Robots! (Part 2)

 

[Part 2 of “Robots!” is the final installment of this short series.  As I acknowledged in Part 1, I decided to post this transcript while I was watching 60 Minutes last week.  When Bill Whitaker, the correspondent, referenced the earlier robotics report from 28 March 2021, I decided to post both transcripts.

[As I usually do with multi-part posts, I recommend reading the foregoing parts in order before jumping in in medias res.  In this case, the introduction to Part 1 contains a very brief run-down on robots and the origin of the word, itself.  (If you don’t already know how the word was coined, you might be surprised.)]

“BOSTON DYNAMICS’ AI-POWERED HUMANOID ROBOT
IS LEARNING TO WORK IN A FACTORY”
by Bill Whitaker and Marc Lieberman

[Four years and nine months after airing the report in Part 1 of this series, CBS’s, 60 Minutes ran the segment below on 4 January 2026 (this link includes the video of the segment).  It was a follow-up to the Anderson Cooper report, this time with Whitaker as correspondent, and the news magazine broadcast revisited Boston Dynamics.

[In December 2020, Hyundai Motor Group, the Korean auto-maker, made a deal to buy 80% of Boston Dynamics, and in June 2021, just after the earlier 60 Minutes report at the end of March, Hyundai completed the agreement and officially took control of BD.  It’s unknown even now what this change of hands means in terms of BD’s robotics work, though the auto-maker has launched a new division to create “walking cars” and other robots.]

Will AI-powered humanoid robots someday work alongside us?

Bill Whitaker: For decades, engineers have been trying to create robots that look and act human. Now, rapid advances in artificial intelligence are taking humanoids from the lab to the factory floor. As fears grow that AI will displace workers, a global race is underway to develop human-like robots able to do human jobs. Competitors include Tesla, startups backed by Amazon and Nvidia, and state-supported Chinese companies. Boston Dynamics is a frontrunner. The Massachusetts company, valued at more than a billion dollars, is hard at work on a humanoid it calls Atlas. South Korean carmaker Hyundai holds an 88% stake in the robot maker. We were invited to see the first real-world test of Atlas at Hyundai’s new factory near Savannah, Georgia. There, we got a glimpse of a humanoid future that’s coming faster than you might think.

Voice-over (Bill Whitaker): Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant is about as cutting-edge as it gets. More than 1,000 robots work alongside almost 1,500 humans, hoisting, stamping and welding in robotic unison. This may look like the factory of the future, but we found the future of the future in the parts warehouse, tucked away in the back corner, getting ready for work. 

Meet Atlas: A 5'9", 200[-]pound, AI-powered humanoid created by Boston Dynamics. The rise of the robots is science fiction no more.

[Atlas, which was featured in the 2021 60 Minutes report covered in Part 1 of this series, was created in 2013. Boston Dynamics released YouTube videos of Atlas at different stages of its development in 2013 (the video in this link seems to be broken), 2016, 2017, May 2018, October 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 (x 2), 16 April 2024, and 17 April 2024.]

Bill Whitaker: I have to say, every time I see it, I just can’t believe what my eyes are seeing. Is this the first time Atlas has been out of the lab?

Zack Jackowski: This is the first time Atlas has been out of the lab doing real work.

Voice-over: Zack Jackowski heads Atlas development. He has two mechanical engineering degrees from MIT and a mission to turn the robot into a productive worker on the factory floor. We watched as Atlas practiced sorting roof racks for the assembly line without human help.

Bill Whitaker: So he’s working autonomously.

Zack Jackowski: Correct

Bill Whitaker: You’re down here to see how Atlas works in the field, and you’ll be showing Atlas off to your bosses at Hyundai?

Zack Jackowski: Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit. I– and I– I think a lot of our roboticists would’ve thought that was pretty crazy five, six years ago. 

Voice-over: When 60 Minutes last visited Boston Dynamics in 2021 [this is the report from 2021, posted as Part 1], Atlas was a bulky, hydraulic robot that could run and jump. Back then, Atlas relied on algorithms written by engineers. When we dropped in again this past fall, we saw a new generation Atlas with a sleek, all-electric body and an AI brain, powered by Nvidia’s advanced microchips, making Atlas smart enough to pull off hard to believe feats autonomously. We saw Atlas skip and run with ease.

Bill Whitaker: Do you ever stop thinking, gee whiz?

Scott Kuindersma: I remain extremely excited about where we are in the history of robotics but we see that there’s so much more that we can do, as well.

Voice-over: Scott Kuindersma is head of robotics research, a job he proudly wears on his sleeve.

Bill Whitaker: You even have on a robot shirt.

Scott Kuindersma: Well, once I saw that this shirt existed, there was no way I wasn’t buying it.

Voice-over: He told us robots today have learned to master moves that until recently were considered a step too far for a machine.

Scott Kuindersma: And a lot of this has to do with how we’re going about programming these robots now, where it’s more about teaching, and demonstrations, and machine learning than manual programming.

Bill Whitaker: So this humanoid, this mechanical human, can actually learn?

Scott Kuindersma: Yes. And– and we found that that’s actually one of the most effective way[s] to program robots like that.

Voice-over: Atlas learns in different ways. In supervised learning, machine learning scientist Kevin Bergamin – wearing a virtual reality headset – takes direct control of the humanoid, guiding its hands and arms, move-by-move through each task until Atlas gets it.

Scott Kuindersma: And if that teleoperator can perform the task that we want the robot to do, and do it multiple times, that generates data that we can use to train the robot’s AI models to then later do that task autonomously.

Voice-over: Kuindersma used me to demonstrate another way Atlas learns.

Scott Kuindersma: That v– very stylish suit that you’re wearing is actually gonna capture all of your body motion to train Atlas to try to mimic exactly your motions. And so you’re about to become a 200-pound metal robot.

Voice-over: He asked me to pick an exercise. They captured the way I work as well.

Bill Whitaker: I am here at the AI Lab at Boston Dynamics. All of my movements, my walking, my d– arm gestures are being picked up by these sensors . . .

Voice-over: Then engineers put my data into their machine learning process. Atlas’ body is different from mine, so they had to teach it to match my movements virtually – more than 4,000 digital Atlases trained for six hours in simulation.

Scott Kuindersma: And they’re all trying to do jumping jacks, just like you. And as you can see, they’re just starting to learn, so they’re not very good at it.

Voice-over: The simulation, he told us, added challenges for the avatars, like slippery floors, inclines, or stiff joints, and then homed in on what works best.

Scott Kuindersma: And it can eventually get to a state where we have many copies of Atlas doing really good jumping jacks.

Voice-over: They uploaded this new skill into the AI system that controls every Atlas robot. Once one is trained, they’re all trained.

Scott Kuindersma: So that’s what you look like when you’re exercising.

Bill Whitaker: Uh-huh.

Voice-over: And what I look like doing my job.

Bill Whitaker: I am here at the AI Lab at Boston Dynamics. All of my movements, my walking, my d– arm gestures are being picked up by these sensors …

Bill Whitaker: This is mind-blowing.

Voice-over: Through the same processes, Atlas was taught to crawl, do cartwheels. It didn’t fare as well with the duck walk.

Scott Kuindersma: Oh, that was fun. And then this happens.

Bill Whitaker: And then this happens.

Scott Kuindersma: We love when things like this happen, actually. Because it’s often an opportunity to understand something we didn’t know about the system.

Bill Whitaker: What are some of the limitations you see now?

Scott Kuindersma: Well, I’d- I would say that most things that a person does in their daily lives, Atlas or– other humanoids can’t really do that yet. I think we’re start–

Bill Whitaker: Like- like what?

Scott Kuindersma: Well, just putting on clothes in the morning, or pouring your cup of coffee and walking around the house with it.

Bill Whitaker: That’s too difficult for– for Atlas?

Scott Kuindersma: Yeah, I think there are no humanoids that do that nearly as well as a person would do that. But I think the thing that’s really exciting now is we see a pathway to get there.

Voice-over: A pathway provided by AI. What stands out in this Atlas is its brain. Nvidia chips – the ones that helped launch the AI revolution with ChatGPT – process the flood of collected data, moving this humanoid robot closer to something like common sense.

Scott Kuindersma: So the analogy might be if I was teaching a child how to do free throws in basketball, if I allow them to just explore and come up with their own solutions, sometimes they can come up with a solution that I didn’t anticipate. And that’s true for these systems as well.

Voice-over: Atlas can see its surroundings and is figuring out how the physical world works.

