Creative robotics theatre and performing arts
Abstract
Creative Robotics Theatre (Samani et al. 2024a; Samani et al. 2024b) represents a cutting-edge fusion of robotic technologies and theatrical performance, bringing together artists, designers, engineers and researchers to explore how machines can participate in, shape, and transform live performance. Over the past decade, creative robotics has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field, drawing on traditions from puppetry, dance, scenography, installation art, and human–robot interaction to reimagine what robots can do on stage and how audiences might meaningfully engage with them. This special issue brings together research, case studies, and theoretical reflections that illuminate the diverse ways that robotics, artificial intelligence, and performance intersect, and unfolds how these intersections open new pathways for artistic innovation and technological inquiry. Theatre and the performing arts have long experimented with non-human performers, from automata and mechanical devices to digital avatars and immersive environments (Jochum 2026). While robots in literature and film are frequently depicted as metaphorical humans, live performance offers a wider range of robot characters and opportunities for creative experimentation with robots alongside theatre and performance artists. As robot technologies move out of the laboratory and onto theatrical stages, we find a new cast of embodied, responsive, and materially present agents woven into new dramaturgies (Jochum and Donnarumma 2027; Sone and Savery 2025). These agents challenge familiar assumptions about agency, intentionality, expressivity, and relationality that prompt artists, researchers, and audience members to reconsider the boundaries between human and machine, performer and object, choreography and computation. In this special issue, we explore how creative robotics theatre engages these questions through improvisation, physical storytelling, embodied interaction and scenographic design. We aimed to attract diverse perspectives that consider robots not as tools or novelties, but as collaborators, creators, and co-performers that function as invitations