“Can I take this robot apart?” When roboticists and theater makers meet

The Centre for Transformative Media Technologies (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) invites you to attend a presentation by  Professor Maaike Bleeker – Utrecht University 

“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‘.”

Event details

• Date: Wednesday 26 March 2025
• Time: 2.00pm – 3.00pm AEDT | 4.00am – 5.00am GMT+01
• Online, please e-mail j.fraune@uu.nl for the participation link

Maaike Bleeker is a Professor of Theatre and Performance at Utrecht University and the director of the Research Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON). She studies the performance of humans and technology, on and off stage. She is also an experienced dramaturg in theatre and dance. In her work, she combines approaches from the arts and performance with insights from philosophy, media theory, and cognitive science. She is the PI of ”Acting Like a Robot: Theater as Testbed for the Robot Revolution’ and ‘Dramaturgy for Devices: Developing Sustained Relationships with Robots and Smart Objects’, both funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). She is the author of ‘Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking’ (Palgrave, 2008) and ‘Doing Dramaturgy: Thinking Through Practice’ (Palgrave, 2023). She also co-edited the ‘Routledge Companion for Performance and Technology’ (forthcoming).