Abstract
In an age when creativity is increasingly simulated by machines, the drama school offers a rare environment in which intelligence is still modelled through bodies, relationships, and shared attention. This paper reframes the conservatoire as a living ecology of creative intelligence—a site where human, technological, and social systems intersect to train responsiveness, empathy, and ethical awareness. Drawing on examples from the United Kingdom, Brazil, and the United States, I argue that drama training functions as a dynamic model for sustainable creative systems, demonstrating how artistic processes of rehearsal, iteration, and ensemble thinking generate forms of cognition and collaboration that resist the logic of automation. In contrast to artificial intelligence, which reproduces patterns through data modelling, performance training rehearses adaptation, vulnerability, and presence—qualities that constitute a vital counterpoint to algorithmic abstraction. The paper draws on Erika Fischer-Lichte’s theory of autopoiesis (2008), Jane Bennett’s vital materialism (2010), and Timothy Morton’s ecology without nature (2007) to conceptualise the drama school as a creative ecosystem, composed of human and nonhuman agents, institutional forces, and affective flows. This framework allows the drama school to be seen not as an obsolete industrial model but as a prototype for how artistic and educational systems might evolve in response to ecological and technological crises. By situating artistic training within the discourse of environmental and digital ecologies, the paper proposes the drama school as a site of embodied research into what remains distinctively human—and therefore urgently necessary—in the age of intelligent machines.
Presenters
Mark O'thomasPrincipal/CEO/Professor, London Academy of Music & Dramatic Arts (LAMDA), United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
DRAMA, ECOLOGY, INTELLIGENCE, EMBODIMENT, PEDAGOGY, SUSTAINABILITY, PERFORMANCE, ETHICS, AUTOMATION
