Theatre review: Una Isla’s feverish stagecraft warms up to artificial intelligence

Una Isla

Agrupacion Senor Serrano
Sota Drama Theatre
May 18, 8pm

Una Isla returns to a foundational setting of Western literature – the island. This skeletal story of a castaway’s journey to survive and co-exist with strangers discusses what the extremity of remote living reveals about human nature.

The script cites the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey, but this is a theme that has fired the imagination of writers throughout history, from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (circa 1611) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) up to the creators of reality television show Survivor (1997 to present).

Every age attempts to rewrite the castaway genre, and Una Isla does so by collaborating with artificial intelligence (AI).

Directors Alex Serrano Tarrago and Pau Palacios Pozuelo’s credited collaborators are by now household names in the AI-led disruption: GPT-3, Bloom, Dall.E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and Film.

For more than a year, the Barcelona-based theatre company Agrupacion Senor Serrano fed these generative AI programmes with prompts, and the result is 70 minutes of a feverish dance between machine thinking and human direction.

Novelty is its main selling point – but this quest for the new also hampers the performance.

The edited transcript between man and machine is projected onstage as a means of laying bare the creation of some marvellously surreal sequences.

A performer in white lycra – the castaway (Carlota Grau Bages) – performs an aerobics warm-up routine, for example. This culminates in a dance-off with three neon-dressed strangers looking like they have just leapt out of spin class. All this takes place within an inflatable rice grain-shaped balloon.

In another sequence of dreamlike stagecraft worthy of generative AI’s offbeat aesthetics, the castaway meets opera singers on an island. Their disembodied, AI-generated faces are projected onto rotating fan blades and appear as discs of light like modern-day digital sirens tempting the hero.

All this while, the text-based tussle between the show’s creators and a large-language model on screen reveals antagonisms between human conceptions of drama and machine bias towards certain gendered and racialised tropes.

Such a collaboration with AI is conceptually fascinating, if not entirely new, but its novelty wears off after some time.

Man and machine sparring and scripting on stage is par for the course in Singapore International Festival of Arts festival director Natalie Hennedige’s line-up dissecting the anatomy of performance. In the 2023 edition of the festival, Canadian artist Sougwen Chung collaborated with four AI-powered robotic arms in Realm Of Silk, a far more engrossing response to the AI wave.

Even in the world of books, the novelty is starting to flag. Best-selling children’s writer Andy Stanton’s collaboration with ChatGPT on a meta-fictional children’s story Benny The Blue Whale (2023) and AI poetry collection I Am Code (2023) are two recent examples. Both are smart, self-aware and theoretical, but reluctant to leave the world of ideas.

These meta-fictional works beg the question: Can AI-collaborative art ever go beyond conceptual self-referentiality to offer something truly moving and original?

Conceptually, Una Isla raises a tentative question of how surrealist aesthetics has been transformed by generative AI, but never quite digs deep enough.

After all, surrealist techniques such as automatic writing and the exquisite corpse have an affinity with generative AI’s quirks of language and fanciful flights of image-making.

This line between two movements a century apart deserves more examination as AI-led disruption to art, work and social life continues.

Una Isla, much like its aerobics-performing protagonist, is just warming up to this new collaborator.

Book It/Una Isla

Where: Sota Drama Theatre, 1 Zubir Said Drive
When: May 19, 5pm
Admission: From $38
Info: str.sg/doHe