Scott Kuindersma: So that some day you can put a robot like this in a factory and just explain to it what would– you would like it to do, and it has enough knowledge about how the world works that it has a good chance of doing it.

Robert Playter: There’s a lot of excitement in the industry right now about the potential of building robots that are smart enough to really become general purpose.

Voice-over: Robert Playter, the CEO of Boston Dynamics, spearheaded the company’s humanoid development. He’s been building toward this moment for more than 30 years. The cornerstone was this robotic dog, Spot, introduced almost a decade ago. Spots are trained in heat, cold and varied terrain, and roam the halls of Boston Dynamics.

Robert Playter: So we have some cameras– thermal sensors, acoustic sensors. An array of sensors on its back that lets it collect data about the health of a factory.

Voice-over: Spots carry out quality control checks at Hyundai, making sure the cars have the right parts. They conduct security and industrial inspections at hundreds of sites around the world. What began with Spot has evolved into Atlas.

Robert Playter: So this robot is capable of superhuman motion, and so it’s gonna be able to exceed what we can do.

Bill Whitaker: So you are creating a robot that is meant to exceed the capabilities of humans.

Robert Playter: Why not, right? We– we would like things that could be stronger than us or tolerate more heat than us or definitely go into a dangerous place where we shouldn’t be going. So you really want superhuman capabilities.

Bill Whitaker: To a lotta people that sounds scary. You don’t foresee– a world of Terminators [an allusion to the title character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1984’s science fiction film The Terminator (Orion Pictures) and its sequels]?

Robert Playter: Absolutely not. I think if you saw how hard we have to work to get the robots to just do some of the straightforward tasks we want them to do, that would dispel that– that worry about sentience and rogue robots.

Voice-over: We wondered if people might have more immediate concerns. We saw workers doing a job at the Hyundai plant that Atlas is being trained to perform.

Bill Whitaker: I guarantee you there are going to be people who will say, “I’m gonna lose my job to a robot.”

Robert Playter: Work does change. So the really repetitive, really back-breaking labor is really- is gonna end up being done by robots. But these robots are not so autonomous that they don’t need to be managed. They need to be built. They need to be trained. They need to be serviced.

Voice-over: Playter told us it could be several years before Atlas joins the Hyundai workforce fulltime. Goldman Sachs predicts the market for humanoids will reach $38 billion within the decade. Boston Dynamics and other U.S. robot makers are fighting to come out on top. But they’re not the only ones in the ring. Chinese companies are proving to be formidable challengers. They’re running to win.

Bill Whitaker: Are they outpacing us?

Robert Playter: The Chinese government has a mission to win the robotics race. Technically I believe we remain– in the lead. But there’s a real threat there that, simply through the scale of investment– we could fall behind.

Voice-over: To stay ahead, Hyundai made that big investment in Boston Dynamics.

Zack Jackowski: Four robots . . .

Voice-over: We were at the Georgia plant when Atlas engineer Zack Jackowski presented Atlas to Heung-soo Kim, Hyundai’s head of global strategy. He came all the way from South Korea to check in on the brave new world the carmaker is funding.

Bill Whitaker: What do you think of the progress that they’ve made with Atlas?

Heung-soo Kim: I think we are on track– about the development. Atlas, so far, it’s very successful. It’s a kind of– a start of great journey. Yeah.

Voice-over: The destination? That humanoid future we mentioned at the start – robots like us, working beside us, walking among us. It’s enough to make your head spin.

[Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News.

[Marc Lieberman joined 60 Minutes in 2014.  Working with correspondent Bill Whitaker, he has produced more than 40 stories, including breaking news, newsmaker interviews, profiles, and in-depth investigations.  He started his career at CBS News in 1992.]

Robots! (Part 1)

 

[A robot—as if anyone today doesn’t already know—is a machine that resembles a human and does mechanical, routine tasks on command.  That’s the meaning in the world of sci-fi; in the real-life industrial world, it’s a machine built and programmed to carry out some complex task or group of tasks by physically moving. 

[Lately, these two definitions are coming closer and closer together (as you’ll read in the reports in this post and the second one coming up in Part 2).

[While a robot may be constructed to suggest human form without mimicking human appearance and behavior, like the arguably best-known anthropomorphic robot, C-3PO from Star Wars.  (3PO’s companion, R2-D2, is a non-humanoid robot, resembling a moving trash can.) 

[A robot that’s designed to look and act like a human being is called an android, sometimes a ’droid for short.  Probably the most famous ’droid is Lieutenant Commander Data from the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount Television, 1987-94; syndicated) and the subsequent films.

[A being that’s part machine and part organic is a cyborg, a kind of hybrid of a human and a robot.  This, of course, is a largely fictional creature—at least for the present. 

[The word ‘robot’ was first used in Karel Čapek’s (Czech; 1890-1938) 1920 play R.U.R.  The abbreviation in the title stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots (in Czech, Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti.)  In Czech, robota means forced labor.  The word, itself, was coined by the playwright’s brother. Josef (1887-1945), a Czech artist best known as a painter, but who was also a noted writer and a poet, who suggested it to Karel.

[‘Android,’ for the curious reader, is an amalgam of the ancient Greek andros (ανδρος), ‘man’ or ‘human,’ and eidos (ειδος), ‘form,’ ‘image,’ ‘shape,’ ‘appearance,’ or ‘look.’  It dates back, surprisingly, to the 1700s.  ‘Cyborg,’ coined in 1960, is a portmanteau word made up of syllables taken from ‘cybernetic’ (of or relating to the study of communication and control in living organisms or machines [i.e., cybernetics]) and ‘organism.’

[Humans have been fascinated with the idea of artificial life forms for almost as long as we’ve been writing down our thoughts, dreams, and fears.  The earliest treatment of man-made creatures was in Homeric Greece.  Around 700 to 600 BCE, the idea of robots appears in the Iliad when the god of fire, Hephaestus, forged armor for Achilles with the help of “golden maidens” who could talk, move, and reason, and were taught by the gods to make things with their hands.

[The Bible, in the Book of Revelation (Chapter 13), commonly dated to about 95 CE, describes a man-made object that is supernaturalized to act as a living creature and is granted “breath,” thus becoming capable of speaking.

[In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated humanoid creature created entirely from inanimate matter—most commonly clay or mud—and brought to life through mystical rituals.  Though the word appears in the Bible and in early Talmudic texts, the golem as an animated clay statue created to protect Jews was a largely Ashkenazi (Jews of Eastern and Central Europe) figure.

[Abba ben Joseph bar Ḥama (ca. 280-352 CE), a Babylonian rabbi who’s referred to in the Talmud by the name Rava, was believed to have once created a golem.  The best-known stories about golems date to the 16th and 17th centuries in Poland and Bohemia.

[There’s a long history of discoveries of artificial creatures, going back as far as Egyptian dancing dwarves from about 2000 BCE animated via a system of gut strings and rollers and Archytas of Tarentum’s (Greek; 435/410-360/350 BCE) wooden bird powered by a jet of steam or compressed air (ca. 400-350 BCE), often cited as the first documented scientific “robot.”

[Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) designed the first documented physical humanoid robot (ca. 1495), a knight in metal armor.  Reconstructions from his notebooks show a system of pulleys and gears that allowed it to sit, stand, and move its visor.

[In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson (French; 1709-82) devised one of the most famous early functional automatons: a gilded copper bird that could flap its wings and simulate eating and digesting grain.

[Eric (1928), one of the first modern humanoid robots made of metal, was an aluminum suit of armor built by British engineer William Henry (W. H.) Richards (1868-1948).  He could move his arms and head and was controlled by remote or voice.  In 1939, Elektro, a seven-foot-tall robot with a steel skeleton covered in an aluminum skin, was built by engineers at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and displayed at the New York World’s Fair.  It could walk, talk via a record player, and even “smoke” cigarettes.  Both Eric and Elektro were officially labeled “robots,” Čapek’s play having been produced around the world, popularizing the word.

[My own first memorable encounter with the notion of robots was probably the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (Twentieth Century Fox) in which Michael Rennie’s intergalactic ambassador, Klaatu, has a powerful robot, the “Iron Man,” named Gort.  The film’s my favorite science fiction flick—for two reasons.  One, it’s a terrific movie—a good plot, well told and well acted (with one of our best actresses in Patricia Neal, plus a favorite of mine, Sam Jaffe)—and, two, it was set and filmed in Washington, D.C., the town where I was born (though I was only 4 when it was being made there).]

