“We live on this planet, we can do what we want” – “Glitch Witch”: Breaking Spells, Shifting Identities, and the Art of Collaborative Movement

Meg Stuart, Mieko Suzuki and Omagbitse Omagbemi on stage for “Glitch Witch” (Photo: Laura Van Severen, courtesy of HAU Hebbel am Ufer)

“GLITCH WITCH” – a haunted trip through scorched memories and flickering futures. Meg Stuart, Omagbitse Omagbemi, and Mieko Suzuki step into a liminal wasteland, bodies imprinted with personal and ancestral echoes. They glitch, they hover, they slide between timelines – above and below, before and after, never quite settling.

Their search? To discover a language that doesn’t yet exist. A pulse-driven ritual of shimmering movements, of frictions and fusions. What starts as distance transforms into a shared (witch)craft of vulnerability and resistance. Glitches crack open the surface, carving out a space beyond enchantments. A shimmering, trembling act of solidarity.

The music by Mieko Suzuki includes works by Oren Ambarchi & Robin Fox, Naaahhh, Brett Naucke, Charlemagne Palestine, Saturn And The Sun, Shaped Noise, Mieko Suzuki, Voov, Jeff Witscher and Christian Zanesi.

The interview was conducted by Thomas Venker after the opening at HAU Hebbel am Ufer on 31rd of January.
Next performances: 21./22.3, Vienna, Tanzquartier Wien; 7./8.11. Essen, PACT Zollverein.

Do you consider yourself as friends? And is that important for your working process together? (Laughter) It’s a tough question, maybe?

Omagbitse Omagbemi: I just met these two lovelies when we started the project. I didn’t really know them personally before. We haven’t spent much personal time outside of the work and rehearsal. So it’s a hard question for me to answer. They’ve known each other longer, so maybe you guys should start….

Meg Stuart: I know Mieko, we’ve worked together on many different projects and workshops and improvisations, and I got to know Omagbitse through this commissioned work. But as the collaboration is very intimate, you definitely have to build up a connection, an understanding of the others; the process. It’s like mining your inner depths, working with your body to bring up feelings, emotions, tensions, things that have been lingering around the body. And to do that, a very supportive and connected space makes it more fun, and also brings it to a different place.
We were in a residency in Orléans in September and then , before the premiere, we were three weeks in Toulouse, spending time outside of the studio and having dinners together, this brought us closer. I think through time and even when we’re not performing we’re becoming closer and closer. I think now we’re moving into that deep friend zone.

Mieko Suzuki: I agree.

Meg Stuart, Mieko Suzuki and Omagbitse Omagbemi on stage for “Glitch Witch” (Photo: Laura Van Severen, courtesy of HAU Hebbel am Ufer)

So, Meg, you chose to collaborate with them based on their skills. How does that normally work, you scan the world for the suitable talents and collaborators?

Meg Stuart: Well, I wanted to do a series of smaller works. And then I was invited by the company Dance On to make a work for them – and Omagbitse is part of that that company. So it became clear to me that I wanted to work with Omagbitse specifically as there were creative sparks when we met the first time in the studio. And I really wanted to work with Mieko again.

I brought that friendship thing mostly up because of the constellation of narratives in “Glitch Witch”, which I’m still trying to totally understand. The beginning felt pretty post-apocalyptic to me, cold and nihilistic. But then you made this break and suddenly it felt like three friends gathering to prepare for a fun night out, exchange clothes, joke about goings-on… To me that part came by surprise and led to me to wonder about your connection and how it developed.

Meg Stuart: That is a nice question. We wanted to create a change. To me the post-apocalyptic landscape with the ashes and us dressing up are also connected through the whole set-up with disco balls, it is about the celebration of nightlife. It is about showing another dimension of our encounter, while making a connection with the audience. I thought it would be interesting to take the masks that we wear in the beginning literally off, so you see us for real, being together and navigating our connection in real time; three women discussing life together. We bring up quite personal things as a breathing space, in order to throw the audience back into the more abstract intensity afterwards.

Omagbitse Omagbemi: The moment we started working on these scenes in the rehearsal, we got to know each other better. In those conversations we genuinely question what we want to know. I think that also helps to create the friend-like vibes.

