“Fusion” at the Leipzig Opera: AI makes ballet

Leipzig ballet director Mario Schroeder is an influenced man in many ways. He is interested not only in dancing, but also in the whole artistic work on stage. A man who likes to charge his designs with visionary philosophical aspects. It is logical that he cannot avoid such a “topic” as artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence. Because he is a team player, he never does it alone.

With his new ballet “Fusion,” he draws on the proven collaboration of stage and costume designer Paul Zoller, as well as in-house lighting artist Michael Roger. There are two new musical guests primarily responsible for AI: Englishman Harry Eve. The man of sound and its extension. He started out as a small beatboxer, who could greatly expand his human organ repertoire by means of electronic alienation.

He has developed very impressive compositions using musical software and artificial intelligence. In Leipzig, he is not only responsible for the soundtrack, but also performs as a live performer from the orchestra pit, who goes on stage. He interacts with Gadi Sassoon, the human soul’s AI musician brother, who works primarily with his detached violin.

At the start of an evening of dance in Leipzig, the opera’s iron curtain opens like a huge metallic maw, revealing a dark, primeval landscape traversed by light. In the dark one believes in recognizing structures, shapes and objects. You need time to get behind what you can actually see: yes, it’s human bodies on the ground and floating in the air.

The eerie voice that hovers above everything is produced by Harry Ive, who works halfway in the orchestra pit behind two microphones. With his voice, body and hands, he mysteriously produces this spherical music. To which the dancers move as a kind of amphibious swarm on the ground, among their fellows hovering in the air. Later, the primary element is added to the water in a circular basin in which it moves. Known from Friedrichstadtpalast. Yes, Mario Schroeder and his team put on a grand show, with sheer technical perfection and – that’s the difference – intellectual ambition in terms of content.

This is no less than the history of mankind: where did we come from? Where is the trip going in the future? The piece is divided into five pictures. Starting with “Genesis”. Chapters follow “Artificial Intelligence”, “Reboot”, “Disassembly” and finally “Merger”. Where the dancers develop something like a futuristic pas de deux as double non-binary bundles, linked together in pairs, with bizarre body shapes. to a fast-paced soundtrack, possibly developed by AI, that Double Dance can barely follow.

The question remains to what extent AI is involved in the development process. You can hardly see it. Most likely with recorded video installations that are part of the stage design. Obviously, AI is also involved in music production. But that could also have been created with a regular, still human-controlled computer program.

In terms of dancing, there are moments of apparent improvisation. When seven dancers are standing on a darkened stage in a scene and when they appear as themselves in a cone of light, they are positioning themselves in an abstract movement for that moment. Or when Harry Eve steps among the group lying on the floor and sets them in motion with the sound and sound of a black sound box. This may be driven by his accidental inspiration or artificial intelligence, but it all comes down to the same thing.

It is clear that people work here and embrace technology in order to produce their art, pushing boundaries into new territories. The dramatic rush of this project, Thilo Reinhard, said in a nutshell: “We are giving artificial intelligence the opportunity to become artistic.” And that opportunity was exploited admirably in Leipzig.

Editorial processing: Hanna Romanowsky, tsa