Backstage with Brig Huezo

To mark the world premiere of THE GHOST IN THE GLITCH at Cologne Opera in April 2026, dramaturge Mia Hofner spoke with Brig Huezo. We are delighted to share the resulting interview, THE GLITCH – Between Physical Exhaustion and Digital Code, here by kind permission.
 

If you had to explain what you do without using the word "post-digital," how would you describe it?

I work with bodies that extend beyond themselves. A gesture can trigger a digital environment, and suddenly movement begins to shift the reality around it.

Was there a specific moment when you realized that dance was your true language and not just a hobby?

I do not think there was a single dramatic moment where I suddenly realized that dance was my language. It happened slowly. Movement became a way to process things that words could not really hold questions about the body, identity, and sometimes simply a way to survive through experience. At some point, I noticed that choreography allowed me to connect many interests at once. So it never felt like switching from a hobby to a profession. It felt more like discovering a medium where my curiosity could move.

You describe your work as post-digital choreography where body, image, and code intersect. How do you translate this idea into concrete rehearsal practices?

For me the studio is no longer just a physical room. Movement can become data, an image, and a simulation. In rehearsal, we move between these states constantly dancing, mocaping and tracking, replaying, distorting. Sometimes the dancer teaches the avatar how to move. Sometimes the avatar teaches the dancer something back. The choreography lives inside that feedback loop.

What can a digital body achieve that a physical one cannot – and vice versa?

A digital body can defy the laws of physics. It can stretch, glitch, rewind, or repeat a movement endlessly. It can also preserve traces of the body – a gesture, a rhythm, a particular way of moving – and conserve them within digital space. Almost like a fossil of movement: a body that could continue to exist there indefinitely. A physical body is different. It is subject to gravity, fatigue and breath. It sweats, it fails, it becomes exhausted. Yet that is precisely where its power resides: in its fragility, its unpredictability, and its aliveness. :/

When starting a new project, what usually comes first: a concept, a visual image, or a specific technical tool?

Usually a question. What happens when a movement stops being just a gesture and becomes a trigger; igniting virtual fire, summoning lightning, or activating an avatar that expands the limits of the physical space? When a body becomes an avatar, what kind of body is it and whose story is it telling? From there it becomes a testing ground: bodies, cameras, sensors, engines, and aesthetics. Ideas are cheap. They only get interesting once they move. It seems to me that this is what motivates me.

Do you choose your technology based on an artistic idea, or do the tools themselves spark the questions you ask?

The artistic question always comes first. However, tools are never neutral. A new software or tracking system can suddenly open a problem you did not know existed. lol XD So it’s a feedback loop. Ideas shape the technology. Technology reshapes the idea.

You speak about the “hybrid” or “phygital” body. What kind of concrete tasks, scores, or exercises do you use in rehearsal to make this idea physically tangible for the performers?

In rehearsal, we treat the digital layer almost like a new skin. A dancer moves while their motion data animates an avatar in real time, or triggers light, sound, or visual effects. A gesture suddenly extends beyond the body. It travels into virtual space. Then I look at the gaps where the physical movement and the digital response do not fully match. That space becomes interesting. It is like the body watching its own digital ghost and trying to understand it.

What role do motion-tracking systems, game engines, or 3D design actually play in your day-to-day studio work? At what point do you switch them on, and when do you keep the rehearsal space more “analog”?

Technology is not stage design. It is another body in the room. Tracking systems translate movement into a different language rigs, numbers, and avatars. Nevertheless, I don’t keep the machines running all the time. Sometimes everything goes dark and we return to breath, gravity, and contact. The choreography emerges in the friction between those worlds.

How do you develop movement material when the body exists as both physical presence and digital data?

Sometimes choreography begins in the studio. I move first and capture later. Other times it begins inside the computer. I take motion-capture data and distort it stretch it, loop it, break it and then ask the dancer to embody that impossible version. At first, it was mostly a tool for archiving or studying my own movement. However, it slowly became a way of inventing choreography. Therefore, the work constantly travels between flesh and data. Recently I have also been starting from something more speculative imagination, desire, even fantasy. Movements that do not exist yet, but that the body somehow already carries, waiting for the right impulse to bring them out.

What routines or rituals help you shift between being a choreographer, a researcher, and a “tech nerd” without losing your focus?

For me these roles are not separate. Some days I am debugging motion-capture setups for hours. Other days I am in the studio working only with bodies. The trick is to treat both as choreography. Stay punk stay calm!

You often work with interdisciplinary teams that include technology, game design, and film. How do you organize decision-making so that artistic and technical needs can really meet?

I usually look for collaborators who are comfortable moving between disciplines. For me the goal is to create a shared playground. Dancers, developers, designers, filmmakers everyone enters the same system. I bring a framework I have been developing, and together we test how it can expand through different perspectives and expertise. Often the most interesting ideas appear through misunderstandings between disciplines. At the same time, it can be challenging. Many of us work as freelancers across different industries. In fields like gaming, the production structures are very clear. In experimental digital art those structures are more fluid, so collaboration becomes a process of translation, negotiation, and constant adjustment.

How does your practice shift when you work within a large institution whose production logic differs significantly from your own?