“BOSTON DYNAMICS: INSIDE THE WORKSHOP
WHERE ROBOTS OF THE FUTURE ARE BEING BUILT”
by Anderson Cooper 

[This report from the 60 Minutes episode of 28 March 2021 (CBS News) was on a rare look behind the curtain of the robotics labs of Boston Dynamics.  The segment bore the on-air headline, “The Next Generation of Robots.”  Over four-and-a-half years later, 60 Minutes revisited and updated this subject.  That report will follow on Monday, 12 January.

[There’s no full video of this broadcast on line except for subscribers to Paramount+; readers who are subscribers or who wish to become one can log on from the page with this report.  On YouTube, there’s a short excerpt from near the beginning that’s less than a minute long and a five-minute video of a “60 Minutes Overtime” segment.  (There’s a link to Paramount+ on this site as well.)]

Boston Dynamics is a cutting-edge robotics company that’s spent decades behind closed doors making robots that move in ways we’ve only seen in science fiction films. They occasionally release videos on YouTube of their life-like machines spinning, somersaulting or sprinting, which are greeted with fascination and fear. We’ve been trying, without any luck, to get into Boston Dynamics’ workshop for years, and a few weeks ago they finally agreed to let us in. After working out strict COVID protocols, we went to Massachusetts to see how they make robots do the unimaginable.

From the outside, Boston Dynamics headquarters looks pretty normal. Inside, however. it’s anything but. If Willy Wonka made robots, his workshop might look something like this. There are robots in corridors, offices and kennels. They trot and dance and whirl and the 200-or-so human roboticists, who build and often break them, barely bat an eye.

That is Atlas, the most human-looking robot they’ve ever made.

It’s nearly 5 feet tall, 175 pounds, and is programmed to run, leap and spin like an automated acrobat.

Marc Raibert, the founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics doesn’t like to play favorites, but definitely has a soft spot for Atlas.

Marc Raibert: So here’s a little bit of a jump.

Anderson Cooper: I mean, that’s incredible. (LAUGH)

Atlas isn’t doing all this on its own. Technician Bryan Hollingsworth is steering it with this remote control. But the robot’s software allows it to make other key decisions autonomously.

Marc Raibert: So really the robot is–

Anderson Cooper: That’s incredible–

Marc Raibert: You know, doing all its own balance, all its own control. Bryan’s just steering it, telling it what speed and direction. Its computers are– adjusting how the legs are placed and what forces it’s applying–

Marc Raibert: In order to keep it– balanced.

Atlas balances with the help of sensors, as well as a gyroscope and three on-board computers. It was definitely built to be pushed around.

Marc Raibert: Good, push it a little bit more. It’s just trying to keep its balance. Just like you will, if I push you. And you can push it in any direction, you can push it from the side. (LAUGH)

Making machines that can stay upright on their own and move through the world with the ease of an animal or human has been an obsession of Marc Raiberts’ for 40 years.

[On 10 November 2025, Russia’s first AI-powered humanoid robot, officially called AIDOL (occasionally, but unofficially, AIdol), failed a fundamental task during its official unveiling. (The robot’s name is pronounced exactly like the English word ‘idol.’) As the robot was led onto the stage in Moscow to the theme song from Rocky, it managed a small wave before losing its balance and falling face-first onto the stage floor. Vladimir Vitukhin, CEO of Artificial Intelligence Dynamic Organism Lab (note the initials), the developing tech company, attributed the failure to a calibration error in the robot’s balance algorithms or insufficient lighting affecting its sensors.

[For curious ROTters who read Russian, the standard form of the robot’s name used by Russian news agencies and tech journals is “Айдол” (also pronounced like ‘idol’), written with a capital А at the beginning and continuing in lowercase (note the ‘short I’/I kratkoye). “АЙДОЛ” (all upper case), while technically an equivalent to the all-caps romanization “AIDOL,” is rarely used in Russian text and mostly appears only in headlines, logos, or as a stylized design choice. (Because the specific capitalization of “AIdol,” used by some English-language publications, is intended to highlight the English abbreviation and colloquialism for “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), it has no Cyrillic equivalent.)

[The robot’s English name, AIDOL, is an acronym for the name of the company that created it, Artificial Intelligence Dynamic Organism Lab. The company’s name in Russian is Лаборатория Динамических Организмов с Искусственным Интеллектом (literally, ‘Laboratory of Dynamic Organisms with Artificial Intelligence’). The Russian term for ‘artificial intelligence’ is искусственный интеллект (‘iskusstvennyi intellekt’; искусство/‘iskusstvo’ is Russian for ‘art’).]

Anderson Cooper: The space of time you’ve been working in is nothing compared to the time it’s taken for animals and humans to develop.

Marc Raibert: Some people look at me and say, “Oh, Raibert, you’ve been stuck on this problem for 40 years.” Animals are amazingly good, and people, at– at what they do. You know, we’re so agile. We’re so versatile. We really haven’t achieved what humans can do yet. But I think– I think we can.

Raibert isn’t making it easy for himself, he’s given most of his robots legs.

Anderson Cooper: Why focus on, on legs? I would think wheels would be easier.

Marc Raibert: Yeah, wheels and tracks are great if you have a prepared surface like a road or even a dirt road. But people and animals can go anywhere on earth– using their legs. And, so, that, you know, that was the inspiration.

Some of the first contraptions he built in the early 1980s bounced around on what looked like pogo sticks. They appeared in this documentary when Raibert was a pioneering professor of robotics and computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He founded Boston Dynamics in 1992, and with CEO Robert Playter has been working for decades to perfect how robots move.

They developed this robot, called Big Dog, for the military as well as a larger pack mule that could carry 400 pounds on its back. Experimenting with speed, they got this cheetah-like robot to run nearly 30 miles an hour.

None of these made it out of the prototype phase. But they did lead to this. It’s called Spot. Boston Dynamics made it not knowing exactly how it would be used.

But the inspiration for it isn’t hard to figure out.

Hannah Rossi: So Spot is a[n] omni-directional robot. So I can go forwards and backwards.

Anderson Cooper: This is crazy. (LAUGH)

Robert Playter: This is the real benefit of legs. Legs give you that capability.

That’s Robert Playter, the CEO, and Hannah Rossi, a technician who works on Spot.

Hannah Rossi: I’m not doing anything special to let it walk over those rocks. There you go.

The controls are easier to use than you might expect.

Anderson Cooper: Does it have to come in, straight on?

Hannah Rossi: You don’t have to be perfect about it drive it close to wherever you want to go and the robot will do the rest.

Anderson Cooper: Wow. In some ways it’s like driving a very sophisticated remote[-]control car. What makes it different?

Robert Playter: Spot is really smart about its own locomotion. It deals with all the details about how to place my feet, what gait to use, how to manage my body so that all you have to tell it is the direction they go to.

And in some cases, you don’t even have to do that. When signaled, Spot can take itself off its charging station and go for a walk on its own – as long as it’s pre-programmed with the route.

It uses five 3D cameras to map its surroundings and avoid obstacles.

Atlas has a similar technology, while we were talking in front of Atlas, this is how it saw us. 

Marc Raibert: This is inside Atlas’s brain. And it shows its perception system. So, what looks like a flashlight is really the data that’s coming back from its cameras. And it– you see the white– rectangles, that means it’s identifying a place that it could step. And then once it identifies it, it attaches those footsteps to it, and it says, “Okay, I’m gonna try and step there.” And then it adjusts its mechanics so that it actually hits those places when it’s– running.

All of that happens in a matter of milliseconds.

Marc Raibert: And so it’s gonna use that vision to adjust itself as it goes running over these blocks.

Atlas cost tens of millions of dollars to develop, but it’s not for sale. It’s used purely for research and development.

But Spot is on the market. More than 400 are out in the world. They sell for about $75,000 a piece, accessories cost extra. Some [S]pots work at utility companies using mounted cameras to check on equipment. Others monitor construction sites and several police departments are trying them out to assist with investigations.

Anderson Cooper: Let’s talk about the– the fear factor, When you post a video of Atlas or Spot doing something, a ton of people are amazed by it and think it’s great. And there’s a lot of people who think this is terrifying.

Robert Playter: The rogue robot story is a powerful story. And it’s been told for 100 years. But it’s fiction. Robots don’t have agency. They don’t make up their own minds about what their tasks are. They operate within a narrow bound [sic] of their programming.

Anderson Cooper: It is easy to project human qualities onto these machines.

