At a cultural time when most of us are happier to watch pirated lo-fi movie trailers on our phones than spend an evening at the theatre, a Berlin opera house is making a stab at reinvention, casting a robot as its male lead.
Berlin’s Komische Oper’s current near three-hour performance of My Square Lady is asking a lot of its new performer; in an art form that is known for embracing the melodramatic, with its performers not known for restraint when it comes to belting out arias about love, death, marriage, and getting laid, laying their hopes on an emotionless humanoid robot to carry an entire show seems a tall order.
Picture: Iko Freese | drama-berlin.de
Myon, the fully-automated robotic lead of the show does, at the very least, live up to the ideas behind the story Pygmalion, created by Irish Nobel Prize-winning writer George Bernard Shaw. My Square Lady, itself a play on words of the stage-musical version of Shaw’s enduring classic, asks very current questions about the role that technology plays in the arts in the modern world, as well as raising questions about what it is to feel and think.
Instead of Eliza Doolittle attempting to shake off the shackles of flower-selling poverty to pass as a member of high society, My Square Lady sees a Myon, the Eliza Screwlittle of the show, attempt to pass as a human. From the show's description, "Myon’s task is to explore opera, as a 'power plant of emotion' in all its facets, and in the process learn what it means to feel human emotions, express them, and prompt them in others. Whether Myon makes it as a human being - or even an opera star - will be demonstrated at the end of the season, on stage at the Komische Oper.”
Picture: Iko Freese | drama-berlin.de
To get their leading man up to scratch, the comedic opera house teamed up with the Gob Squad performance group, as well as the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory at Berlin's Beuth University of Applied Sciences. Both parties worked for more than two years on training and rehearsing, to create a humanoid robot that could take to the stage independently, with the capability of reacting to the visual and sound cues of the other performers in order to play his part and pull his own 16-kg weight.
When the lights go down and the hush descends across the audience, Myon appears on stage, the robot entirely under his own control. No third-party tech operators are playing with computers or remote controls in the wings. He's on his own, and the whole show, along with the expectations of the near-50 cast members, rest squarely on the shoulders of a 125-cm tall robot.
“Myon is a modular humanoid, which can be disassembled and reassembled during runtime," said a member of the research team at the neurorobotics lab. "The body parts are fully autonomous in a threefold sense: they all possess their own energy supply, processing power, and a neural network topology which allows for stand-alone operation of single limbs.”
You can watch a trailer for My Square Lady below:
