Residency of Synergy of Music Theatre (SMouTh) hosted by MPArt, in partnership with Internationales Digitalkunst Festival (IDKF) and InShadow - Lisbon Screendance Festival.
The residency of Synergy of Music Theatre (SMouTh) explored authorship, creativity, and collaboration between artists and machines.
Bringing theatre, music, poetry and live light design into the same space, the work took the form of an AI-generated poetry slam, where creativity was shared between the stage and the audience.
At the heart of each performance was “Prompt Me Gently”, a participatory segment inviting spectators to become judges, co-authors and performers. Poems were generated live with AI, then shaped, interpreted and brought to life on stage.
The residency
The two-day residency at SYNERGEIO culture space, began on 10 September at Larissa during the MPArt festival with the Devising With Machines masterclass. Over three hours, emerging writers and performers explored the possibilities of spoken word, slam and generative tools through writing exercises, improvisations and collaborative editing.
Prompts became fragments, fragments became poems, and poems were tested through voice, rhythm, timing and performance. Alongside the creative process, participants opened up conversations around sourcing, responsibility and the limits of AI as a collaborator.
The following day, "Who The F*ck Wrote This?" brought these experiments into the spotlight!
On stage, voice, music, movement, light and AI came together in real time. Texts were generated, transformed, questioned and performed, while the audience became an active part of the process. Applause, interruptions and silence all had a role to play as performers curated machine-generated material in front of the crowd.
At the centre of the performance was a simple but complex question: who writes a poem when humans and machines create together?
Across two days, the residency transformed prompts into performance, giving emerging artists space to experiment, collaborate and question what authorship and creativity can look like in an age of generative technology.