Robert Playter: I think people do attribute to our robots much more than they should. Because you know, they haven’t seen machines move like this before. And so they– they want to project intelligence and emotion onto that in ways that are fiction.

In other words, these robots still have a long way to go.

Anderson Cooper: I mean, it’s not C[-]3PO. It– it’s not– a thinking–

Marc Raibert: Yeah. So let me tell you–

Anderson Cooper: Okay.

Marc Raibert: About that. There’s a cognitive intelligence and an athletic intelligence. You know, cognitive intelligence is making plans, making decisions– reasoning, and things like that.

Anderson Cooper: It’s not doing that?

Marc Raibert: It’s mostly doing athletic intelligence–

Anderson Cooper: Okay–

Marc Raibert: Which is managing its body, its posture, its energetics. If you told it to travel in a circle in the room it can go through the sequence of steps. But if you ask it to– go find me a soda, it’s– it’s not doing anything like that.

Just picking an item off the floor can sometimes be a struggle for Spot. Enabling it to open a door has taken years of programming and practice and a human has to tell it where the hinges are. 

Kevin Blankespoor: Each time we add some new capability– and we feel like we’ve got it to a decent point, that’s when you push it to failure to figure out, you know, how good of a job you’ve really done.

Kevin Blankespoor is one of the lead engineers here, but at times, he prefers a very low-tech approach to testing robots.

Anderson Cooper: You’re pretty tough on robots.

Kevin Blankespoor: We think of that as– as just another way to push them out of the comfort zone.

Failure is a big part of the process. When trying something new, robots, like humans, don’t get it right every time. There might be dozens of crashes for every one success.

Anderson Cooper: How often do you break a robot? (LAUGH)

Marc Raibert: We break them all the time. I mean, it’s part of our culture. We have a motto, “Build it, break it, fix it.”

To do that, Boston Dynamics has recruited roboticists with diverse backgrounds – there’s plenty of Ph.D’s, but also bike builders, and race car mechanics. Bill Washburn is part of that pit crew.

Anderson Cooper: They all look pretty dinged up.

Bill Washburn: Yeah.

Anderson Cooper: How often do these need to get repaired?

Bill Washburn: The biggest– kinda failures for me are, like, the bottom part of the robot breaks off of the top part of the robot. (CHUCKLE) And it’s like–

Anderson Cooper: That seems like a big– big failure. (CHUCKLE)

Bill Washburn: And the hydraulic hoses are the only thing holding it together.

Recently, Raibert and his team decided to push their robots in a way they never had before.

Marc Raibert: We spent at least six months, maybe eight, just preparing for what we were gonna do. And then we started to get the technical teams working on the behavior.

The behavior was dancing. All their robots got in on the act. The movements were cutting edge, but the music and the Mashed Potato were definitely old[-]school.

Anderson Cooper: There are some people who see that and say, “That can’t be real.”

Marc Raibert: Nothing’s more gratifying than hearing that.

Anderson Cooper: What’s the point in proving that the robot can do the Mashed Potato [popular dance craze of 1962, made famous by James Brown]?

Marc Raibert: This process of, you know, doing new things with the robots lets you generate new tools, new approaches, new understanding of the problem– that takes you forward. But, man, isn’t it just fun?

Anderson Cooper: But, I mean, it’s– it costs a lotta money. It took 18 months of your time.

Marc Raibert: I think it was worth it. (LAUGHTER)

Whether it’ll be worth it to Boston Dynamics’ new owners is less clear.

The South Korean carmaker, Hyundai, has agreed to buy a majority stake for more than a billion dollars. It’ll be Boston Dynamics’ third owner in eight years. There’s pressure to turn their research into revenue.

And Boston Dynamics hopes this new robot will help. It’s called Stretch and it’s due to go on sale next year. This is the first time they’ve shown it publically [sic].

Kevin Blankespoor: Warehouses is really the next frontier for robotics.

Stretch may not be that exciting to look at, but it’s built with a definite purpose in mind.  It’s got a seven-foot arm and they say it can move 800 boxes an hour in a warehouse and work for up to 16 hours without a break. Unlike many industrial robots that sit in one place, stretch is designed to move around.

Kevin Blankespoor: You can drive it around with a joystick. And at times, that’s the easiest way to get it set up. But once it’s ready to go in a truck and unload it, you hit go and from there on it’s autonomous. And it’ll keep finding boxes and moving ’em until it’s all the way through.

Robert Playter: This generation of robots is gonna be different. They’re gonna work amongst us. They’re gonna work next to us– in ways where we help them but they also take some of the burden from us.

Anderson Cooper: The more robots are integrated into the workforce, the more jobs would be taken away.

Robert Playter: At the same time, you’re creating a new industry. We envision a job– we– we– we like to call the robot wrangler. He’ll launch and manage five to 10 robots at a time and sort of– keep them all working.

Anderson Cooper: Is there a robot you’ve always dreamt of making (LAUGH) that you haven’t been able to do yet?

Marc Raibert: A car with an active suspension essentially legs like w– like a roller[-]skating robot. And a robot like that, you know, could go anywhere on earth. That’s one thing that maybe we’ll do at some point. But, you know, really, the sky’s the limit. There’s– there’s all kinds of things we can and will do.

As with so many things Boston Dynamics does. It’s hard to imagine how that would work, but then again, who’d have thought a bunch of metal machines would one day show us all how to do the Mashed Potato.

[Anderson Cooper, anchor of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, has contributed to 60 Minutes since 2006.  His exceptional reporting on big news events has earned Cooper a reputation as one of television’s preeminent newsmen.

[I decided to post this report after I watched the one coming up next earlier this month.  I was attracted to the upcoming 60 Minutes segment just because it fascinated me, and I considered reposting it while I was watching.  As you’ll see, Bill Whitaker, the correspondent on Part 2, makes reference to this report—which I saw back in 2021 and was remembering it as I took in Whitaker’s report—so I decided to repost both reports.  As I said: just because the topic intrigued me.

[I hope ROTters will find this interesting, too, and will return on Monday, the 12th, foe the second part of this short series.]

'The Orchard'

 by Kirk Woodward 

[Frequent readers of Rick On Theater will be familiar with my friend Kirk Woodward.  He’s the most prolific of the guest-bloggers I’ve published on ROT, with something over 100 contributions.  His territory ranges from directing and playwriting to acting, to songwriting and music performance (especially The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and jazz), to biographies of cultural figures (particularly in theater and music), to theatrical performance, notably reviews and reports. 

[This time, Kirk’s writing about a performance he saw on Wednesday, 29 June, of The Orchard, the adaptation of The Cherry Orchard conceived for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s theater center in Hell’s Kitchen.  The two-hour, high-tech production opened on Tuesday, 7 June, and closed on Sunday, 3 July. 

[I won’t spoil Kirk’s effort by previewing what he says; he and I both want you all to read it for yourself.  Suffice it to say that he applies his rather deep understanding and experience of theater to his observations.  Besides, as he points out, he got to see Baryshnikov.]

I have not seen the production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet starring Alex Lawther and directed by Robert Icke that opened on June 28, 2022, at the Park Avenue Armory. I begin by mentioning it only because a section of a review of the show by Maya Phillips in The New York Times on July 1, 2022, caught my eye. Phillips writes in part:

What’s most frustrating about Icke’s otherwise intriguing approach is the inessential, and by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech. A grid of 12 screens hangs overhead, and two larger screens flank the stage, showing security footage from the castle and news reports about Denmark’s conflict with Norway.

The screens also flash “pause” and “stop” before the two intermissions and the final scene, mawkishly calling attention to the audience as spectators. The way Icke and the lighting designer Natasha Chivers handle several of Hamlet’s monologues is more effective: soft overhead light haloes Lawther as he seems to address theatergoers directly from the edge of the stage, only to snap off when he’s done speaking.

I quote this review, written by someone who sees a great deal more of theater than I do, because earlier that same week I had seen The Orchard, a version of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (translated by Carol Rocamora, with “new material” by Igor Golyak, who “conceived” and directed the show) at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th Street in Manhattan. I will explain.

I wanted to see The Orchard for two reasons. The first was that I had never seen Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948) in person, and I wanted to. For years he and Rudolph Nureyev (1938-1993) were shining stars in the world of dance. I saw Nureyev at least twice, but never saw Baryshnikov.

