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Aurelien Bory's Compagnie 111 presented their work Sans Objet at BAM's Howard Gilman Opera House on November 9th and 10th, 2012. It was first performed in 2009. This company is at the forefront of experimental movement theater, growing out of France's robust arm of the rich nouveau cirque performance genre. The company's artistic director, Aurélien Bory, is a physicist by training, and worked in the field of architectural acoustics before moving into the theatrical realm. The conversation taking place within the piece between performance arts and French philosophical post-structural thinking about the nature of communications and human-machine relationships was apparent. I wish that the class had had the opportunity to see and discuss this theatrical piece, which resonated so deeply with the work we have been considering in this course. The title, Sans Objet, means "without object" if translated literally. But the more accurate translation would be "pointless."

The performers, Olivier Alenda and Olivier Boyer, were marvelously fluid and seemingly effortless in a piece that demanded great strength, grace, and delicate subtlety. The third character, the robot, was programmed and operated by Tristan Baudoin. The machine was originally an automotive-construction robotic arm, in use in the 1970s in Detroit. It had a broad base, and a long arm with pivoting joints in several places, culminating in a bulbous, blunt appendage capable of grasping and moving heavy objects with great dexterity and precision. It had been re-designed and rebuilt, so that the machine's repertoire of movements, of speech-acts and signs, was different from its original functional one, and was now in service not of car-building but communication; it was now aimed at the construction of messages originating in the mind of M. Bory, rather than of the physical “messages” of the car designers at Chevrolet, Ford, or whichever company the robot was originally built for.

Although there were many moments when the human performers were truly characters, subjective agents on the stage in their relations with the other characters, for the most part they were transparent—in other words, one saw action without character. The action flowed through them and the audience saw the playing out of the changing relations among the actors rather than their thoughts, motivations, or feelings.

There were comedic moments, and ominous moments. The piece was largely wordless; only a short piece of dialogue from 2001: A Space Odyssey gave voice to the characters and to a part of their complex relationship and interplay. The excellent original music by Joan Cambo worked in perfect tandem with the action to create the shifting affective moods of the piece, from lighthearted to clock-work mechanistic to menacing.

The players are two humans and a robot. The set consists of a platform on which the robot stands, which appears to be simply a raised floor at the start, but is revealed to be made up of planks and shallow boxes that slide and are lifted out of their place by the robot. It grasps, seemingly by contact-suction, and lifts, rotates, repositions the pieces to re-configure the space, forcing the humans to adapt to the changes. The piece proceeds in several scenes, or episodes, which build upon one another, as the identities of the actors change and shift.

The piece opens with a large, shrouded figure on a platform. Wrapped in a huge sheet of black plastic, the thing begins to move, standing, bending, twisting, rotating, reaching out and recoiling back in; appearing to be exploring its space. A man enters; he watches the thing's movements. When it stops and rests, the man begins to pull the huge tarpaulin off the thing, exposing it as a large robot. Although the audience knows what to expect, if one didn't one might have thought that what would be revealed would be a group of humans, acting in concert in an acrobatic manner as one body.

The robot has become still, inert, by the time it is unmasked. The humans struggle with the covering; the weight and bulk of it almost too much to lift without being overwhelmed and knocked down. One of them steps up onto the platform where the robot stands; he is preparing to investigate. As the man peers at the top appendage of the robot, which can function as the equivalent of a hand, the robot surprises him by springing to life again; it grabs hold of him. As the robot moves in abrupt, simple movements, the man is moved and steps across the stage along with it. The robot seems to be using the man's head as a handle to conduct him through the space. The lines between subject and object, actor and passive recipient of action, are blurring.

At the start of another scene, the robot is once again alone on the platform. It pivots on several axes at once, with a remarkable fluidity of motion, bringing itself into an upright position one is tempted to describe as a stance. It looks quite like some strange living being, with a node at the end of its uppermost appendage which is alarmingly head- and face-like. It turns slightly, extends its head forward, then gently cocks it to the side, in a questioning manner. The impression of sentience conveyed in this simple movement is uncanny; funny, and a bit disturbing. And it calls up the question of what we know about the agency and consciousness of any creature or object. If we believe that making assumptions about the existence and contents of their inner life by analogy to human movement and expression constitute the pathetic fallacy, then to what extent can we be certain we are not equally mistaken in our application of those same assumptions to other humans?

We have already seen that the robot is capable of attaching itself to things and is strong enough to move them. In another scene, the robot's hand lowers to the floor of the platform, and attaches itself to it. One of the men is standing on the platform, looking in another direction. The machine swivels, and with its hand, slides the floorboard to the side a couple of feet. One of the man's feet is on that board, and it goes with the board, throwing the man momentarily off balance. This dance continues, with the board moving the man, one or both feet at a time. He adapts to the machine's control, progressing from being taken off guard and to moving with the machine in a rhythmic, swinging dance; though in this dance the machine is always leading. It eventually pulls the floor out from under him completely, and finally swallows him into the void beneath the platform.

At another point in the performance, the two humans are crouching in a shallow box. It is deep enough from front to back for the thickness of their bodies; it is about four feet high by four feet wide. They are hemmed in by the small space, but move within it, sometimes climbing over each other. The robot lifts the box, and begins to rotate it. The men must move to stay upright, then they brace themselves against the walls and rotate with the box, finally finding a new paradigm by climbing outside the box. But in this scene, their movements and relationships with one another are always limited by the actions of the robot.

Later on, the machine speaks: “You know what the problem is as well as I do.”

Is there a problem? Do we know what it is? Does the machine know? And, is there a solution?

The music then reaches a higher volume; the sounds become more ominous; the curtain is drawn but clearly the action is not over. The audience knows that there is something important happening that is invisible to them. The music continues on its racing, frightening, and unstoppable trajectory. The curtain is opened, but covering the whole stage is a plastic sheet, obscuring the action as the action of the robot was obscured at the start inside the plastic sheeting. Suddenly, violent blows are struck at the sheet from the stage side, toward the audience. The blows come quickly, repeating all over the sheet, with enough force to punch holes in the plastic membrane separating the stage-world from the audience-world. Finally the music ebbs, to a calmer, if no less menacing dynamic. Large holes are ripped in the plastic, and the two humans burst stumblingly through. They stagger slightly toward the audience. But they are not the same. Their heads are wrapped in the same black plastic sheeting that enveloped the robot at the start. They have been deprived of their most specifically human features; they are just two more moving bodies, machines, in the space. The stage goes quiet, and darkens.