Meg Stuart: I mean it’s performative, so what is real? You are dealing with these multiple layers of being present, of our identities, of what we channel. I think we have many ages in our body at the same time. Like I feel sometimes like a child, like a teenager, I don’t know, I feel all different ages – that’s the malleability of identity. And the space is also changing how you perceive it by what we do, what kind of friction we bring to it, what kind of perspective we bring to it – that’s also related to the clothes and how we wear them. We can imagine what a future looks like, but it’s not going to feel comfortable, right? I mean it’s not like how we imagine it, right? Even after watching all these science fiction movies or reading the Octavia E. Butler books, it is always going to be not what you imagine.

Meg Stuart, Mieko Suzuki and Omagbitse Omagbemi on stage for “Glitch Witch” (Photo: Laura Van Severen, courtesy of HAU Hebbel am Ufer) 

Omagbitse, when you say genuine, does that mean you don’t say the same things on stage every time and you don’t wear the same clothes at the end of the dressing sequence? Is this improvised spontaneously or is it all scripted?

Omagbitse Omagbemi: Well, the clothes are set.

Mieko Suzuki: But it is optional if you choose this one or that one. Some of the clothes are personal, stuff we brought into this project, it happened during the rehearsals. Meg told us, “okay, tomorrow let’s bring our own clothes, and let’s have an exchange.” It was quite memorable, to exchange clothes. It was a vert interesting moment: Meg is wearing my jacket, that I’ve known for many years, because I wore it on my body. Things like these brought us very close as friends.

In the moment of changing clothes, you can’t play your roles anymore. In life (and of course on stage) we all play different characters all the time, but by exchanging the clothes somehow the sense of control is lost, and one has to smile about the act itself. The interesting thing about that specific scene in the play, it did not just change the narrative, it also dramatically changed the vibes of your personalities and your movements. It takes around 30 minutes until you touch each other, the first dancing parts reminded me more like a tribal gathering of skinheads, hooligan style. And suddenly things fee easier, more playful, the same goes for the DJ scene with you, Meg and Mieko.

Meg Stuart: We are happy to hear this. We call it punk rock.
I mean, as you mention the DJ scene: when Mieko bravely crosses from her territory (or her identity as a musician) and slips into her new role, it enables a new understanding of her world through my misunderstanding of it. Through the glitchy playfulness of that, we actually find something new. We meet through the sounds, but we meet also through the mistakes we make – we try to illuminate the negative space, like the emptiness and the vibrations that you don’t see. I feel that we also talked about mental health, loneliness, the after party, the idea that maybe disco’s dead, that desolation. That can be horrific, very creepy or eerie, but it can also have a sort of peace, if you’re in a kind of empty landscape, the smallest little thing can be visible.

When I’m wearing this pink dress, I feel kind of futuristic. I have this way I move, but I feel a bit like her avatar. I feel like a variation of me, like a mirror for her or like a fantasy, I feel like I’m not quite a person. That doesn’t mean I lack empathy – or even more because I’m in that kind of glitchy portal of time and space. We try to navigate together to that zone and that creates this very trippy, luminous experience of luminous, we’re all becoming light bodies, like what kind of space is that? Is there a place in that space for our stories? Maybe we have no stories? Maybe we are just figures, shadows. We were interested in invocation and shedding and releasing and letting layers go, but also allowing like being channels and allowing things to to appear, is constantly moving in different ways through the work. That’s not in a linear zone, it’s circuitous. It’s like a glitch. All at the same time. It is so related to the sound because you can’t underestimate how much the sound is shaping your perspective. It’s not just music, it’s like giving you a depth of experience that helps articulate the different weird way of experiencing time and warping spaces in the show.

That would have been my next question, because yesterday, to me sound was more important than air and light, in that sense.

(Meg laughs loudly)

Because the sound really made the room. Especially when it was slowing down. And the time zones were really fucked up in that sense, just as you described it right now with the glitch moments. You know what I mean? I felt like the sound had a priority and then the physical communication between your bodies began. Does that make sense?

Mieko Suzuki: Thank you for picking up the sound. When I saw this amazing stage set-up by Nadia Lauro, this other planet made out of ash and mirror balls, it inspired me a lot. I immediately thought about how to bring the audience into this place where we live and we are going on the journey together. So at first I wanted to break the border between stage and audience, and I went with a multichannel set up. I placed speakers on the back of the stage and in front of the satge to be able to listen to the depth of the sounds.
I enjoy a lot playing around with the dynamic volume. In the beginning it is super quiet and the sound is moving from far away like a living creature and slowly develops to a physical full on sound experience.