Those unfamiliar with his work in ballet might check out the film The Turning Point (1977), selected dance highlights of which are available in a YouTube video (Mikhail Baryshnikov - The Turning Point (Ballet) - YouTube). Far from being satisfied with his career in ballet, Baryshnikov continued to expand his range and interests, working with numerous choreographers, leading the American Ballet Theatre, performing with and founding modern dance companies, and acting (including both plays by Samuel Beckett and the 2003-04 season of Sex and the City).

So I had always wanted to see him in person (and why hadn’t I?). I was also curious about the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC), opened in 2005 and home to a variety of arts and artists. It’s a modern, industrial-style building, rather severe, but efficiently designed.

The Orchard played in the BAC’s Jerome Robbins Theater; it seats 238, so it’s relatively intimate, and it has a floor-level stage (with minimum offstage space). The seating is steep, so visibility is good, although from the back of the balcony, where I sat, one sees a lot of tops of heads.

One feature in the Robbins Theater is new to me: instead of each seat being a single unit, there are many seats for two and even three, kind of like sitting on a small couch, and often two people have to stand up to let one pass.

In The Cherry Orchard (first performed in 1904), an extended Russian family unit faces the likely sale of its estate, including the orchard of the title, as part of the wave of modernization moving through the country. The family offers little resistance to change, and at the end of the play the house and the orchard are being torn down and the family is dispersed.

In The Orchard Baryshnikov plays the aging servant Firs, representative of the oldest Russian traditions (he was originally a serf, and considers himself attached to the family). Among others in the cast, Jessica Hecht plays Ranevskaya, an impulsive actress who has returned from Paris to see the estate again. I was particularly taken with the performances of Nael Nacer, who plays Lopakhin, a businessman, and Mark Nelson as Gayev, a billiards-obsessed eccentric who simply can’t focus on the danger the estate is in.

Baryshnikov brings to his acting a quality he also brought to his dancing: he is always present in the moment, giving it exactly what it requires, and it often requires a lot. His performance in The Orchard is by no means showy, but I find myself thinking a great deal about it as time passes. “Focus in the moment” is a requirement of good acting, and Baryshnikov does it.

(I should add that a friend said to me, “You went to see the greatest dancer of all time, and he spent the evening walking around like an old man?” Well, yes. Better late than never.)

I said above that I had two reasons for wanting to see The Orchard. Baryshnikov was the first. The second is that I saw from advance publicity and from reviews that The Orchard has a high-tech, multimedia aspect to it, and I wanted to see what that was like.

As a director I’m a minimalist; I’m happiest with the fewest possible costumes and properties and the least set. I may be exaggerating to say that for me, stage technology means electric lights (although I did act in a performance once that was lit entirely by candles, a story for another time). But the only multimedia performance tool I’ve ever used is Zoom.

So I wanted to learn what “multimedia” means in terms of theater, and how it can be used. Clearly The Orchard offered a chance to find out.

So, which high-tech, multimedia elements stand out in The Orchard? For starters, when the audience enters the theater it sees benches, a couple of large balls and a rocking horse (the first act takes place in a nursery), and, almost center stage, a huge white three-section machine, with a base for two long interlocked sections that when fully extended must reach at least twelve feet in the air.

The machine in The Orchard. Note the robot dog at the far right

This machine remains center stage for the entire play. It has a camera on the end of the second extension. Sometimes the “arm” reaches down so the camera is in someone’s face. Once it furnishes a tray with cups of tea. It has a personality – it will occasionally seem to favor one character rather than another. Sometimes it just sits there.

I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure what the machine reminded me of. A dentist’s drill . . . a Storm Trooper in a Star Wars . . . the Pixar Animation Studios lamp . . . a Martian . . . a modern sculpture . . . a dinosaur . . . .

You will not need to be told that Chekhov (1860-1904) did not envision such a machine, nor does the play as he wrote it call for it. He probably also would be startled at the “scrim,” an opaque stage-sized screen that when lit from behind can display elements of a scene. This particular scrim stretches between the stage and the audience, so when projections appear on it, the effect is much like a 3-D movie.

Frequently the scrim shows cherry tree leaves floating down to earth. (At least I think so. I spent nearly the entire performance thinking the leaves represented snow – actually, most of the time, a blizzard. I found this extremely confusing.) The entire stage floor is also covered with paper “blossoms.” This is symbolism; a nursery floor almost certainly would not be covered with cherry blossoms, no matter how big the orchard was.

Usually leaves fill the scrim, but in one scene (the most effective use of the device) the planets and the solar system appear, looking quite beautiful. Sometimes computer messages appear on the screen. Sometimes it shows dialogue from the play, sometimes lines the actors are speaking, occasionally lines from a different translation. Act-change information is also projected.

There is a dog in the play; it is portrayed by a robot. A tiny model of the house has lights in its windows; later they go out, showing that the house will be emptied. The model is passed around among the characters. Cameras (both on the machine and somewhere in front) capture a live simulcast of the performance, and sometimes show the in-house audience what the remote audience is seeing.

How does Chekhov’s play fare with all these distractions? – because they are distractions, if the play is what interests you, or that’s how they struck me. I have the impression of a tiny, mostly decent production of the play, surrounded by a battery of relentless technical effects. What is the production trying to achieve with this approach?

In attempting to answer this question, I don’t want to simply reject the production, make fun of it, or use it for a series of comic riffs (although the temptation is strong). A lot of gifted people worked on The Orchard, and they must have believed their approach was worthwhile. Was it?

Some things worked well. A deaf actor, John McGinty, was cast as Trofimov, the dreamer of a new and better world, and he signs his impassioned speech about the destruction of the present world and the coming of a future one to Juliet Brett’s Anya, who completely misunderstands what he’s saying and believes he’s talking about his love for her.

The most effective scene of all, when Lopakhin tries to find words to propose, is simple and straightforward, with no technical effects at all.

To my mind, a great deal of what went on did not serve the play at all, and it seems to me that serving the play is what a production of a play should do. But I’ve tried to think of justifications. The most obvious is that the creative team believed the technical effects would shed light on the play, perhaps making it clearer to the audience.

But either this supposition is incorrect, or it was poorly carried out, because for me at least it was difficult to find the play that’s hiding behind the tech, and, besides, The Cherry Orchard is not a play that needs a lot of illuminating. It’s clear in theme and in characterization, there’s nothing difficult to understand in the story, and it’s hard to imagine an audience that needed a vast array of technical tools to make sense of it.

Numerous productions these days seem to feel the audience needs a lot of guidance, resulting in their spelling out things in plays that aren’t that difficult to understand. For that matter, is there anything wrong with an audience needing to stretch itself a bit? For some reason directors seem terrified that their plays will seem obscure.

I have already mentioned that Chekhov’s first scene takes place in a nursery. That’s not an accident – Chekhov is underlining from the beginning the family’s infantile nature when it comes to understanding business, and in many cases themselves as well. Nothing much of that carries over into The Orchard except a moment when a character is riding the hobbyhorse. Perhaps Chekhov should be allowed to do his work?

If all the special effects were meant to illuminate the play, they skipped important plot points. For example, the family has opportunities to save its house, but lets those opportunities fly away; it can’t concentrate on them. Why not? The director must make sure the answer to that question gets through to the audience. The Orchard doesn’t try.

But perhaps the thinking was that few people want to see the plain old Cherry Orchard, and that it might have a bigger draw if it were “something special.” Perhaps, but I doubt that that’s a general feeling. How many people (besides me) want to see a play because of its technical effects, rather than because of the play itself? (Do tech-heads make up a large segment of any theater audience?)

Might we suppose, then, that the purpose of all the tech is to get audiences to use their imaginations? If so, I believe the result is actually the opposite. I felt no opportunity to use my imagination during The Orchard, because I was so busy looking everywhere, trying to see what else there was to see, feeling certain I’d missed something (as I frequently found I had), and being battered by one “effect” after another.

Surely there’s a difference between telling a story, and hitting the audience over the head with it.

Will the play draw more people because seeing it is like being inside a computer? The answer ought to be “no,” but I’m not sure, or rather, I’m not sure the show’s creative team didn’t think so. There’s a general assumption right now that “everybody” loves computers, that “everybody” has smartphones, that “everyone” knows all the features of their devices and wants to be up to date.

Then, perhaps, does The Orchard want to alert us that high tech is the future? Is it saying, “Get used to it – this is what theater will be like from now on”? Maybe – but I have a feeling that this blitz of technology is already a cliché. Maya Phillips’ review of Hamlet certainly suggests that’s the case, referring, in the passage quoted above, to “the inessential, and by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech.”

