How are localities represented when technofuturism, nationalism, and traditionalist revivalism converge? Macau 2049, a large-scale stage performance directed by Zhang Yimou, combines robotics with Chinese traditional performance arts and offers a compelling case study. This paper advances two main arguments. First, I interpret the show as symbolically staging China’s pursuit of modernity in its most contemporary and idealized form. Scholars have already noted that China’s modernity is marked by the celebration of national milestones and the reform of traditional performing arts. Macau 2049 is examined as articulating these themes while also embodying a newer trajectory in which the incorporation of AI and robotics into traditional performance marks the latest stage in a modernist narrative that celebrates technological innovation as the means of reforming tradition. Second, I analyze how locality is reconfigured within this technological, artistic, and ideological assemblage. Although Macau, a Special Administrative Region of China, is invoked in the show’s title, serves as its exclusive performance site, and is cited as the home of several performers, the city itself remains curiously elusive on stage. Drawing on Ackbar Abbas’s concept of “disappearance,” I argue that the intersection of technofuturism, nationalism, and traditionalism situates localities such as Macau in a simulacral mode of existence: they are signified, yet what they signify remains ambiguous, functioning as a circulating sign within a broader techno-traditional-national imaginary. In doing so, the performance gestures toward a projected future for China’s localities, where technological spectacle rearticulates their signification within a broader modernist national vision.