Modern dance drama questions the essence of life

What makes us human? Is it our ability to love and feel, or simply the awareness of our own existence?

These questions lie at the heart of The Garden, an original contemporary dance drama that explores the meaning of life in the age of artificial intelligence.

The production will premiere at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing on Sept 17 and 18.

Produced and performed by the Beijing Dance Drama & Opera, The Garden draws inspiration from Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek's groundbreaking three-act play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which was published in 1920 and first performed in 1921.

It was in R.U.R. that Capek introduced the word "robot", derived from the Czech word for forced labor. The play tells the story of a scientist named Rossum, who discovers how to create humanlike artificial beings and establishes a factory to manufacture and distribute them around the world. In an effort to make the robots more human, another scientist gradually gives them human characteristics, including the ability to feel pain. Years later, however, the machines created to serve humanity turn against their creators and ultimately take control.

More than a century after its publication, the play's central question remains strikingly relevant: What is the essence of life?

For Xu Junrui, the playwright of The Garden, that question provides the philosophical foundation for the new dance drama.

Xu says the title refers not to a physical garden, but to a spiritual space — a possible shared home for humans and future forms of life.

"'The Garden' is a spiritual space, a shared space where we coexist with future life-forms," Xu said at a media event at the NCPA on Aug 6, where the creative team discussed the ideas and artistic development behind the production. "If having emotions means that robots can be considered living beings, then we coexist with them in this 'garden'."

The idea shifts the familiar science-fiction conflict between humans and machines toward a more fundamental question: Are emotions the only measure of life?

Set on a desolate planet in the future, The Garden depicts a world in which humans mass-produce robots to help develop new territories. But the relationship between creator and creation begins to change when the robots unexpectedly develop empathy and gradually awaken to a sense of self.

Yet the production is not simply a story about the promises and dangers of technology. Rather than asking whether machines will eventually defeat humanity, The Garden explores whether humans are capable of recognizing and accepting another form of existence — and whether we can truly "see" beings that do not look or behave like us.

For director Bai Hua, robots provide a lens through which to examine more universal questions about emotion, love and the future of humanity.

"Creation should not blindly follow trends — making whatever happens to be popular," Bai says. "It should start from within ourselves and convey something about humanity itself."

Co-director Gong Xingxing points out that while AI has become a defining topic across almost every field, there are still relatively few dance productions that engage with the subject in depth.

"We want to use the topic of AI to create a work with warmth, a work that can convey love," Gong says.

The production originated as a young talent project in Beijing in 2024 and has since undergone further development and refinement. It brings together a group of leading young Chinese dancers.

At the Aug 6 media event, the performers presented three key excerpts — Awakening, Choice and Awakening of Consciousness. Rather than simply reproducing mechanical movements, however, the dancers approach their roles by imagining what it might mean for machines to enter the human world and develop the ability to perceive and feel.

"The dancers are not deliberately imitating machines," Xu says. "They are imagining: 'When cold machines enter our lives and can see us, can we see them?'"

For Xu, that question may be the true starting point of The Garden.

As audiences enter the theater, they will encounter an imagined future in which the boundary between human and machine is increasingly blurred. Within this "garden", the production invites audiences to look beyond the familiar debate over technology and consider something more intimate: what makes a life worthy of recognition, what gives emotion its meaning, and whether love itself might be a bridge between different forms of existence.

Ultimately, The Garden leaves the answer open, inviting each audience member to find their own meaning in the "garden".

Contact the writer at chennan@chinadaily.com.cn