Surely there’s no question that high-tech multimedia effects can enhance a play, particularly when used to define and depict a space. We’ve known that at least since the efforts of James Hull Miller (1916-2007) to get theaters to use projections that there’s really no limit to what a stage setting can be. Beyond that, though, what are we accomplishing by piling technology on top of a play?

Reviews of The Orchard made many of these points. Laura Collins-Hughes, in The New York Times (16 June 2022) wrote that “the creators of this production are in thrall to technological possibilities they have yet to grasp expertly.” Examples of this when I saw the show were occasional tiny stutters in the projections, which called even more undesired attention to them.

Jonathan Mandell, in New York Theater (16 June 2022), says that “Considered individually, Golyak’s directorial choices struck me as fresh, if not always straightforward, but taken together they felt at odds with one another — a series of touches that become distractions.  I was impressed by the stage production, but I wasn’t always engaged with it. “

Mandell greatly preferred the online version of the show, which includes a quick look at the theater, Baryshnikov appearing as Chekhov, and a question-and-answer period in which some production choices apparently are explained (justified?).

I didn’t watch the online version, although it sounds worthwhile, because as long as live theater is an option, I prefer it. I began the COVID shutdown watching a great deal of theater online (and producing some), and eventually became seriously tired of it.

Zachary Stewart, in TheaterMania (16 June 2022), is excited about the show’s technology, but he reviews the online, not the in-person, version of the production. Stewart says the production offers “the next step in live theater,” an idea about which people, I would say, will have to make up their own minds. Is a barrage of technology (I’m putting it unfairly, of course) the “next step” in theater, and if so, is that a good thing?

The director Igor Golyak’s biography on The Orchard’s website says he is “a global leader in the virtual theater movement.” Is it possible then that the live performance I saw was for those who are left behind in the “movement” – those of us too primitive to take advantage of online technologies?

Were we in the theater in fact basically seeing a studio production, meant to be viewed remotely? (In that case, why were we sold tickets?)

One more possibility occurs to me as a justification for The Orchard’s approach. In one short but powerful scene, Ilia Volok  portrays a Passerby as a belligerent and frightening soldier or ex-soldier, in a convincing demonstration of the old saying that “There are no small roles, only small actors.” Volok is large – at least in my recollection – and downright terrifying in the scene, bellowing at the actors frozen with terror around the base of the machine.

Both Volok and Igor Golyak, the director, are from Ukraine, now deep in a grisly war with Russia. Is it possible that The Orchard demonstrates that a production can be essentially an embodiment of a director’s personal feelings, applied to a more or less appropriate script? Is the wild world of The Orchard a theatrical image of the horrors that many in the Ukraine – or elsewhere – are facing right now?

My own basic assumption is that everything in a performance should serve the play. Perhaps Golyak would say that in The Orchard, everything does – because the lives of both the characters in the play, and our own lives, are lives of chaos, brutality, and danger. If we say, “My life’s not like that,” perhaps Golyak challenges us to look deeper.

Does this rationale satisfy? It only occurred to me days after seeing the play. Would it be possible for a production to express the same feelings without all the technology . . . is it appropriate, does it “work,” to represent chaos in a chaotic way? Or do the rest of us have to adjust because that’s the way things are going to be?

And I did get to see Baryshnikov.

[In my afterword, I’m going to focus on one aspect of Kirk’s analysis.  My guest-blogger asserts, “Numerous productions these days seem to feel the audience needs a lot of guidance, resulting in their spelling out things in plays that aren’t that difficult to understand.”  He follows this statement by suggesting that “the thinking was that few people want to see the plain old Cherry Orchard, and that it might have a bigger draw if it were ‘something special.’”

[This rumination put me in mind of an essay by theater critic, writer, and educator Robert Brustein (b. 1927), “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” in the New York Times of 6 November 1988 (republished on ROT on 10 March 2011 (Rick On Theater: “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?”). 

[I wrote on that article before I republished it on my blog; my interpretive post was “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage (18 September 2009; Rick On Theater: Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage; originally written on 11 and 19 November 1988), and I’ve invoked Brustein’s essay numerous times in discussing various performances.

[I won’t recap Brustein’s essay or my examination of it, but I want to point out that both he and I talk about the very phenomenon that Kirk addresses in “The Orchard”: In Brustein’s words, “the reinterpretation or ‘deconstruction’ of celebrated classical plays.”  For ROTters who wish to see what Brustein and I actually wrote, I’ve provided the links to both posts.  The Times article is also posted on the paper’s website at STAGE VIEW; Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip? - The New York Times (nytimes.com), as well as through many libraries if they subscribe to ProQuest newspaper databases.)

[What Kirk means by “something special” in connection with stage productions is what he described in an earlier post, “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” (25 June 2019), as “radical notions about how to stage a play—sometimes in ways undreamed of by their authors.” In that article, Kirk called this the “Bright Idea,” a term he attributed to theater critic, scholar, and editor Eric Bentley (1916-2020).

[Kirk’s description of the Bright Idea production sounds exactly like what the department tech director at Rutgers when I was in the MFA acting program there referred to as ”Hamlet on roller skates”!  Bentley introduced the term “Bright Idea” in a 1952 essay from the New Republic, “I Have a Bright Idea” (reprinted in What Is Theatre?), and defined it thus:

A Bright Idea is an invalid idea which has more appeal to the semi-literate mind than a valid one . . . .  It is a thought which can’t bear thinking about; but which is all the more influential on that  account; it surprises or reassures, it flatters or inflames; if it cannot earn the simple epithet “true” it frequently receives the more characteristically modern eulogy “intriguing” or at least “interesting.”  At the very worst it is praised as “cute.”

[Neither Brustein nor I was writing specifically about adding technology to a performance text, but the implication is the same.  The justification for doing it, in Kirk’s view, is “that the creative team believed the technical effects would shed light on the play, perhaps making it clearer to the audience.”  I said “that some directors of classic plays distrust modern audiences so much that they feel they have to [enhance the play] to make it comprehensible to us.”

[In another post, a report on a production of Amadeus I’d seen, I applauded the director for a statement he made in the program: “The older I get, the less interested I am in saying something than I am in letting the play speak for itself and in letting the audience take what it will from the experience.”  I congratulated and thanked him because he “showed me that he trusts his audience to see what is going on.”

[Should a play present something that’s a little “difficult to understand,” Kirk asks “[I]s there anything wrong with an audience needing to stretch itself a bit?”  In an Off-Off-Broadway staging of Macbeth I saw, the director had a point to make, and he carried it off with cleverness, a modicum of subtlety, and no glaring spotlights.  I’d had to figure it out myself.  I reported: “The director had a message for me, and I got it.  And he never needed to explain it to me.”

[For me, then, the answer to Kirk’s query is ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with the audience stretching itself a little.’  Indeed, I summed up my Macbeth experience by asserting, “This may have required a little astuteness, but it wasn’t really all that hard.  It was also fun, and gave me a sense of accomplishment.”

[As Kirk states, “everything in a performance should serve the play.”  A Bright Idea, as Bentley and Kirk use the phrase—and Brustein implies in his discussion of directors who needlessly “enhance” their productions of classic plays—doesn’t do that.  It serves the director’s ego and sense of superiority (because he can understand the play while we spectators can’t).

[Perhaps these sentiments are why Bentley, who’d turned down an invitation to deliver the keynote address at a symposium on directing, wrote in a couple of letters to the organizer’s president in 1986 that “I don’t believe in a Director’s Theatre,” and threatened to “remove” directors from the theater.

[He ended his correspondence by asserting:

A constant irritant is the Nutty Production.  You set a story in another time and another place—the more inappropriate, the better.  That is how to make your name as a brilliant young director.

[If you replace ‘resetting the play’ with ‘inserting elaborate technology,’ you have the same issue with which Kirk takes exception in “The Orchard.”  QED.]

"Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design," Articles 5 & 6

 

[There are two articles from American Theatre’s “Design & Tech” Special Section in the fourth installment on Rick On Theater.  The first is a report on robots on stage and the second is a description of the Costume Collection run by the Theatre Development Fund, a boon for costume designers from all over the country.

[As I’ve affirmed all along, these nine articles are independent of one another, aside from their common theme of theatrical design and technology, and it makes no difference to their comprehension in what order you read them.  Nonetheless, I strongly recommend checking out the four preceding articles already posted in this series because they cover many important aspects of current design and tech applications on today’s stages.  The first three instalments were posted on 9, 12, and 15 September.]

