If you’re looking for a cookie-cutter pretty dance piece, Autoplay is not it. But if you’re in the mood to see something you’ve never seen before, to truly be wowed, then you’re in luck.
This extraordinary experimental AI Opera by Cape Town-based dance company, Dark Room Contemporary, has your heart pounding before you’ve even taken your seat.
It starts the moment you walk into the venue. Performers push chairs around the stage in a meticulous, choreographed pattern.
Their movements are sharp, bold, erratic. It’s almost as if they are being prompted to move, but not of their own free will.
A weird, ominous energy fills the space. As the performance moves from scene to scene, this only seems to escalate, and so does your anxiety.
But that’s the whole point.
Created using generative AI, Autoplay is a commentary on the relationship between humans and machines, on what the world might become as AI continues to influence and perhaps even control us.
Made in 2024 by award-winning dance and film maker Louise Coetzer, Autoplay is Africa’s first AI opera.
The process involved using AI systems as creative partners, from the developmental phase right through to performance.
Throughout its development, Coetzer used AI as a sounding board; she’d feed it her previous works, her ideas, her concepts, allowing AI systems to generate possible variations of the work, musical and visual approaches, scene structure, themes and more.
While audiences don’t get to “see” that part of the AI integration, what we do experience is how AI can manipulate, change and even control a piece of art in real time.
No two performances of Autoplay are exactly the same, because parts of the score change depending on what the generative AI outputs are.
Throughout every performance, the breaths, stamps, claps and sounds the dancers make, performer Inge Beckmann’s operatic vocals, and echoes in the room are recorded and fed into an AI system to create an entirely different musical score.
The ending is also not set in stone. The audience get to decide between two possible endings, and the performers only find out in real time and must adapt.
Ironically, or cleverly, the piece directly critiques the very thing that was used to make it exist.
It is impressive, surreal, absurd and uncomfortable. Sometimes all in the same breath. And that’s kind of what AI is too.
It can do incredible things, be impressively quick, but it is also frightening.
Coetzer’s unprecedented concept is brought to life by dancers who perform every single step with a physical intensity I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.
They jerk, jump, glide and walk with such force.
Sometimes stretching their bodies to the limit, creating the most elegant lines, and at others contorting so violently it jars you, bringing chills somewhere deep within your bones.
Each movement is rigid, sharp and exquisite, in the strangest way.
Beckmann’s voice is both angelic and haunting.
Coupled with simple lighting, the dancers’ massive shadows looming over the stage, moving props and a stage with nowhere to hide, Autoplay is, for lack of a better word, mind-bending.
Coetzer has created something that previously did not exist. Seventy-five fascinating minutes of humans and machines interacting.
Nothing truly prepares you for this experience. It’s one of the most otherworldly things I’ve been lucky enough to watch.
- Autoplay runs at the National Arts Festival until June 29. The production will also be performed later this year in October, as part of the 2026 Woordfees programme.
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