Announcing Our New Commission: Glitch/Giselle

Sometimes described as the dance equivalent of Hamlet because of the emotional journey and technical challenges that meet the dancer playing the heroine, the ballet Giselle has been performed continuously since its première in Paris in June 1841. 

Glitch/Giselle is a multidisciplinary research project where choreography and technology meet history and philosophy. Responding to the ballet, digging deep into the archives, reading widely and interviewing notable dance scholars, Glitch Projects has created a series of original films and a digital tarot deck, which together provide a way of travelling in time and space to look back to the origins of Giselle in myth and forward to its potential futures.

“We’ve worked with Marisa Zanotti for many years,” says Cath James, our Artistic Director. “And we supported Marisa’s collaboration with Lea Anderson, with their multidisciplinary online digital dance piece Pan’s People’s Papers as part of the 2015 Brighton Digital Festival. 

“For me, Glitch/Giselle is a real investigation of where and how new technology trends and applications collide with the art of choreography and dance history – looking backwards and forwards at the same time. It’s really exciting out here on the edge of something new, and we are delighted to embrace that edge.”

Glitch/Giselle is the product of a collaboration between an unusual team, including dancers, scholars, a composer, a film maker/choreographer, and various design, digital and cultural specialists, united in a shared mission: to uncover, and then to celebrate, the reasons why Giselle has been so enduringly addictive over nearly two centuries.

Marisa Zanotti says: “I love exploring how choreographic practice might expand existing ways of working with technologies and vice versa. In Glitch/Giselle the tarot card system driving the project was developed over 18 months. It’s a kind of meeting between my early experiments with a website as a choreographic space with The Pan’s People Papers, Alex’s experience as a digital producer and Grant’s love of interactive design. We’re trying to open up visual and virtual spaces in unexpected ways.”

You can visit the project here.