This book considers David Hanson’s robots as a performative expression of our cultural moment, serving as a paradigm for the evolution of humanoid social robots.

Mechanical beings have occupied the human imagination since antiquity. Now, they inhabit the pop-cultural imagination, embodying the apotheosis of humanity’s technological aspirations and dread. Sophia, Hanson’s most advanced robot, anticipates the future as she articulates the mythic pattern, narrative, anxieties, and hopes as old as humanity. Gendered as an attractive female with a face inspired by Queen Nefertiti and Audrey Hepburn, Sophia is a cipher, avatar, and turning point that brings humanity and technology a step closer to the emergence of a post-human species. The author is a transdisciplinary artist/scholar/educator working internationally in experimental performance, indigenous performance (ritual, shamanism), and social robotics. Hanson’s robots and Sophia are examined as performance media and events, as characters evolving as post-human narratives of technological beings. The emergent, complex, and collaborative relationships social robots have with technology, AI, performance, anthropology, mythology, psychology, sociology, popular culture, social media, politics, and economics are considered.

Performing Africa is a collection of essays on contemporary African performance. From 1992 to 2002, Thomas Riccio worked with several groups in South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, West Africa, and Kenya – the Zulu and the !Xuu Bushmen of the Kalahari among them. Performing Africa combines a rare, in-the-field perspective with a keen insight into Africa’s transformative and tumultuous confluence of tradition, urbanization, politics, history, and the AIDS crisis. The evolution of tradition and the emergence of dynamic new forms of expression are practical necessities and survival. An interdisciplinary approach and accessible language make Performing Africa a unique resource for those teaching or interested in cultural anthropology, sociology, drama therapy, theatre, performance, and African studies.

Through drama, the author cleverly builds a bridge between differing worldviews and does it well. This kind of bridging is magical, sometimes mystical. We get a glimpse of the cognitive map in the minds of the Yup’ik and Inupiat. Each of these groups has its own form of verbal art expressed through various mediums, a form of holistic drama expressed through storytelling, dancing, drumming, and singing. This book demonstrates the kind of respect that indigenous people recognize and appreciate. This attitude of self-expression negates the usual practice of the West to recreate the indigenous groups into their own image.

George Charles Kanaqlak Native Elder and Professor of Alaska Native Studies, University of Alaska FairbanksQuote Source

 Sophia, one of the world’s most widely known humanoid social robots, is a performer in an unfolding narrative central to our historical moment— the technological transfiguration of the planet. Sophia, created by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, is a performance medium, an alluring protagonist, exemplar, harbinger, and co-evolutionary vector of a dramatic event played out in real-time, the merging of humans and technology, and a new way of being.

As humans asserted control, the arts and humanism became expressive of the pathology of power, a cover, and justification for the domination and, ultimately, destruction of all else. The pragmatism of place-based systems gave way to human-centered social and cultural systems, with the arts and humanities serving as propaganda ministry for the anthropocentric. Value and meaning were no longer based on place considerations and maintenance but with the anthropocentric becoming further entrenched and institutionalized. Value and responsibility shifted from place-based cosmocentricism to human needs, values, and functionality. The arts, humanities, and their prodigal progeny, technology, are not in the service of the world but rather the tools of colonization and exploitation of the world of one species over all others. It is the rendering of the world into an object with dissonance, an expression of self-justifying human survivalism. 

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Since her creation in 2016, Sophia has become the world’s most recognized humanoid social robot. Gendered female by creator David Hanson, she is a harbinger of a tomorrow world that is here. She performs at events around the planet as a messenger, celebrity, and ambassador representing the human-technological future. Sophia is a symbol, and humans are witnesses to an origin story as much hers as it is our own.

Book Reviews

Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry, By Vera Manuel (Kulilu Patki). American Indian Culture and Research Journal

African Theatre 14: contemporary women. eds. by Jane Plastow and Yvette Hutchison. Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute,

Pina Bausch, By Royd Climenhaga. Theatre Journal

War Cries, Diane Glancy. American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Devising In Process, Edited by Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart. Theatre Journal

African Theatre in Performance: A Festchrift in Honor of Martin Banham, Edited  by  Dele  Layiwola. Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute