Content warning: this article contains mentions of suicide.
In a Parkes Hall classroom in late May, Communication sophomore Azalea Brown spun slowly to a pulsing digital beat, wrapped in a metallic foil sheet from Amazon. A purple burlesque wig slipped off her head. She spoke, then screamed, lines from “Romeo and Juliet.”
“What’s in a name?” she asked.
Across the room, choreographer-director and Communication sophomore Felix Gaddie tried to answer. He rolled on the floor, wailing, half-dressed and spiraling — like a child mid-tantrum. Or maybe he portrayed a man, stripped bare, reaching for that unnameable thing we all hope might reach back.
This is “Sex Tech No,” or at least what it looks like in rehearsal.
The part-rave, part-experimental dance-theater collage premiered June 6 at Alvina Krause Studio under Northwestern’s Performance Hours grant. Across each of the three intimate performances, one thing remained constant: the feeling.
Gaddie’s conceptualization for the piece began with a New York Times report on a teenager who died by suicide after forming an emotional bond with an AI chatbot.
“I started to think, ‘Wow. There are real implications of AI and chatbots,” Gaddie said. “They’re not just funny things we use for homework. They actually create really powerful dynamics with their users.”
This tragic story became a catalyst for the questions “Sex Tech No” asks: Can you fall in love with a device? What happens when connection is simulated, rather than lived? What even is love, if not between two humans?
The result is a Bauschian pastiche of verse, movement, projected visuals and fractured language. Shakespeare is juxtaposed with original monologues, which are then combined with AI-blended speech. Passages from “Romeo and Juliet” are reframed in a disorienting sonic landscape spun live by Chicago-based DJ and Bienen senior Lucy Rubinstein, known by her stage name, R00BIES4EVER.
Rubinstein, a voice and opera major turned electronic musician, sees her role as shaping energy.
“It’s a conversation with the crowd,” Rubinstein said. “Giving them what they want while opening their mind.”
As performers blur the line between human and bot identities, her live-mixed beats form the emotional spine of the piece. Her set conveys equal parts euphoria and existential dread.
“Sometimes Azalea (Brown) feels like the person, and the rest of us become the bots,” Gaddie said.
In the performance, she acts as a kind of glitchy, honest and seductive guide through the work’s meditation on technology, sex and the desire for connection.
When asking these questions about AI, Rubinstein said the club felt like the perfect setting for Gaddie and his collaborators.
Gaddie and his collaborators seek to fill the void in what The Atlantic Recently dubbed America’s “party deficit” — a measurable drop in socializing, sex and revelry, particularly among youth. They don’t pretend they have answers. What they do have though, is feeling.
“We all just want to feel love and to get love,” he said, referencing Nietzsche’s “eternal return”as a philosophical backbone of the show. “It becomes this loop that repeats until it dies, or returns, or morphs into something else completely. Maybe some sort of hybrid.”
At one moment in rehearsal, Brown shrieked: “love…touch…trust…known…right…special…sparks!” Her voice cut through the space. A metronome ticks like a clock. Then silence.
Gaddie described the process as “orchestrated chaos.”
Communication junior Poseybelle Stoeffler, another cast member who delivers punchy yet earnest monologues and greets guests at the door. “Are you on the list?” she barks with theatrical swagger when guests arrive.
In many ways, “Sex Tech No” transcends the conventional cast and functions more like a collective.
“I’m the lead artist in a room of artists. That distinction matters,” Gaddie said, rejecting the title of director.
Gaddie explained that it’s about “aesthetics as narrative.” Though transitions may be chaotic, the moments in the show remain intentional if kept visually clear.
Gaddie said intentional chaos is central to his philosophy, shaped by artists like Pina Bausch and Julie Taymor. To him, they’re figures he turns to for their raw theatricality and emotional precision. For Gaddie, the structure doesn’t need to be neat; in fact, it shouldn’t be.
“I want to make something that feels like culture in crisis,” he said.
The foil sheet becomes a motif of sorts. Shimmering, reflective, alluring. It separates Brown and Gaddie on stage: two figures close enough to sense one another, but divided by something metallic, digital and not quite human.
“It’s not about solving anything,” Gaddie said. “It’s about putting the questions in your lap and seeing what you do with them.”
Each moment tapped into something raw, unresolved and urgent. This is what faculty advisor and Communication Prof. Thomas DeFrantz described as the need for “the messiness of human connection in order to render time as an aspect of life.”
“When we ask questions like these,” DeFrantz said. “We learn much more, collectively, about who we might want to be.”
In an interview, about a month before “Sex Tech No” was set to premiere, Gaddie sat with traces of silver glitter hair spray in his raven hair — clad in dark wash Japanese denim with a printed rabbit across the front, Doc Martens and a pink unicycle t-shirt. He shrugged his shoulders.
“Maybe you won’t know what you saw,” Gaddie said. “But I hope you feel something.”
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