The Dramaturg in the Machine: Integrating Virtual Production and GenAI into the Development of Live Theatre

Abstract

This article examines how virtual production and generative artificial intelligence can participate in theatrical development while authorship, artistic authority, and ethical responsibility remain identifiable. A practice-led case study follows the development of the final act of When We Marched, an Afrofuturist play responding to the global reverberations of George Floyd’s murder across past, present, and (speculative) futures. The inquiry is situated in the playwright’s Black diasporic practice in Aotearoa New Zealand and her engagement with Afro-Kiwi identity and Māori cosmology. The collaboration also included a technology dramaturg, creative technologist, and custom project-specific GPT. The virtual production studio at Auckland University of Technology was repurposed as a dramaturgical volume, a preproduction environment used as a setting for embodied spatial, atmospheric, and scenographic exploration while the script remained in development. The custom GPT was configured as a constrained dramaturgical interlocutor, generating questions, reframings, and pattern associations without producing theatrical text for incorporation into the play. The GPT’s adherence to these boundaries was subsequently evaluated through adversarial stress-testing.

The case study illustrates how dramaturgical dialogue, computational prompting, and embodied exploration within a virtual production environment informed the developing work through situated interpretation and creative judgement. The playwright remained the sole-author of the theatrical text and retained final artistic authority throughout this relational process. Building on this account, the article proposes multi-intelligential dramaturgy (MID) as a dramaturgical specification of cognitive assemblage informed by sympoiesis. MID extends beyond the configuration used here to encompass alternative arrangements of biological and technical cognizers, embodied environments, and material infrastructures. It provides a framework for examining how deliberately constructed arrangements for participation, artistic authority, and ethical responsibility can sustain distributed dramaturgical inquiry without requiring shared authorship.