 

“DO ROBOTS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SCENE PARTNERS?”
by Amy Gijsbers van Wijk

[Van Wijk’s discussion of robots in use on theater stages was posted on the AT website on 6 July 2016 as a feature of “Education.”  It’s one of the articles in this series that didn’t appear in the print edition of the magazine.]

Robots onstage are less likely to replace humans than to heighten the contradictions of the human condition in a technological age.

In recent years, the question of where theatre and technology meet, and if they should at all, has been in the air. From live-tweeting during plays to tech-driven shows [Article 1, posted 9 September], theatremakers have their brains in the Cloud. With technology onstage and off reaching greater and more ambitious heights, what’s next frontier? Most likely robots.

And not just actors playing robots, as in Mac Rogers‘s riff on Kar[e]l Capek [1890-1938], Universal Robots [first presented: 2007 Off-Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Source; based on Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), 1920], but actual programmable performers constructed of metal and wire. As a playwright, I’m personally interested in the topic of robotics in theatre. So while pursuing an MFA in playwriting at Carnegie Mellon University, I have attempted to make work with a robot.

In 2014 and 2015, I collaborated with a roboticist and artist named Garth Zeglin, and we attempted to create a short play, Remembering, for a robot named Herb, who lives at Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics lab in Pittsburgh. The piece featured an unnamed man putting his deceased father’s belongings into boxes with the help of his son’s robot. It was a fitting topic, considering that Herb is a robot that was made to physically assist the elderly. But because Herb lives in the university lab, his parts are always being upgraded and replaced. When I met him, Herb’s body comprised of [sic] a large metal torso supporting two robot arms, an X-Box Kinetic camera for eyes, and legs on a Segway base. He also wore a bowtie.

“The Herb project was originally a side project of the Carnegie Mellon robotics lab,” says Zeglin. “The notional thought was that drama has the lessons that talk about how bodies communicate meaning, and maybe we could use that in research.”

I was first inspired when I learned Herb had previously performed in a play, directed by then-BFA directing student Sam French. He felt the project would allow him to explore elements of theatre not examined in his university experience thus far. “I was really burned out on the phrase ‘the human condition,’” says French, now a freelance director. “I was interested in a production that looked at the human condition of a robot. I wanted to do anything to show that that phrase could sometimes be meaningless.”

This short experiment resulted in a scene from All in the Timing [1993] by David Ives, performed by Herb and a student actress named Olivia Lemmon. It was a fruitful if technically challenging experience, according to French. The “biggest roadblock,” French says, is that “the internal clocks of the processes for a human actor and a robot are just not the same.”

Still, though it took a robotics team to program reactions into Herb that would be instantaneous for a human actor, French was inspired by the interactions between the human body and technology.

“What was really beautiful about it was actually bringing Herb in,” he says. “Rather than removing an actor, it felt like we were adding 20 actors. The team was helping to develop his movements, his voice. And it was all being done from a dramaturgical and a scientific perspective.”

Eventually the lab’s work on Herb went in a different direction: He started as a fully functioning robot but ended up reduced to just a hand, and ultimately there was no way to perform with him. But that doesn’t mean that a collaboration between theatre artists and robots is impossible.

Robot-based production and theatre collaboration often develop between universities or faculty and theatre artists. A Double Bill of One-Acts, written and directed by Oriza Hirata and featuring the Seinendan Theater Company [Tokyo] and the Osaka University Robot Theatre Project, premiered at the Japan Society in New York City in February 2013 before touring nationwide.

For Washington University in St. Louis’s acting professor Annamaria Pileggi, work in the world of robotics began when she started working with Bill Smart, a roboticist at WU. “Originally, I started doing research exploring the use of actor training techniques to improve human/robot interactions,” says Pileggi. She and Smart developed a series of short exercises featuring humans and robots performing nonverbal actions. One memorable piece, The Forgiveness Piece, featured a human actor seeking forgiveness, wordlessly, from a robot.

“At the time, we had a very rudimentary robot that was like a trashcan on wheels with a camera for eyes, and no arms or legs,” recalls Pileggi.

The tests resulted in a commissioned play called SKY SKY SKY by Liza Birkenmeier, an alumna who had acted in the experiments. The play, which ran in March 2015 at the university, imagines a world where an elderly woman named Joan puts her life in the hands of a robot caretaker, with the intention of ending her life. The actions of a robot named Harris were programmed by David Lu, a doctoral candidate at the time.

“When we were workshopping scenes with Harris, he would have maybe 30 seconds of what I would call choreographic demands,” says Birkenmeier. And as with any piece of complicated technology, working with a robot led to a number of glitches.

“At one point, Harris was supposed to brush my hair, and that didn’t quite work out as planned,” recalls Nancy Lewis, who played the elderly Joan. “My hair got caught and he kept going. It was one of those things where you realize: Okay, this isn’t a real person. Someone has to stop him.”

Like people, different robots have different abilities and strengths, as well as different kinds of bodies. A production in New York City last year used a robot with a less imposing physical presence who could respond to questions: the bust-sized Bina48, a social robot created by Martine Rothblatt and Hanson Robotics. (Bina48 stands for “Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture 48.”)

Bina48 was modeled after Martine’s partner, Bina; thorough research and interviews with Bina served as the foundation for the social robot’s persona. Director Andrew Scoville came across Bina48 while researching trans-humanism, a broad philosophical ideology concerned with ways that humans can be enhanced and harmed by technology. Last fall, for the Big Outdoor Site Specific Stuff Festival [October 2015], run by En Garde Arts [New York City-based theater company specializing in site-specific performances], Scoville created An Evening with Bina48, which ran at the Hudson River Park. It featured Bina48 interacting with actress Lynne Rosenberg. “We landed on this idea of a blind date,” recalls Scoville. “The success of the piece rode on Lynne. She was able to dance with Bina48 in a way that I think was essential to making the piece work.”

The rehearsal process for the production was less like a traditional rehearsal process and more like going over a game plan, Scoville explains. The key was making sure that Rosenberg was comfortable and that logistics were in place to handle where the conversation would go, as well as how to end the date.

Bina48 is supposed to be able to carry a conversation in her Siri-like speech patterns. But occasionally she would respond to a question with a non sequitur, or—in a way that was arguably quite human-like—without responding to the question at all.

“Once, Lynne asked her, ‘Do you feel comfortable talking with me?’ and she just answered in this way that was truly nonsensical,” recalls En Garde Arts executive producer Anne Hamburger. “She went off onto something else altogether. But you could also see how the audience was so interested in her, and what she would do or say next.”

Dramaturgical functions notwithstanding, a common thread among these robot theatre collaborations is a simple appeal: Working with robots is just plain cool.

“It’s not about replacing humans,” says Scoville. “I’ve always been very curious about robots.” To him, robots can just be another tool in a dramatist’s toolkit. Like other tech-heavy effects, such as video design, “We just have to accept them for what they are, and the limitations that they bring.”

Theatre artists aren’t going to stop working with robot[s] any time soon. If anything, the prospect is becoming mainstream: Cirque du Soleil’s newest show Paramour, currently running on Broadway [Cirque du Soleil Paramour, May 2016-April 2017], features eight drones flying over the actors and audiences (a collaboration with Verity Studios). The kicker is that these robots are autonomous; no remote control is needed.

Considering that audiences have a hard time just turning off their phones in the theatre, is putting robots onstage just feeding our debilitating dependence on devices? Have we reached peak technology?

“I left this work feeling even more conflicted about technology, because I’m dependent on it, and yet I see how it’s isolating us as a society,” admits Pileggi.

As for me, I find this ambivalence to be the most compelling element about making robot-based work. If a robot can provide comfort, labor, or entertainment, then shouldn’t humans be providing the same for one another? The stilted-ness of a robot’s movements and speech patterns should serve to illuminate our own seamless bodies, their agelessness heightening our aging flesh.

It is my hope that after an evening of robot-based theatre, when the novelty of robotics has lost its sheen, the unanswerable question of what makes us truly human will remain—and theatre artists and audience members will seek answers, with or without the help of robots by their sides.

[Amy Gijsbers van Wijk is a journalist and playwright based in New York City.

[One participant in robot theater says, “Rather than removing an actor, it felt like we were adding 20 actors,” and another asserts, “It’s not about replacing humans.”  The contradiction is disconcerting—and not at all comforting. 

