On December 9th, 2025, the kick-off of Daniël van Klaveren’s work-in-progress Robot Opera (provisional title) took place at Theater Sonnevanck in Enschede. Drawing scenographic inspiration from Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel The Electric State, the play is set in a junkyard inhabited by abandoned household objects. Among the devices scattered on stage—including a vacuum cleaner and…

On the 6th of February, Dramaturgy for Devices and Robotstories | Expanding Narratives organised a collaborative exploration of Prompts & Theater. With the advent of LLMs, the concept of “prompt” has entered the HRI vocabulary. However, in the theater domain, formulas and systems resembling what a prompt might be for AI have been in use for much longer. For example, Forsythe’s Improvisation…

On September 25th 2025, Dramaturgy for Devices organized a workshop on dance knowledge. The participants included choreographers, roboticists, dramaturges, and performance scholars, each of whom brought their own distinct understanding of and relation to dance. Four choreographers/researchers were invited to share their view of what dance knowledge entails. The aim of the workshop was to…

VU Lecture by Laura Karreman and Ulrike Quade On December 1st, 2025, Dr. Laura Karreman—Associate Professor in Media and Performance Studies at Utrecht University (UU)—and Ulrike Quade—theater director, artistic researcher, puppeteer, and scenographer—gave a lecture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) titled The Dramaturgy of Robots on Stage. The lecture was presented in the context

Science and theatre seem like two different worlds. Yet theatre can tell us something about what our future with robots will look like. ‘Theatre knowledge is relevant to robot development.’ Daan Appels wrote a series about feelings for robots for NEMO Kennislink, the journalistic platform of NEMO Science Museum. In his first article, he talks

“If, as Shakespeare famously claimed, ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’, robots are the new kids on the block.” Prof. dr. Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) The podcast ‘Acting Like A Robot’ is about the research of the same name within which the VU, UU, HKU and Ulrike Quade…

ELRAT | European Lab for Robots in Arts and Theatre

What does it take to move a robot? Acting Like a RobotFilm: The Transketeers Special thanks to Stadsschouwburg Utrecht

ELRAT | European Lab for Robots in Arts and Theatre

Pick me up, kick me out!  On 21 February 2025, the Dutch newspaper NRC published an interview with Maaike Bleeker on the research project Acting Like a Robot, which concluded festively on 31 January 2025 at De Paardenkathedraal. Read the article here (in Dutch)