Dance Artists Are Playing a Significant Role in the Development of Robotic Technologies

Whenever a stranger asks Amy LaViers what she does for a living, she gets “a little bit prickly and awkward about it,” she admits. As director of the Robotics, Animation, and Dance Lab in Philadelphia, she finds people often simply imagine her dancing with humanoid robots onstage. “Which I’ve done—I’m not going to knock that,” LaViers says. “But there are so many other ways into what we do and how it can be useful.”

As moving machines like drones and self-driving cars become more integrated into our daily lives, the tech companies behind them are realizing they need experts who intimately understand motion through space and time, and how the nuances of that motion can affect the way we feel about their products. Translation: They need dance artists. “As you see these technologies more and more in human spaces, we need intentional design that’s focused around the human experience,” LaViers says. This is precisely what the emerging field known as choreobotics aims to deliver. 

Think about it: Getting a mechanical object to walk up or down a flight of stairs means understanding how to shift weight, how to fall, how to redirect, and how to absorb energy, says choreographer Ilya Vidrin, a professor of creative practice research in the theater department at Northeastern University, affiliated with the school’s Institute for Experiential Robotics. While a biomechanics expert might be able to help with that, a choreographer will bring an understanding of the emotional impact of the way a robot might saunter, skitter, or trudge up those stairs. 

This is essential, because how robots move is one of the first things people notice about them—and artificial-seeming motions can easily creep us out, says Catie Cuan, who leads the arts and robotics program at the Stanford Robotics Center. “Almost everything that moves in the world is a part of nature—even when you see a car or bike, it’s operated by a person,” she says. “Our brains have evolved to ascribe agency to the thing that’s moving.” With robots, however, we don’t have thousands of years of evolutionary context to help us comprehend their unnatural jerks and sputters, which can make us immediately suspicious. 

Artists have a sensitivity to these kinds of details—one that engineers, who are squarely focused on functional problem-solving, might not. For instance, Vidrin points out that people tend to assume stronger robots are always better. “But strong robots are also very dangerous,” he says. One project he worked on, for example, looked at robotic technologies to help bedridden patients get up. “In order to do that, we can’t just thrust them up,” he says, pointing out the inherently vulnerable, fragile nature of that human–robot relationship.

Choreobotics isn’t only about bolstering the development of autonomous machines, however. Robots have also expanded choreographic possibilities. “In a very literal way, machines do things that human bodies can’t, so they are extending the palette of dance artists,” LaViers says. She points to a piece Kate Ladenheim choreographed in which she wore robotic wings triggered by her breath.  

What’s more, because our brains don’t fire the same way when we’re watching a robot as when we’re watching humans, artists can leverage how machines can alter an audience’s perception of choreography. “We relate to their movement totally differently,” Cuan says. “With robots, your mirror neurons don’t map it to your own experience as they do when you’re watching a human.” That chasm can illuminate something poetic—or disturbing. Monica Thomas, known for her viral work with Boston Dynamics’ robots, highlights how the level of synchronicity among robots can be uniquely terrifying to watch. “The Rockettes are incredibly unified and yet they’re still not perfect, and that’s comforting on some level,” she says. 

Exploring the creative possibilities of robots through dance can also deepen technologists’ understanding of the capabilities of their machines. One of Cuan’s current artistic projects uses AI to help a robot learn how to be “lovable” based on reactions it gets from the crowds it interacts with at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco. The work both puts AI in a new light—as a means of comfort, rather than efficiency—and offers useful information to help create the kinds of machines that we might actually want to have around in our lives.   

“We’re in a very special moment where we get to decide, How do we want to live with robots?” Cuan says. “We don’t want to sit in the future and complain about being surrounded by scary, freaky-looking robots that annoy us on the sidewalk because we didn’t make deliberate choices today about what that would look like.” She predicts more and more companies will begin to use choreographic thinking as an integral part of their product development. 

“Right now, there’s maybe a few hundred people on Earth who do what I do,” Cuan says. “In the future, I think there’ll be tens of thousands.”

Yes, You Have a Place in Robotics

Coming from a dance background before getting into robotics, Cuan admits that, for a long time, she worried she didn’t know enough about engineering. Sometimes she still feels that way, even now, with her PhD in robotics. But she encourages all dancers to see a place for themselves in this field.

“I have so many conversations with people of all different ages, and there is a sense of foreboding, dread, disempowerment, because there’s opacity around how these technologies and systems work,” she says. “But you need to assume that there is space for you. Because, otherwise, we’re going to wind up with a much more homogeneous set of voices in this field, and fewer imaginative, creative­, risky things. And nobody wants to be in boring-land.”

The Beauty—and Challenge—of Choreographing Metal

Although he’s made a name for himself choreographing with machines, Huang Yi doesn’t see dancers and robots as natural partners. “One is warm, organic, and the other is really cold, metal,” he says. “And when you hit that in rehearsal, it hurts!”

Thomas, who’s created movement for Boston Dynamics’ robot dogs and humanoids, points out that robots simply can’t replicate the charisma of a great dancer. “A good performer knows how to pull in an audience with their movement, with their breathing, with their intention. They’re bringing way more than the dance steps to the stage,” she says. “When you’re working with robots, you don’t have that.”

That’s why Yi says he thinks about the challenge almost like a musician: “The instrument is created by a human, and through human input, it might just make noise, or it can create this really beautiful, harmonious resonance.”

Still, Yi admits that most of the movements robots make today are still very…robotic. “I’m looking forward to seeing how the technology can catch up, and become even more humanized,” he says.