Maybe I am a bit of a visionary in that sense. Institutions often come with heavier structures and production logics. However, they also offer something valuable: time, space, technicians, sometimes even a video department. :) If the mind-set is open, a small impulse can grow into experimentation. Therefore, my process sometimes adapts to the structure, sometimes pushes against it, and sometimes finds ways to operate more independently inside it. What motivates me is transforming limits. When something feels almost impossible inside a system that is usually where my creativity wakes up. I start looking for another path through technology, choreography, or a different way of organizing the work. Early in my career, I was often frustrated by how quickly institutions said “no.” That pushed me to develop ways of working more independently. Digital tools helped with that. They allow choreography to exist even without large infrastructure. Nevertheless, whether I am inside an institution or outside it, the question stays the same: how do we keep curiosity alive and stay open to new ways of working?

If you had to identify one main tension or conflict that drives your work, what would it be?

A recurring tension in my work is between systems and bodies. Digital technologies want precision and control. Bodies bring instability, fatigue, emotion, accidents. I am interested in the moment when those two logics collide. That friction is not a problem for the work. It’s actually the engine of it!

What would you say to a young person who feels underrepresented in the world of dance or digital arts?

Wenn du dich nicht repräsentiert fühlst, ist das kein Problem. Es ist nun Information. Es zeigt, dass etwas fehlt ...und genau dort kann Transformation beginnen. Es bedeutet, dass Raum für eine andere Sprache entsteht. ^_^

You are traveling to Japan next. What are you hoping to explore there?

I am curious about how bodies and digitality coexist there. Japan has a long cultural history of imagining hybrid bodies, robots, avatars, artificial life, but also very strong traditions of embodied aesthetics, from oiran and geishas to contemporary Heitai practices. I am interested in observing how those imaginaries appear in everyday life, design, and movement culture. As someone who enjoys exploring hybrid bodies, it feels like a fascinating place to spend time and maybe also a place that feeds the imagination with new fantasies.

If the internet went offline tomorrow, which digital artifact would you save?

Probably my cyborg ghetto body. A glitchy body of movement, survival, and imagination.

Brig Huezo is a post-digital choreographer and dance artist. Since 2021, they have been studying Contemporary Dance at the Cologne University of Music and Dance, supported by scholarships from the DAAD and private foundations. In 2024, Huezo received the North Rhine-Westphalia Award for Young Artists in the Performing Arts.

Their artistic practice operates at the intersection of dance, motion tracking, gaming and 3D design, exploring the deconstruction of the body within digital worlds. Their production THE DEATH AT THE CODE! (2024) was nominated for the SK Stiftung Kultur Dance Theatre Award in Cologne. Most recently, Huezo developed PERREANDO HARDCORE at tanzhaus nrw. Huezo's latest work, THE GHOST IN THE GLITCH, premiered at Oper Köln in April 2026. The production was created within a long-standing partnership between Oper Köln, the City of Cologne's Department of Culture and the independent dance scene, which commissions a new co-production for Bühnen Köln every two years. For the 2026 edition, the jury selected Brig Huezo. The work will be presented at tanzhaus nrw on 25 and 26 September 2026, which also co-produced the piece.

Mia Hofner, dramaturge of THE GHOST IN THE GLITCH, works between text and performance. She studied Visual Communication at Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin and Literary Writing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

Three times, the same scene appears: pale yellow sand, a basin of mountains etched against the horizon, and above them the cold blue of the sky. Whereas Brig Huezo’s previous works unfolded across three screens as lush virtual fantasy worlds, this new digital landscape is stark and stripped back. The bodies on stage are at work: through their movements, the avatars – the inhabitants of the virtual world – are brought to life. THE GHOST IN THE GLITCH concludes a trilogy exploring the relationship between the body and digital technology. The dance solo THE DEAD CODE MUST BE ALIVE! (2022) animated an avatar bearing Huezo’s own face, while THE DEATH AT THE CODE! (2024) examined the avatar’s ghostly mode of existence. THE GHOST IN THE GLITCH turns its attention to the biological body: its labour, its exhaustion, and its persistence within a hyper-digitalised world. Huezo’s hybrid works combine choreography with live motion capture and experimental sound. Through complex technological systems, the movements of the dancing body are transmitted in real time into virtual environments, where they are mirrored by avatars. Drawing on cyberfeminist theory, the entanglement of body and technology is conceived as a productive dissolution of boundaries: wherever the organic gives way to the digital, and vice versa, binary categories lose their organising power. The performers on stage are cyborgs – part mortal body, part machine.

In THE GHOST IN THE GLITCH, however, this relationship is probed for its asymmetries. The intertwining of body and technology is anything but a harmonious symbiosis. The biological body sustains the digital world while simultaneously expending itself. Every movement generates a digital surplus; dance becomes raw material in the form of data. Again and again, the performers slip into robotic sequences and tightly structured formations that oscillate between mutual support and mechanical interconnection. Within looped passages that endlessly repeat the same steps, traces of humanity emerge in trembling limbs, laboured breathing and sweat. Exhaustion becomes a form of disruption – the moment at which the body resists complete translation into data.

Yet the data, too, begins to misbehave. In their visualisation, digital limbs bend at impossible angles and the avatars’ flowing hair freezes unnaturally in mid-air. These virtual beings bear little resemblance to either the performers or the choreographer: naked, plastic-like bodies with faces reminiscent of shop mannequins. When they are not animated by the dancers, they roam the digital desert, guided by a PlayStation controller, endlessly searching.

THE GHOST IN THE GLITCH encounters the human body as digitalised and networked, yet ultimately – and still – mortal. The final instalment of Huezo’s trilogy insists on that which escapes codification.

(Mia Hofner)