Was that the reason why you decided to take the musician physically into the dance piece? I mean, I was so surprised to see Mieko step from behind the mixer into the play and dance with you guys. She was not just trying it – she was a full part of it. And that is first of all a tough undertaking and also an enormous performance.

Meg Stuart: I know Mieko and I felt her potential to dance, to improvise as a dancer and to perform with us. I think it became clear quite early on that Mieko was also going to dance. In the beginning sometimes she wasn’t playing music, she was just dancing in the improvs, like simple tasks or impulses such as rocking or channeling energy. We would do the warm-ups together and then I would give little impulses and she was part of it and it just felt exciting to meet in that way.

Mieko Suzuki: It’s just swapping rules or exchanging the positions – have Meg become DJ, and I become a dancer. Or the moment when Omagbitse sings…

Meg Stuart: I mean, things can get messy when you don’t have clear borders, but I think to understand the other, you have to cross into their world, you have to be in their skin.

Omagbitse Omagbemi: Make space for each other.

Meg Stuart: Yeah, make space, for another understanding as well.
I just had this thought again, the question:, “do you have to be friends to love someone?” I don’t know. I just put that out there.

Omagbitse Omagbemi: No, you don’t have to be friends to experience each other.

I want to come back to that in a second. But first a question about how you learn the choreography, the movements. I love to dance, but I dance freely when I go to a club. So I never have a scripted dance and I don’t have to revisit my same dance again, but you work with dance narratives in your works. What goes into the process of memorising movements for this kind of performance?

Meg Stuart: You spend lots of hours in the studio with others. And with yourself. I don’t know how many thousands of hours. I mean, your body is always moving through your life, when you’re dancing in the club or you’re getting ready to go out the door or you’re impacted by what you read…. the body one way or another filtering the world.

Omagbitse Omagbemi: It doesn’t feel so separated for me, movement and everyday life. Yes, there are parts of us that are trained, but still, what I’ve opened up to in my training is that everything is movement.
So that’s why I think, when Mieko is moving, it’s brilliant because she’s in this place of not having an idea of what it should look like. You (ed. mieko) say you like to dance in the club, without having that insecurity about, “oh, this is what I need to look like”. We don’t need to have this training to have this movement to express ourselves – we already have it in different ways. That’s why I find it made sense when she jumped in. It wasn’t like: “she’s a musician, so why is she going to dance?”

Mieko Suzuki: They were so open-minded, which gave me the space to dance. Usually I prefer to dance in the dark or in the shadow. But here there was this amazing invitation, why not take it? But to come back to your question: I have such a fucked up memory to remember my movements. But they were very, very patient with me.

Meg Stuart: There are different levels of memory. I mean, there’s like remembering a sequence of movements, which is a formal understanding which creates a kind of construction, like a language. But then there’s memory connected to history, the body has all kinds of memory. So even if you feel rage, and later become detached from the content, that emotion, can lodge in your shoulder or in your neck. So sometimes we dance with emotional body parts and memory or emotions, you know, such as ecstatic elbows and wild hair angry shoulders… – reconstructing through micro narratives an emotional journey of experience. We call it storytelling, we call it fragments, we call it expressing, but I think that way of moving with physical and emotional memories, even if it’s just in pieces and reconstructing them, is the real time choreographic work. So, yeah, it’s improvised scores. We don’t do exactly the same, but I think by spending a lot of hours on practicing this, we can access it when we are performing. We can put our mind on rhythmic choices and articulations for the body and the input of the sound and then the work is out there.
Sometimes I feel my memories are coming from film or they’re coming from a dream – I mean, it’s not just my memories, if I felt it was only me, I would also feel limited. I feel like I’m there to channel, to access the people that are watching, their fantasies, their memories… It’s me and not me, it’s the collective. Sometimes I exaggerate it more and sometimes I’m actually reducing it so that it’s just a flicker.

That leads me to two aspects, one of them connected with the friendship question at the beginning. To me your performance yesterday was a non-hierarchical collaboration, which I find beautiful. The DJ becomes a dancer, the dancer a DJ. Often artists have this tendency to hold their fields close, to block others out. But there was another layer to it, the way the whole piece is done, it felt like a statement in favour of non-hierarchical existence. Throughout the play, the way you dance and interact together dramatically changes from very distanced and harsh movements to softer movements and a certain closeness. In the beginning there were three characters that weren’t friends, but somehow they became closer, shared emotions, I found that very touching.

