By Nikolas Kamtsis
Theater has always been ruled by voices of authority: the playwright, the director, the producer, the critic, the audience. But today, a new sovereign has entered unnoticed: the algorithm. This invisible director has no face, no body, no human fragility. It calculates instead of imagining. It does not ask questions—it gives instructions. It decides what will be seen, for how long, and by whom. It trims the infinite into fragments, the tragic into comic, the complex into digestible seconds.
And we—theater makers—are told: “Adapt, or disappear.” We are pushed to translate the handmade into the machinic, the flesh and blood into AI avatars, to transform the trembling pause of an actor into a GIF, the epic silence of tragedy into a looping reel. But let us ask: should we surrender and craft our work in the algorithm’s image? and if we revenge and expose the algorithm itself as a character on stage, the ultimate censor and director of our age as an actor naked under 10000 watts?
If we surrender, theater dies. It dies because its essence is not speed but duration and endoscopy, not fragments but wholeness, not statistics but presence. Not the likes but the vivant applause of the spectator. The stage is the last place where algorithms cannot calculate human breath, hesitation, error, fragility. These are not weaknesses—they are the raw material of theater. To erase them in the name of visibility is to amputate theater itself.
But if we expose the algorithm, – I like this option- then theater regains its teeth. We can make the algorithm stumble under the weight of its own rules. We can present it as a tyrant who edits our lives into consumable moments. We can dramatize its violence: the way it buries some voices and amplifies others, not by merit or truth, but by profit and control. Theater, the art of revealing hidden power, can turn the algorithm into what it fears most: a visible character, naked and ridiculous, no longer invisible.
Handmade theater is not just another content generator. It is resistance. It is the place where a human hand paints a set, a human body shakes under light, a human voice fills a room. No algorithm has ever written a sigh, no machine has ever carried the silence of grief across a stage.
Remember: The algorithm is a tragic “person”
It has never felt loneliness or the fear of death.
In the coming years, audiences will hunger for what cannot be scrolled away. They will search for theater not because it is optimized, but because it is unfiltered. In a world curated by machines, theater’s handmade imperfection is its superpower.
So, let the algorithm direct its endless feed. We will direct the unrepeatable moment. We will craft what cannot be quantified: presence.