And Who Is Useless Now?

And Who Is Useless Now? is an original theatre performance about a man, four robots, one slightly elitist artificial intelligence, and the transfer of responsibility to technologies.

As Wendy the A.I. tries to use art to be accepted by humans as a thinking being, Florent, who shares the stage with her, is beginning to doubt his human mind. How much freedom and how many human qualities are we willing to sacrifice for comfort?

The production is inspired by the ideas of Alan Turing, the founder of modern computer science, and Marvin Minsky, a pioneer of machine thinking. They both believed the human mind was just a very complicated machine.

About the company

Ondřej Holba is director, dramaturg, actor and teacher.

A graduate of the Nonverbal Theatre Department the Music and Dance Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (HAMU), he specialises in the directing and dramaturgy of original theatre, new circus and dance theatre. He is also an actor in the Fireducks and Circus Sacra ensembles.

In recent years, he has directed the original productions Kukačka – přesto zůstal člověkem (2017), Parazit (2019), Johnny & Jenny (2020), Narušení (2021) and J.O.E. (2023). As a dramaturg, he has been involved in projects such as Atlas (2021), Sandwritten (2021), Zero etc. (2022) and Ke Zdi (2023).

In 2019, he completed a major project, And Who Is Useless Now?, which was selected for the European projects Circolaborative Tools, Circus Next + and the Czech Dance Platform and Tanec Praha festivals.

Dedicated to circus pedagogy and youth circus for over 15 years, he is a teacher at Cirqueon, where he was a member of many European circus projects. He also specialises in facilitating feedback sessions for the creative process in theatre.