In Cascina, technology and theatre are arriving in school with the project What can a robot do?
Last October 2020, at the Internet Festival in Pisa organised by Fondazione Sistema Toscana (Tuscany System Foundation), a show was staged at the Museo delle Navi Antiche (Ancient Ships Museum), produced by the Fondazione Sipario Toscana-La Città del Teatro di Cascina (Tuscan Stage Foundation-Cascina City of Theatre), set in the future with actor Dario Focardi and EGO, the robot developed by IIT-Italian Institute of Technology and the Research Centre at the E. Piaggio University of Pisa with coordination by Prof. Antonio Bicchi. It was a preview of the debut that was due to be held at the end of the month at Città del Teatro in Cascina. That debut never took place, and the lights at the Theatre have been switched off for many months now.
Despite the difficulties of a difficult and complex period such as the one the whole world has been going through for over a year, that show has remained on the sidelines, waiting for the stage lights to come back on, while Cosa può un robot (What can a robot do) has been developed instead.
An artistic and educational journey arising from a concept by actor Dario Focardi and Pericle Salvini, managing director of GREAT Robotics, produced by Fondazione Sipario Toscana – La Città del Teatro with support from Fondazione Toscana Spettacolo Onlus, Circuito Regionale multidisciplinare, (Tuscany Theatre Foundation non-profit organisation, multidisciplinary Regional Circuit) and the Region of Tuscany as part of the special project Così remoti, così vicini – Nuove idee per un teatro a distanza (So far, so close – New ideas for remote theatre). This is an educational and training project designed for primary school classes, with the objective of transforming LIM, Lavagna Interattiva Multimediale (interactive multimedia whiteboard) into an environment where theatre and gaming could meet.
The actor EGO has gone back home to his laboratories at IIT and Centro Piaggio, waiting for a new live performance. And why did the actor Dario invent ‘What can a robot do’?
Being at home, with a lot of time on my hands, freed up some creative slots that I had abandoned for some time, so I dedicated some space to this new idea, on which Pericle and I had been working for at least a year, and which then became a project through cooperation with the artistic director of Fondazione Sipario Toscana-La Città del Teatro, Luca Marengo, and the work of all the people in this Centre for Theatrical Production. The pandemic closed our workplace to the public but it could not stop our creativity.
In detail, what does this project comprise?
My initial reaction would be to answer as follows: “the exploration of new directions in such a barren period”. We have had very few face-to-face social relations, and this led us to accumulate vast amounts of emotive solitude. We thought that children also needed to re-establish contact with the outside world, which has been crystallised at this moment in time, and so, in order to try to offset this latent sadness, we decided to bring Theatre and Robotics together again. In this case, it was for an educational project involving classes IV and V of the Primary Schools in the Municipality of Cascina. The whole project was performed in distance learning mode. This was possible because all the classes were equipped with a LIM – Lavagna Interattiva Multimediale (interactive multimedia whiteboard), and Great Robotics had developed a remote control software programme for Coderbot, the robot that we used in the project and that belongs to the University of Milano-Bicocca. The children in the project worked with me on the rewriting of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, while with Pericle they studied the basics of coding and learned how to control Coderbot.
While we were running this first part of the course, the artisans at Città del Teatro (Theatre City) built the maze within which the robot would be moving.
In practical terms, the children had to guide Coderbot through this escape room/maze, a reconstruction of Little Red Riding Hood’s path from her home to her grandmother’s house. The children were Little Red Riding Hood. In fact, the robot has a camera mounted on its head, so it enables you to see what the robot is seeing, as if you were playing a video game.
Gaming is the third element involved in this project. We exploited some of its fundamental characteristics, such as attaining a goal that has been set at the start of the adventure, along with other intermediate goals to be completed. On the last day, when we all played together, Pericle and I were connected from Città del Teatro, and the children were in their classrooms.
What was the greatest difficulty in interacting on computer screens with such a young audience?
The physical and emotional distance that we encountered. I have been working with children for a long time, and every year I lead several workshops at school. I hadn’t done any since the pandemic started. Returning to the classroom in this way created a sense of alienation. You have to talk to the children from a distance, hoping they hear you, and you have to ask them to confirm that this is the case every time, and then you see them coming into view of the webcam with their facemasks on, and they also look rather perplexed.
When you think of theatre, technology is far from your thoughts. But both in this case and in your previous experience, technology seems to have played a fundamental role. For the children, how important was it to stay connected, even though the theatre stages are still empty?
Without doubt, at this moment in time, technology is helping us a great deal, enabling us to keep certain switches on that would otherwise have been irreparably deactivated. Our presence, albeit from a distance, alleviated the kids’ sense of solitude. It enabled them to feel a positive connection with the outside world. We ourselves understood, by means of this workshop, that it is important to recommence in-person projects at school, very soon. The children need them a lot, and so do we.
Tell us also about your show with EGO: what is it like acting with a robot? Is man-machine interaction possible in theatre as well as in other fields?
I hope we see more and more shows like Io (sono) robot – I (am) robot – because they can help allay the fear that some people have of robots. Acting alongside EGO, controlled by actor Federico Raffaelli, is an experience that I would recommend to all my colleagues, because it brings you face to face with unusual difficulties, such as not having any physical reaction from your stage partner, and so you are forced to build an emotive process that digs deep into the character of your theatre persona. The interaction that I developed with EGO is hard to explain, because it doesn’t fit naturally into the traditional behaviour patterns that you have with another human being. You are facing an object that is not inanimate, because it acts independently of you. On the other hand, machines are already present in our lives and they will increasingly become part of our existence. So I think that it would be a good thing to start building relations with them right away.
Can we say goodbye with the hope of coming to see you and EGO again live in the theatre soon, or are you working on something else?
EGO and I will be back on stage again in September at La Città del Teatro in Cascina, when we will at last be able to conclude the production activities that the pandemic has blocked.
