Professor Maaike Bleeker – “Can I take this robot apart?” When roboticists and theater makers meet

In this presentation, I will share experiences from several years of collaboration in which we brought together expertise from the arts and theatre, robotics, and academic research and invited guests with different expertise to join our process, including an acrobat, a spoken-word artist, puppeteers, dancers, a fashion designer, and a mime player. Our research builds on and contributes to the ongoing Performing Robots research at Utrecht University, the artistic research and creations of Ulrike Quade Company and Bram Ellens, the technological applications and projects of the Creative Robotics company, and societal applications (via, among others, the “Acting like a Robot” and “Dramaturgy for Devices” research projects).

In our research, theatre-robotics collaborations serve as a way to activate and externalize the tacit knowledge of theatre practitioners to make it available for interaction with experts from other fields for joint exploration. Interdisciplinary collaboration is thus not only a matter of exchanging ideas and insights but also of different practical expertise and embodied knowledge. Concerning the latter, we are much inspired by Roger Kneebone’s (2020) observations on expertise and setting up collaborations between radically different experts and how this can result in what he terms instances of “reciprocal illumination.”