The robot revolution will be impossibly cute

ROBOT/BLANCA LI Barbican Theatre, EC2

YOU know the rise of the automatons? The robots who are going to steal our jobs and take over the world? Well, if there’s a lesson to learn from Blanca Li’s Robot, it’s that right now, we don’t have too much to worry about.

The coming of the machines here elicits not fear, but a huge, cooing “Aaah!” from the hopelessly smitten, anthropomorphising audience. The subject of their affection: five kneehigh, blue and white droids, with blinking eyes, childlike gestures and a habit of regularly falling flat on their faces.

One robot takes its first tentative steps, carefully placing its heel and toe, palpably vulnerable, before graduating into an interspecies pas de deux with dancer Gaël Rougegrez. It is a brilliantly realised scene, and it is cuteness overload.

Robots provide the music too, thanks to a mechanical orchestra of eccentric contraptions (designed by Maywa Denki), including a self-playing drum kit with a face, like the percussion equivalent of a Henry vacuum cleaner.

These robot-centric scenes are hugely original and entertaining and raise plenty of questions about the fallibility of technology, and our relationship with it. The contrast of the dancers’ own finely programmed bodies with their instinctive sense of balance, connection and reaction is stark.

But the rest of the show that frames these genius moments is frustratingly uneven. Li’s choreography is funny and accessible, but it doesn’t develop much — there’s little evolution going on, dancewise. Instead, there is a succession of often knowingly silly scenes and a loose theme about the increasing pace of modern life. The show loses its momentum once the robots have retired. Maybe they are going to put some dancers out of a job, after all.

Until February 25 (020 7638 8891, barbican.org.uk)