect this course may turn towards. Welp, here is how I would continue were this my solo project. Again, this perspective is mine for discussion, not for intended direction.

Central Question(s)

• Can an autonomous performer utilize a simple feedback loop with an audience or other stage performer to enhance a performance, and what would that look like?
• What are the sorts of performative decisions that can be ‘offloaded’ in a repeatable way?
• How might a ‘robot’ be perceived as an actor, dancer, storyteller, or other type of entertainer? Where in this space of ‘performance’ might ‘robot’s’ or autonomous creations fall, and how might feedback loops with audience’s affect this?
• How much of an autonomous performance can go ‘off-script’ or be spontaneously improvised/adapted/generated by the autonomous performer while retaining the audience’s sense of engagement?
• Within a scripted piece, would even an insignificant adaptation or response from audience feedback help sell an illusion of sorts of a much more sophisticated level of entertainment.

(There is a solid question being circled by these questions, but I can’t quite get my grammar on it).

Artistic objective: The point is the ‘theater’, not the ‘experimental’. (see measures of success below).

Technical objective: Allow the technical elements of the play to be either invisible [enough], or integrated [enough] that they are not so attention grabbing (un-manipulated attention grabbing, that is) to detract significantly from the ‘text’ (whatever the ‘text’ may be). Movements must be believable and “natural” which is merely to say, where natural is anything not so uncanny as to be distracting.

Creative Constraints

Keep any feedback loops with audiences or other stage performers as simple as possible. One quantifiable input (audience volume, number of audience, distance to audience, etc). This does not mean that this input need be public or the simplicity shared – it can and probably should feign more complex ‘understanding’, or leave it mysterious and magical.

Build the performance for a ‘black box’ theater environment, with limited seating for the audience – get them standing, moving, talking even. Design the space to encourage the audiences measurable participation – (make it easy to see if they are engaged). No theater or risen stage.

Scope

The complexity with which a performer may respond or adjust itself is limitless and a dark hole to fall into. Limit this for highly pragmatic reasons, and determine how an output may behave. For scope: limit the output to no more than 2 axis, such as “rate of bounce” and “brightness of environmental LED’s”, from the one quantifiable input. The “black box” between input and output should be a simple parametric function.

Limit the performance to no more than 2 actors (1 or 2 of them autonomous).

Limit the time of the performance to no longer than a 1 act play (15-25 minutes).

Build performance on top of a text/world/genre that an audience may already have familiarity with.

Measures of Success

The audience should believe that they did not just witness an experiment, exploration, or something that “challenges the boundaries of xyz form/medium”. Instead, they should have an honest reaction about the piece itself. Again, the audience should react to the message, not the medium. That’s an easy out for experimental theater and we should strive to avoid it.

Not only that, but the audience should enjoy the piece too! Make them laugh/cry/have emotions/reflect more than “think”. Let’s not have the audience leave saying that it was “interesting” and nothing more.