‘Robot’ at BAM fuses robotic movement and dance

June 15, 2015 By Benjamin Preston Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

A humanoid Brazilian Carnival-bot (Yacnoy Abreu Alfonso) dances with a Carnival reveler (Aliashka Hilsum). Photos by Laurent Philippe

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We may rely on robots to assemble many of the manufactured goods we use on a daily basis, but for most of us, they’re not something we see or even think about on an everyday basis. Bianca Li’s “Robot,” which was performed several times last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), superimposed robotic movement onto the most human of dynamics: dance.

To be fair, the eight dancers Li employed in her show had every right to be called athletes as well, as the show’s frenetic choreography challenged them to use their bodies with an intensity that would send many of us to the hospital after an hour and a half. “Robot” seemed to focus on the human body from the very beginning of the show, when images of organic and electronic patterns were projected onto a motionless dancer to portray a process that looked like a mash-up between growth and construction.

An ensemble of robotic musical instruments created by Maywa Denki formed the musical backbone of the rest of the show. A pair of automated, pole-mounted xylophones, with bars arranged like flower petals, were flanked by an electromechanical accordion, some percussion equipment and a harpsichord that looked like a 1950s science fiction prop. All of the musical devices were mounted on wheels so they could be moved around the stage by dancers throughout the show.

“Robot” had a decidedly mid-century feel. Costumes varied, with the nude look and a set of bulky robot suits standing out, but the most memorable were gender-specific, light blue service uniforms. The male outfits resembled something a Maytag service man would wear, while the female version consisted of a short, airline flight attendant-style dress ensemble.

A couple of segments dedicated to the mechanics of daily life used uniformed dancers to compress those details into a rushed, robotic blur — wake up, brush teeth, drink coffee, exercise, work, work, work, get yelled at by boss, yell at someone else, repeat. One dancer broke down after going too fast, collapsed and was swept off the stage by a janitor wielding a large push broom. Know anyone who has suffered a similar fate?

The robots, seven examples of the Nao programmable units built by the French company Aldebaran Robotics, were adorable diminutive accessories to these mad-dash sequences, actually slowing down the action as robotic-motion humans took time to teach them how to dance.

The onstage antics of the childlike robots often elicited laughter and sympathetic coos from audience members, who seemed more in tune with the robots’ plight than with the human acrobats among them.

Particularly enjoyable, if difficult to place within the show’s grand scheme (if indeed there was one), was a Nao robot, dressed in blue sequins and a pink boa, singing a synthesizer-supported rendition of “Besame Mucho” in a nightclub setting that looked as if it had been lifted from Brighton Beach. A Brazilian Carnival-bot was also engaging, as was the music that accompanied it.

Although “Robot” was at times incongruous and didn’t seem to have a deep social message to impart, it was entertaining. But sometimes — as the throngs of people who go to Las Vegas shows can attest — people often need, more than anything else, whimsical entertainment as a means of escape from their own daily grind.