Exercise - Interacting Like Robots

For these pair and ensemble exercises, we will explore how we can express interactions and conversations between robots by puppeting objects with our hands.

Expressive Interaction

Drama is all about interactions: people talk, fight, love, collaborate, co-exist. It reflects and exaggerates our own daily life social interactions. Representing that using robots involves condensing the richness of human experience to much simpler movements and rhythms. A good abstraction of this interaction can suggest the fuller experience and the audience will read their own experience into what they see.

Improvising movement with a partner is much easier when we feel our efforts will be accepted. For the following, a good rule of thumb is to always think “Yes, and...” whatever someone else does: accept it, and then build on it. This will help foster a spirit of collaboration.

Part 1: Taking Turns

  1. Choose an object to represent your ‘robot’. It can be anything: a glove, a book, an actual robot. You will move this object with your hands as if it were a two-wheeled robot.
  2. Stand up, find a partner, and move to a clear area of the floor.
  3. Each partner should choose an attitude to portray with respect to their partner. Some examples: shyness, curiosity, fear, interest.
  4. Each partner should choose an action which is characteristic for that attitude. E.g. the shy robot might turns its back; the curious robot might explore.
  5. Pick which partner goes first. One partner performs their action, then the other partner responds. Try to respond with an action consistent with your robot attitude, and with movements within the robot capabilities.
  6. Then the second partner can take the initiative, and the first partner respond.
  7. After a few rounds, pick a different attitude and action and try again.

Part 2: Tempo

  1. Change partners.
  2. Try the same exercise again. Then try to tighten the timing, see if you can smoothly flow between movement and response and back again.
  3. Do it again, twice as fast.
  4. Do it again, half as fast.

Discussion

These small actions can become events which reveal character and advance a plot, i.e., the units of a story. The larger goal here is to abstract the story itself into an essence which can be conveyed by the robots as our proxies, just as these actions are abstractions of human actions and emotions.