The annual Richard Wagner festival in the southeastern German town of Bayreuth staged its first AI-assisted production over the weekend — and the experiment left part of the audience cold. At the end of Saturday evening's performance of Götterdämmerung, curator Marcus Lobbes and his team were greeted with boos and whistles as they took the stage, according to German news agency dpa. The singers, orchestra and especially conductor Christian Thielemann, by contrast, drew warm applause.
Festival organizers had announced before the show that this would be the first time AI took part on stage at the event — "not as a character, but as an image-generating force." Singers would be "the fixed point within a visually seething cosmos of light, texture, history, and association," with projections that "erupt, constantly shift, and merge into one another."
The AI-assisted collage, built from scenes of previous Ring cycle performances and historical themes pre-selected by Lobbes — director of the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund — puzzled spectators. Projected images included former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the World Trade Center towers after the September 11 attacks, and a special postage stamp marking German reunification in 1990.
The festival's website promised that "every performance will be unique — because the images and associations never stand still." Two more performances with the AI staging are scheduled, giving audiences another chance to judge whether the experiment finds its footing.