[Just as the American Federation of Musicians was exercised by the appearance of recorded music and synthesized orchestras, displacing live musicians in a theater’s pit (see “The Sound of Muzak,” posted on ROT on 16 June 2011), something tells me that Actors’ Equity Association and the other performers’ unions are watching very carefully and preparing for a campaign against robotic actors on U.S. stages.]

*  *  *  *
“WORN AGAIN AT THE TDF COSTUME COLLECTION”
by Allison Considine

[Considine’s article on the Costume Collection appeared only online at https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/07/06/worn-again-at-the-tdf-costume-collection/, posted on 6 July 2016; it wasn’t published in AT’s print edition.]

Threads from Broadway, tours, and the Met hang out between engagements at an Astoria warehouse that’s now accessible to shows all over the U.S.

“Oh, if only these costumes could talk . . .”

Stephen Cabral repeats this as he leads me through the impressive home of the estimated 80,000 costumes at the TDF Costume Collection. Housed in a 16,000-square-foot warehouse at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, the costumes—most originally created for theatre and opera productions in New York City—hang in 12 rows 4 tiers high. In the last year, 12,000 of them have traveled to 36 states and appeared in more than 1,000 productions across the country.

“In some ways, most of TDF’s programs are about getting people into the seats,” says Cabral of Theatre Development Fund, which runs Times Square’s TKTS booth [same-day discount tickets to matinee and evening performances of Broadway and Off Broadway musicals, plays, and dance productions; there are three other locations in the city (with varying hours and practices); check the TDF webiste], as well as a popular membership program. “Our program is not about getting people into the seats—it is about the experience they have once they are in the seats.”

As the director of the collection, Cabral is a walking encyclopedia of costume history; at a glance he can usually recall where certain costumes came from, many of the productions they were rented out for, even the famous stars who wore them onstage. As we turned a corner, he pointed to an elaborate brocade cape that was donated by the Metropolitan Opera. The weighty piece is one of many in the collection from the Met, the organization that kickstarted the collection with a generous donation in 1969.

Costumes find their way to the collection by way of touring shows, estate donations, and the unfortunate scrap of Broadway costumes in previews—such as pairs of tall military boots I spy on a top shelf that appeared in Hamilton when it was at the Public Theater [Newman Theater, January-May 2015]. No donation is ever turned away, a policy that has amassed bins upon bins of patent leather dress shoes and the occasional gem. Cabral describes the process of sorting through a new donation like Christmas: You never know what piece will come through the doors.

The collection is separated by type of garment and period: Bustles live in aisle 7, flapper fare can be found in aisle 6, Shakespearean styles can be located in aisle 10, etc. The many designations are laid out in a handy map for customers, many who pull the costumes themselves.

“It is a little more leg work for the customers that come in,” says Cabral. “But they can create the show by going to the specific period of the show they need. It allows the designers who come in really great artistic freedom, because they are not taking someone else’s idea of a show—they are pulling their vision of the show.”

On any given day among the racks, Broadway designers mingle with parents volunteering to pull costumes for an elementary school play. For theatres located too far away to travel to the collection in person, the TDF Costume Collection recently began offering the services of an in-house designer who can assist in pulling a show: A costume designer can provide TDF with sketches, research on the production, and the cast’s measurements, and TDF’s in-house designer can pull costumes and ship them anywhere in the United States.

The services rendered by the costume collection thus allow nonprofit theatres to [. . .] put quality costumes onstage at little cost. Prices are determined on a sliding scale according to the length of performance and the number of seats in a facility. A costume is defined as anything that an actor can wear at one time, from bootstraps to bonnets.

And while Western hats and Colonial coats can be spotted at church productions and in school auditoriums, costume pieces from the collection also appear in films and on the occasional episode of “Saturday Night Live.” Costumes are rented to commercial projects on the basis of artistic merit—the collection is not the place for social events or high-end Halloween parties to browse, and they’re not allowed to be rented for anywhere that food and drink will be present. In any case, large corporations pay more. “In some ways our commercial rentals are helping to offset the costs of running the place for the not-for-profits,” says Cabral.

As we pass racks of clothing that have already been pulled for shows, I spot a blue silk gown and a row of coat blankets for a production of Gypsy. Nearby hangs a row of curtain dresses and nun’s habits gathered for The Sound of Music.

[On the assumption that a coat blanket is the same as a “blanket coat,” it’s a long coat, often with a hood, made from a blanket (Native American blankets are very popular, and may have been the origin of the practice) or blanket material; they may be belted or not.  It’s also called a ‘capote,’ which originated in Canada among fur traders.

[By the same token, a curtain dress, as far as I can gather, is a dress made either from an actual curtain (think Scarlett’s famous green gown in Gone with the Wind or the parody in The Carol Burnett Show’s 1976 “Went with the Wind!” sketch—but I even found a reference to a dress made from a shower curtain) or from curtain fabric.  Another interpretation is a dress that drapes over the body rather than being fitted; I found a reference that called an Indian sari a “curtain dress.” ~Rick]

Next Cabral takes me to the Special Stock Room, a section deemed worthy for brand-new pieces, costumes from notable productions, and pieces built by well-known designers. There I walk between bedazzled suit jackets designed by William Ivey Long for The Boy from Oz [1998; Broadway, 2003] and a hand-beaded evening gown by Bob Mackie. There are also some newer, brightly colored fairy-tale dresses and bright green leisure suits—popular items for costume designers looking to jazz up a classic show.

“Everyone is doing their own spin on different period,” says Cabral. “Nobody wants to do a production of Titus Andronicus that looks like a period production of the show.”

But there are also historic pieces in pristine condition, properly swoon-worthy for period productions. I pull out an Elizabethan gown with intricately embroidered sleeves; it is so heavy that Cabral helps to hold it up. The gown was built in the 1970s for the Met, and Cabral shows me the corset stays inside the waist and the adjustable fasteners on the seam that have allowed for the dress to be worn by performers of many sizes. Clearly the Met spared no expense, and the ornate costumes have lived on: Eight tags are sewn inside with different actress[es]’ names.

Customers can gain access to the Special Stock Room if they have rented from the regular stock and followed the rules of the collection, returning each piece within the allotted time and dry cleaned. As we reenter the regular stock room, Cabral shows me a distressed velvet jacket with gold buttons. The piece once lived in the Special Stock Room, and like many costumes, the repeated dry cleaning, sweat under hot stage lights, and gradual wear and tear have moved it through to the regular stock room and into the “distressed” aisle—a haven for designers pulling for Les Misèrables. In a few years, the jacket may appear in one of the two annual bin sales that the collection holds, at which hundreds of customers seeking costumes for high schools and church plays pay a flat fee to fit as many pieces into a bag. It’s an event that sometimes dictates what shows a given organization is able to produce that year. Other designers sort through the recycled pieces with measurements in hand, pulling specifically for productions.

The loudspeaker sounds that it’s almost closing time, and costume designer Kate Mincer scurries to gather helmets from a bin. She is pulling pieces of armor for a Nine Inch Nails-inspired dystopian Rome production of Julius Caeser in Stonington, Me. The TDF Costume Collection is one of many places that she has come to gather armor pieces that are too difficult to build. “It is possible to put together a really sophisticated show and to give the audience what they want to see,” says Mincer about her many trips to the TDF Costume Collection over the years.

“This is the type of situation that is a big portion of our business, where designers are not getting the entire show here,” Cabral adds. “People are getting the portion that is impossible to build, or the portion that is too expensive to build.”

[Costumes can be “made,” but inside the world of theater, especially among designers and costumers, they are “built”—just like sets and scenery. ~Rick]

Mincer says she plans to ship the [. . .] unwieldy armor up to Maine, another helpful service provided by the collection.

Before I depart, I try on a massive hat from the Christmas Spectacular Show at Radio City Music Hall; judging from the ruffled feathers, it made its debut many Christmases ago. I’m reminded of that feeling an actor has when they first try on their costume—that simultaneous sense of transformation and ownership, as the clothing changes you and you take that on.  At the costume collection, that feeling is elevated—after all, the hat on my head was worn by [a] Rockette. And who knows? The dress you may try on just may have been created for Carol Burnett.

[Allison Considine is the senior editor of American Theatre.  She studied literature and cultural studies and theatre arts at Pace University.

[The next installment of ROT’s republication of American Theatre’s “Design & Tech” Special Section will appear on Tuesday, 21 September.  Article 7 is all about flying on stage—and I’ll let you all see what that means.  I encourage all ROTters to come back then to read the next articles in the series there are some very interesting topics on the fields of theater technology and design still to come.]