Meg Stuart: Maybe this is a good moment to mention the team that helped create all this. Igor Dobričić is our dramaturge, and Nadia Lauro our scenography dramaturge. Nico de Rooij did the lighting. Claudia Hill was in charge of the costumes. We were all thinking together, there are different voices, giving us feedback, assistance.

We live on this unknown planet, we can do what we want. We arrive, it’s our free choice to show up and imagine and discover this planet. It’s our choice to create a ritual.

Another point, very much strongly held by the dramaturge, is that the situations are not imposed on us. We decide we do this now because we need to do this, because we want and like to do this. We’re reshaping the world through our fantasies, through our imaginations, through our needs, through our desires – and sometimes it’s a bit darker…

That’s interesting that you say so. Because with parts of the performance I see that, but for example the beginning I totally read differently. In the beginning there was no choice – the state of the world was taking you down, or let’s say that’s how it felt to me. But yes, in the other parts, it felt like we can change the world, we still have the power. Suddenly I felt some optimism, an opportunity for development. To me the beginning felt like New York in the AIDS era. The fallen disco ball, it’s simply over. You know, back then nobody believed we could ever step out of that and create a new world.

Meg Stuart: With all the dust, I think about nuclear fall out. And right now, I think about all the burning buildings in California. I’m from California. I mean, the meanings shift daily almost, you know? Like what’s going on with Berlin and the whole cultural scene right now.
I think at a lot of different moments you can feel like the party is over. But of course when you have that moment of transition, it’s also a new beginning at the same time. We find a different kind of party at the end, don’t we?

(laughter)

Omagbitse Omagbemi: I’m still thinking about your question with the hierarchy. I don’t feel that in this piece, but I kno that it is a thing – and it doesn´t always have to be that way. Hierarchies are created. That wasn’t created. So it allowed us to do what we needed to do and be there. You know, it is usually a creation of some sort, like someone creates the hierarchy. And I didn’t feel that that was the case here. So that’s why. Maybe that was a good thing that you didn’t see that.

You could also say, everybody has a certain role and it makes sense that this person has this role. Hierarchy only gets problematic when you force people into roles they don’t want.

Meg Stuart: But that’s still created. It’s not like it’s a law, you know. It’s a creation.

You brought up the aspect of micro-movements and macro-movements or fragments. Do you feel that small fragments and larger movements are equal to you in the dance composition? I ask as there were a lot of small gestures that had a huge impact on me.

Meg Stuart: I would maybe sidestep back to the question about hierarchy. For me it’s important that people I work with feel … I’m kind of I’m pushing them maybe out of their comfort zone, but in a space where during the performance, they are making their own choices. There’s not that sense of, ‘I have to do this’. There’s a lot of check in with that and instigating that vibe, that wish. I don’t have all the elements under control. I mean, I have the sections set and I maybe determine the time and the content and I give an example of the style. –

Well, that is maybe my wording. What I mean, most of the time we think that long dancing parts when you feel the air on your body are the moments of highest enjoyments for dancers, but is it like that always? Or can a short, very small movement in the end feel as inspiring as a long solo dance?
So the question would be, how does this difference feel for you as a professional dancer?

(laughter)

Omagbitse Omagbemi: The everyday kinds of things that people do can be fragments as well. That for me is an inspiration, not always having to go ‘out there’; even the subtle things like picking something up or writing something are … Well, it’s hard for me to separate movements so much because I think everything is movement.

Exactly, that’s why I brought it up.

Meg Stuart: It’s about moving presence, not just about movement. Do you feel completely absent in your body or you have too much energy, is it overloaded? Are you feeling good with the space or not? I think there’s a movement related to presence that I am very much working with. Presence, absence, distraction, intensity. It’s not only what we do, you know, it’s everything around what we do as well.

And in the end you put up the hands in the air, which is obviously a very significant moment.

(laughter)

Meg Stuart: Yes, it was very emotional at the premiere in Berlin; I was surprised by it as well.

Mieko Suzuki: It’s amazing that Meg is showing us a total emotional state on the stage. At that moment If felt: oh shit, I seriously need to rescue her now.

Because this is something you rarely see. I don’t know if it’s only me, but I feel like humans forgot how to use their hands. I mean not in daily life of course, but the emphatic use, like raising your hands in the air. It is rare people move their hands higher than a certain level.

Omagbitse Omagbemi: It’s very exposing. It opens up this area of the body (shows on her upper body) – that’s emotional.

