The NOVABOT play: a mini airship dedicated to capturing video of an actor on stage

The actor's body is present and active on stage, but capture and projection technology enhances its presence, dramatizing its perception by bringing the spectator's gaze closer to it, fracturing her/his image by taking details of the body or face enlarged on screens, sometimes altered, modified and revealing the visible body beyond her/his normal appearance (Mansar 2022; Mansar et al. 2023). These phenomena create a whole new dramaturgy, emancipated from traditional dramatic action, which begins to combine the real and the virtual in an augmented reality, thus disturbing the spectator's perceptive field. A new poetic space is emerging, focusing on a disquiet at the heart of perceptions and sensations, questioning and giving thought to what it means for a body to be inhabited by a speaking subject. Flying drones are only now appearing on the stage, opening an almost unprecedented field of experimentation and study. Live performance is in the process of forging closer ties with the world of robotics, bringing together very different epistemologies, synergizing know-how and forging partnerships that are often punctuated by artistic achievements. This work has been largely carried out in Japan (Paré 2016), at the HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and at leading European art schools such as La Manufacture, Haute École des Arts de la Scène, in Lausanne, but to date no notable experiments have been carried out with an actor delivering a text.