Bodies in Dialogue: Exploring Perceived Agency through Embodied AI in Human-Robot Theatre

Bodies in Dialogue is a process documentary following a practice-as-research workshop led by RAPP Lab (the Robots, Art, People and Performance Laboratory, University of Canberra) with the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. Traditionally, a robot's movement on stage has been confined to three interaction paradigms (puppeteered control, scripted trajectories and rule-based control), in all of which a human authors the movement in advance or by hand. We order these along a spectrum of perceived agency: the initiative that collaborators and audiences collectively attribute to the machine. The documentary traces the creation and in-the-wild deployment of a fourth paradigm, learned generative interaction, through ENACT, a lightweight vision-action model trained on a physical theatre vocabulary that generates a robot arm's movement in real time from its perception of a co-present performer. Across three days, acting, design and engineering students train alongside the arm through Meyerhold's biomechanics, Bogart's Viewpoints and Lecoq's pedagogy, culminating in three devised works authored by neither performers nor model alone, and a shift in how the ensemble perceives, and creates with, the machine.