With AI reaching unprecedented levels of intellectual capacities – would it be possible to design an android that represents the cultural identity of a country? 

Post Theater and Po-Fu Wu have teamed up to invent the story of an android that represents the values of a liberal, progressive, free, open-minded place: Taiwan. In the course of a very physical, personal and intimate performance the audience understands more and more that they are witnessing the crisis of an artificial intelligence. The android on stage is able to perform his own inventor, as well as the actor he is modeled after – Po-Fu Wu. The performance plays with the ideas of the “original” and the “replicant” , and this juxtaposition is the core of the staging.

In NO MAN IS AN iSLAND Post Theater discusses these issues in a monologue with Po-Fu Wu who already worked in NONUMENTS with Post Theater (Hsinchu, 2019). The work is commissioned by the Monologfestival of TD Berlin.

Post Theater has a long professional relationship with Taiwan, with a residency at Taipei Artist Village at its beginning and several collaborations with local institutions since. NO MAN IS AN iSLAND is the first Post Theater production dealing with the current political situation of Taiwan, as well as the first performance with an AI as protagonist.