Meg Stuart: It has this kind of surrender space, like we surrender to whatever energy force and whatever is next and we don’t know what’s coming next – but we all agree, we’re going to go there and we’re together. You know, it feels a bit over the top.
For me it is a movement, to surrender to some other energetic force all together – and it’s very exposing and very vulnerable.

Well, things can hit you suddenly.

Meg Stuart: Yeah, right. It is the opposite of protection.

Which brings me to the last complex I want to talk with you about – the things you talk about on stage in this scene when you exchange your clothes. You talk about sexuality, you talk about nature and you talk about age and the body. The scene is rather casual, as we discussed, like you are all in a relaxed mood, joking, exchanging clothes, but then the conversation gets heavy. How did that scene come together?

Meg Stuart: The conversations can also change. Tonight, I think, we’re going to shift slightly the conversation. Because we have had many conversations. Often we improvise it, we don’t even set it – and now we are starting to have a tighter score and set more of the conversation. It’s not like we need to get this through the door like you have to understand this and that about nature.

Oh, totally. One reading was the scenario of the post-apocalypse: we don’t have nature anymore, we don’t have maybe sex outside anymore, we have ageing bodies which makes it harder to survive in a tougher environment. But then you also have those meta moments. Like when you, Meg, say something like “older woman should not show their legs”. This to me felt like Brechtian Theater – as much as you shift between the times zones you also shift between the communication levels. Or let’s take the DJ scene, it did not really fit in the overall reading of the piece, but it fits like another glitch in that world.

Meg Stuart: But also, we mentioned not having sex, but of course when DJing, like scratching, it could be something quite sensual. It just kind of floats and meets around. I like that scene, it’s fragile, but it’s also playful and again: it shifts the air.

Mieko Suzuki: Yeah, full of unexpected happenings and failures. We glitched to a higher state and keep trying to communicate this through sound and movement. It’s a lot of fun.

Yeah, your mimic interaction was also really good during this scene.

(Mieko Suzuki has to leave for sound check)

Okay. I only have one more question. What do witches mean to you?

Meg Stuart: Go for it.

Omagbitse Omagbemi: I think witches are just women and that we are connected to nature. That’s my simple version. I mean, there is a whole story behind witches, but for me it’s quite simple. In my culture there are a lot of witches, well, we call them healing people or Shamans or whatever. So for me the idea of witches, it’s not a negative word for me. It’s just people really connected to nature and who they are. So what do you think about witches?

Meg Stuart: We were looking for a title, we had a lot of variations and somehow we like landed on the soundbite of glitch witch at the end.

I’ve been called a witch and I find that interesting. When I was young, there was a young girl, we were real close, and we would bury stuff in the earth and put spells on people in the lunch room and have them drop their trays. So I did some witch experiments at a young age.

For me it’s like, actions with intention have impact. And often I find it interesting how older women become ‘witches’…
It’s maybe important to say, we didn’t start making a piece about witches or witchcraft. The whole piece would have shifted. We wanted to come together. It was about a meeting, a changing world. Like all of that was more the base and then we had the stage and then along the way came the title and that kind of brought another element into the piece. Spelling, being spelled and/or releasing the spell.

Omagbitse Omagbemi: Breaking spells.

Meg Stuart: We talked a lot about breaking spells, like what are we being ‘spelled’ by? Social media, the internet, expectations, limits of age…. You know, how woman of a certain age should not do this or that. Like who is fighting over what women’s bodies, like these fights over abortion. How can we break the spells in terms of what gives us pleasure, how we move through the world, how we how find together.

Witch is in things through the mistakes, technological gaps. I think maybe we need to all be more glitch witches now and hack the system and find the cracks and find where the things are. Breaking the spells, because we can’t trust the channels we communicate with. We have to find other ways of communicating, other ways of meeting and also recovering ancient knowledge, we also have capacity to speak with forces that are not visible. We are much more powerful than we think. We can cultivate that.

The theme of witches is connected to the theme of hierarchy we talked about earlier. Especially in the Western World witches would be tracked (by men) and often killed because the system was not willing to listen to them.

Meg Stuart: I mean the witches were women, they were the scapegoats. But again, we didn’t do a whole history on witching.

Omagbitse Omagbemi: Breaking spells.

Meg Stuart: I’m glad you said that because it wasn’t intentionally in the beginning about witches – we can kind of put it like that out there. But what is a glitch? I think we don’t really know what a glitch witch is, but I think we all could start training.

Omagbitse Omagbemi: Yeah.

(laughter)

That’s a nice ending.

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