The story of Pinocchio is pretty old: it was serialised in magazine form in 1881 and published as a book in 1883. AI – artificial intelligence – is a buzzword of our current times, on everyone’s minds and screens, and frankly, in everyone’s lives. Chalk and cheese, you might think, and maybe you’d be right. But the moment you start watching the show AiAiAi Pinocchio! by Gruppo Ibrido (dancer Davide Tagliavini and director and digital artist Cinzia Pietribiasi) you think: of course! That old story and this new technology might look like an odd couple, but they go hand in hand.
For a start, they are both about simulations and self-realisations. In each, a simulacrum of a boy is made by a technologist – a puppet-master’s model of wood and string in the old tale, a computer scientist’s digital creation of pixels and algorithms in the new. Both characters are spirited with curiosity and mischief, both venture out into the world around them where they learn lessons through strange and stimulating encounters, and both ultimately desire to become autonomous beings, with their own lives and wills – to become a real boy, not just a simulation of one.
Gruppo Ibrido’s performance is aimed at children, for whom the story of Pinocchio serves as a catchy gateway: deeply embedded in Italian culture, it is also widely recognised around the world. At the same time as spinning tales of adventures and encounters, it poses fundamental questions, which apply to AI, robots and other machines as much as to puppets. Can a constructed being become an autonomous agent? What is essential to being human? Consciousness, intention, communication, mortality? What is the difference between a real and a copy? When does a simulation stop being distinguishable as such?
Such questions are raised in all sorts of stories, from our earliest myths (of Prometheus, for example) through to science-fiction and fantasy classics such as Frankenstein and Blade Runner, and AiAiAi Pinocchio! remakes this recurrent theme for today, again using a mix of old and new. Old in performance style: it taps the folk-theatre spirit of the commedia dell’arte with its stock characters, episodic scenes and declamatory style. New in scenographic style, using computer graphics, well-known fictional characters (Spongebob, Spiderman) and generated sounds to build a digital world for Pinocchio to inhabit.
But there is another old-new dynamic going on here, and it aligns with E’BAL’s mission to bring contemporary performance to new audiences and new places: adult performers, artists and curators reaching out to a young audience who are, of course, not yet insiders to the contemporary scene, and may never become so. To engage their interest it does two things. First, like so much children’s theatre, it is instinctively multidisciplinary, using whatever means and styles it deems appropriate – movement, text, toys, sets, lighting, video, costume – to connect with its audience. Second, like so many E’BAL performances, it invites its public into conversation, whether through sharings and works-in-progress or, as when I caught the performance at Teatro Rasi in Ravenna, through direct post-show conversation with the kids and their families in the audience.
And thus the new and the old can meet, merge, and indeed change places: as Tagliavini and Pietribiasi are keen to stress, it’s not simply a question of reaching new audiences, but of learning from them too. That is the basis of renewal.
