Edinburgh Fringe Chats (#37): Piotr Mirowski, IMPROBOTICS

29 Jun

Conducted by Emmie for Theatre and Tonic

As anticipation builds for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025, we’re catching up with a range of exciting creatives preparing to bring their work to the world’s largest arts festival this August. In this series, we delve into the stories behind the shows, the inspiration driving the artists, and what audiences can expect.

Today, we’re joined by Piotr Mirowski to chat about Improbotics.

1. Can you begin by telling us about your show and what inspired it?

Improbotics is a science comedy troupe. We create shows that connect audiences with experimental technology, engage audiences about AI ethics, perform grounded theatrical improvisation and entertain festival punters looking for comedy!

The idea of improvising with AI came to Piotr Mirowski (the show’s director) about 10 years ago, when it was still a niche topic. Piotr was researching and building AI, while also performing on stage as an actor and improviser. One day he tried to improvise on stage with a robot, powered by a language model that he coded-up himself. There was a strange connection between language models (who keep making stuff up and generate the most likely answer based on their context and training data) and improvisers (who strive at being spontaneous, and at always saying “the most obvious” thing, while also carefully listening to their stage partners). Obviously, the analogy between machines and improvisers stops there, but it was inspiring enough for Piotr to explore bringing AI onto the theatre stage. Piotr met Kory Mathewson, another researcher in robotics and improv comedian at the Rapid Fire Theatre, who had the same ideal they became friends and set up a theatre company where human actors improvise alongside machines. The Improbotics’ ethos is to make your stage partner look good, even when it is a robot!

Thanks to the amazing, international cast of humans who came to shape the company, the shows have evolved quite a bit. Boyd Branch designed augmented reality shows that kept us connected and provided emotional support during Covid lockdowns, and is now directing our kid show. We improvised multilingual shows with live AI translation with the Swedish cast of Improbotics. And we explored AI as a tool for grounded, emotional improv with Sarah Davies and a very talented cast!

This year, we are bringing a new show to Edinburgh: RoboTales. It is an improvised choose-your-own adventure game, played in front of the audience by the talented cast of Improbotics. The twist in RoboTales is that a robot “writes” and “directs” the show. The bot uses speech recognition and state-of-the-art AI (we developed the software ourselves!) to analyse the improv scenes and generate silly new choices and strange transitions. The audiences control the story by voting on their phones for their preferred choice (like a modern take on the choose-your-own adventure books), and then the actors take the story forward. It is like “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”, brought to life by AI and the actors’ imagination and improv talent.

2. What made you want to bring this work to the Fringe this year?

There is an urgency today to redefine our relationship with AI, and in particular, with AI in the artistic domain. Too many people see it as a replacement for human labour, whereas it should be seen as just another, optional tool for the artist. We illustrate our stance on AI by working as a theatre lab, and by designing a comedic and narrative show around the talents and aspirations of our large improv cast—who want to engage in deep, connected improv to tell an enjoyable story. Sometimes AI surprises us with quirky suggestions (what we call the “glitch aesthetic”). Sometimes we have to work hard to keep AI outputs interesting. Sometimes the AI genuinely helps by keeping track of characters and narrative strands in long-form improvisation.

3. How would you describe your show in three words?

Agency, robots, imagination.

4. What do you hope audiences take away from watching your performance?

We hope audience take away a “maker” mindset that is common to both improvisation and to tinkering and to messing around with robots and technology. On the one hand, talented improvisers are telling a story and play around challenges thrown by an AI system (and amplified by audience choices). On the other hand, the show also features very real and very fragile technology, deployed in the extreme conditions of a Fringe venue, with Piotr fixing any tech issues live. If standard improv is like building a plane in mid-flight, our show adds having to wrangle a mischievous autopilot. The best compliments we received were from audience members who told us they were inspired to dare and try something new.

5. What’s your top tip for surviving the Fringe?

Bring a sense of normalcy into the long Edinburgh run. You could start your day with a morning run before breakfast. And surprising as it may sound, you could use the downtime to get some non-Fringe work done, to get your mind out of the Fringe madness.

6. Where and when can people see your show?

We are at 19:40 at the Gilded Balloon Patter House, every day until 17 August.

Book tickets at:
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/improbotics-presents-robotales