‘YO “I think AI is going to change everything,” Tamara Rojo, artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet, told me earlier this year. “We just don’t really know how.” The impact of artificial intelligence on the creative industries can already be seen in film, television and music, but to some extent dance seems isolated, as a form that relies heavily on living bodies performing in front of an audience. But this week choreographers Aoi Nakamura and Esteban Lecoq, known collectively as AΦEare launching what is billed as the world’s first AI-powered dance production, Lilith.Aeon. Lilith, the performer, is an artificial intelligence entity that has co-created the work with Nakamura and Lecoq. “She” will appear in an LED cube that the audience will move around, and their movement will trigger Lilith’s dance.
Nakamura and Lecoq insist that they are not interested in pursuing the latest technology for its own sake, but rather in improving their storytelling. Working as dancers with theater company Punchdrunk led them to the idea of immersive experiences, which led them to virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and now AI. Your question is always: “How can we make this technology come to life?” But not in the way that robots will take over the world.
Lilith.Aeon’s story is inspired by transhumanism (using technology to evolve beyond human limitations) and began as a script written by an artificial intelligence robot. Nakamura and Lecoq fed all of their research (images, audiobooks, discussions) “and we were able to talk and collaborate with the AI, and co-create the piece together.” The duo created steps, “like a dictionary,” that Lilith was trained in, but the AI continued to generate its own new “words.” They were excited when Lilith did something they would never have thought of, but the choreography is still tailored to their aesthetic. “It’s not random,” says Lecoq. “I’m not interested in seeing something that looks like a screensaver.”
You can’t talk about AI in dance without talking about Wayne McGregor. Always on the cutting edge when it comes to technology, he began researching AI 20 years ago. With Google, McGregor developed AISOMAa choreographic tool based on their archive of 25 years of work, analyzing thousands of hours of video, which can then generate suggestions in real time, like a dancer improvising in the studio. He has used AISOMA to generate new versions of his 2017 piece. Autobiography that are different in each performance. His latest project, which will be released next year, is In the other landdeveloped with Professor Jeffrey Shaw in Hong Kong, which uses a 360-degree screen with sensing technology for the audience to build their own experience.
Choreographer Alexander Whitley It is also using AI to develop ways to integrate audiences into work. In a virtual reality version of The Rite of Spring, he is working on using audience movement as a trigger for avatars trained on a database of Whitley’s choreography. The technology can make an amateur audience member’s movement more inventive and even synchronize it with music, like a dance version of Auto-Tune.
Technology is developing rapidly. The type of motion capture that was once the domain of Hollywood studios is now accessible through an app on your phone (try Move.ai), and much of the progress is led by the gaming industry. But it’s also worth looking there to see some of the obstacles. Video game artists, including motion capture actors, are striking in the US over concerns of being replaced by AI (very similar to the 2023 actors strike). Dancers are already being filmed by companies that build motion benches (“I’ve done about a million projects where I’ve had to capture motion, like someone was spinning on their head,” McGregor says). And the question of rights and royalties for using the movement (and experience) of dancers to train AI is an important one. McGregor says that in the past it was common for motion capture contracts to have a complete termination. “We didn’t understand what the application of that technology would be in the future.” He now wants to work with Arts Council England on intellectual property (IP), motion data and “ethical AI”. Done right, this could be another source of income for dancers. “Codifying choreography creates coins,” Jonzi D quotes from his hip-hop show Fraywhich features an AI-generated dancing avatar.
But what happens when currency is created for someone else? Dance is an ever-changing art form, transmitted across dance floors, studios and now social media, and it can be difficult to know or prove where an idea began. You can protect a dance piece, but not a step, as dancers discovered when they tried to sue the creators of the video game Fortnite. A file can be copyrighted, and Nigerian choreographer Qudus Onikeku is researching the use of artificial intelligence to recognize and classify movements to create a dance data bank and protect intellectual property, especially for artists black people, who were so often misappropriated in the past.
Artists working seriously on AI are partnering with large corporations like Nvidia, Amazon, and Dell. They get the technology, and in return, the companies get the ideas, the praise, and most importantly, the data. Are they selling their souls or is it just pragmatism? There is influence both ways, potentially. “You don’t want to be the one who adopts the technology,” McGregor says. “You want to be in the conversation from the beginning, being generators. You want to be at the forefront; otherwise you are just serving the technology.” Commercial funding is often the only way to develop tools, some of which could democratize and demystify dance: Whitley is working on software that could be used in education, allowing students with no prior dance knowledge to create their own choreography. on the screen.
“I think humans and AI can do beautiful things together,” says Jonzi D. But he has also noticed that most of the AI-created content he sees has a particular, similar look. “It’s always going to come down to how creatively we’re able to use it.” Lecoq agrees that everything will look the same if everything is trained with the same content; art will eat itself. “It is lazy not to cross the limits,” he says. AI is not a shortcut when, like AΦE, you are creating the technology as you go. “It’s a long cut. It is a very hard and lonely process.”
Rojo comes up with some useful applications for AI in dance. An algorithm that would be able to solve the headache of recasting a ballet when someone is injured, for example, and calculate in seconds who is available, who knows the role, etc. Less useful would be “if the composers were replaced, the set and lighting designers were replaced.” , if the patterns in the choreography were created by artificial intelligence,” he says. “And that’s not out of the question.”
However, the computer’s foray into creativity is nothing new. “Computers are the future of dance,” said the choreographer Merce Cunningham in 1995, when he had already been working with the LifeForms program for six years, manipulating avatars on the screen and then transferring the results to his dancers. The intention was to get rid of the dancers’ natural habits, where one movement instinctively leads to another, and find something new, something choreographers have always tried to do.
So is this a good or bad thing for the industry? “I try to avoid falling into the kind of binaries of technology as savior or destroyer,” Whitley says. There will inevitably be a disruptive impact on industries, “but there will also be some really interesting possibilities that come with it.” Not all dancers are about to lose their jobs. “I never worry about the replacement argument,” McGregor says. For him, it’s about using technology to better understand the complexity of the human body. “And we are a long way from building a version that in any way reproduces the brightness of the human body. “Human virtuosity and ingenuity is what we connect with most of the time.”
Part of watching dance is knowing intimately the limitations of the human body and seeing how they are overcome. That doesn’t make sense if an avatar can do anything. As McGregor says: “There is no danger in the digital world.” But even if the choreography uses AI interventions, “when it’s performed by a living, breathing human being, it becomes something meaningful and tangible,” Whitley says. “Without a doubt, live performance can never be replaced by the digital experience,” says Nakamura. She’s not interested in seeing a real person replicated on screen (“What’s the point?”), but in Lilith.Aeon she does want to create something that couldn’t exist otherwise. However, even though AΦE is pioneering the latest in artificial intelligence, they are not really interested in the technology, Lecoq insists. “The best technology I like is my washing machine and my microwave.”