Generative Sensei

YCAM presents a performance for children that was newly created by the choreographer/dancer Pijin Neji in collaboration with Sayo Onoda, a science fiction writer and engineer.

Since 2024, YCAM has been running ”Where Theater Meets School”, a talent development program that creates artworks where children and technology meet. “Generative Sensei” is one of the productions from this program, created by Neji Pijin and various artists and creators, presenting a performing arts piece where both children and adults can enjoy.This immersive piece’s theme is GenAI, an AI that auto-generates new content such as text, pictures, audio, and video. The audience partakes in a class hosted by a robot acting as a Sensei (‘Teacher’ in Japanese), responding to their questions. Based on the response, the speech lines for the little robots on the desk are generated.

Our teacher is AI!? --- A class out of school!

“Generative Sensei” is an interactive performance where the audience partakes in a class on a stage acting as a classroom, responding to the words from robots and AI playing the role of a Sensei (‘Teacher’ in Japanese). Sensei’s speech ranges widely from simple requests of gesture, such as “if you are a human, raise your hand?”, to queries, “what is human?”. In the latter half of the performance, the AI generates line of speech based on the response from the audience. Dancer and choreographer Neji created and directed this work, starting from the question “How do ‘we’ change by the coexistence with AI?”. “Generative Sensei” asks theneed to think about what kind of future coexistence is possible between humans and AI through the awkward and, at times, philosophical communication of the audience and Sensei.