New dance show Plagiary moves to the AI beat

Plagiary, a dance performance in which a series of AI-generated instructions are fed to dancers through earpieces, is set to premiere in Melbourne and Sydney, and promises to be different every night.

Over the course of the 50-minute show developed by choreographer Alisdair Macindoe, 10 dancers will respond to hundreds of varied directions.

It's not a jump to the left and a step to the right, but more like this: Breathe beyond the boundaries of time inside a labyrinth.

"Let the inner story hurry out of your corpse.

"As a group rapidly hop along an oily path.

"Allow yourself to explore a state of ego death as you enter a state of quantum superposition."

As the dancers make these instructions into movement, audiences will be able to read the text projected into the performance space, while other lines fed to performers must be spoken aloud.

Macindoe, a protege of dance legend Lucy Guerin, says while the dancers don't have to memorise any choreography, they must be excellent at improvisation and instantly translating complex ideas into movement.

Adding technology changes the relationship between the choreographer and performers because it demands a focus on the immediate present, and a suspension of critical responses, he said.

"It allows for the situation where the dancer can be far less judgemental of the ideas being presented, and their interpretations," Macindoe said.

"They can be quite committed to an idea that you might judge more, if it was given to you by a human."

Ego death and quantum superposition, eat your heart out.

Macindoe has worked as a dancer and sound designer for two decades, and began making computer generated choreography in 2019 when he noticed automated composition was far more common in music than dance.

Plagiary is a combination of Macindoe's programming and publicly available AI. Once he has approved the concept and title of each performance (these are generated by his program), he feeds them to an AI system to generate specific instructions.

Whatever your take on AI, Plagiary puts the entire process of making a dance in front of an audience, leaving it for them to interpret.

"That role of judging the meaning of the dance and the meaning of what the dancers are doing, it becomes your role," Macindoe said. 

So, is he putting himself out of a job?

Macindoe says he's not sure whether AI could ever usurp human dancers or choreographers, and insists the Plagiary project has actually created work.

Creative workers should be included in a public debate about these technologies as they develop, he said, and humans ultimately need to take responsibility for what they create using AI.

* Plagiary will premiere at Arts Centre Melbourne as part of the Now or Never Festival, August 28-31, before showing at the Sydney Opera House from September 12-14 as part of UnWrapped.

Australian Associated Press