Biography
Cécile Bally is a Berlin-based choreographer whose work merges performance, video game, and maximalist scenography. She combines DIY magic, absurd humor, and sustained performative states to build speculative environments that question how stories are constructed on stage. Anchoring her work in science fiction and magical realism, she uses figures and settings such as vampires, teenagers, NPCs, supermarkets or suburbs as worldbuilding components to explore how contemporary desires and anxieties shape our visions of the future.
From 2016-2018, Cécile created a series of works dealing with monstrosity and rationality in modern times (The Price Is Right, Aktion, The Sleep of Reason). Starting with The End of the Road (2019), she developed a new series of performances around the construction of collective futures in relation to urban space and ecological collapse. She co-signed The Flood (2021) with Emma Tricard, and The Day After the Day After Tomorrow (2022), a children’s performance anchored in solar-punk futurity, with Cathy Walsh.Cécile’s work has been shown at venues worldwide such as Sophiensaele, Bauhaus Dessau, Ballhaus Ost (Germany), Kunstencentrum BUDA (Belgium), NAVE (Chile), Scène Nationale – Manège de Reims, 3bisF (France), If I Can’t Dance (Netherlands), Dansehallerne (Denmark) and Queens Collective (Morocco). She was awarded with the Fonds Transfabrik Prize in 2021, the Künstlerhaus Lukas Scholarship in 2019, and the Goethe Institut Young Talent Prize in 2015, among others.
Working in collectives is central to Cécile’s artistic and political practice. She is part of the artist-led alliance CRUSH (with Martin Hansen, Kareth Schaffer and Darcey Bennett), co-founded the performance collectives BlingBlingRecycling and Celine and Renana and co-organized events such as Monday Feast and Flutgraben
In residentie Glitchless
26.05.2025 – 01.06.2025
Glitchless is a performance that explores what happens when there is no main character. Inspired by the logic and aesthetics of video games, the piece focuses on Non-Player Characters (NPCs) – figures designed to support a hero’s journey, often overlooked and without agency. What kind of world emerges when performers embody only these background roles?
Glitchless invites us to reconsider what we perceive as central or marginal. It reveals how the same situation can shift in meaning depending on perspective and role. The performance blends live action with video projection, combining footage from live-played games and custom-made sequences created for the work. It plays with perspective, duplication, and visual layering, producing moments of distortion, and narrative slippage. Performers interact with and manipulate their projected environment, creating intentional “glitches” and challenging the boundary between main and minor roles.
Glitchless also builds on a four-month workshop process with teenage girls, who developed their own games and characters—imagining alternative narratives and worlds that reflect their desires, humor, and frustrations with existing gaming culture. Their ideas directly informed the themes, characters, and visual language of the performance.
By shifting the spotlight to the figures who usually populate the edges of our vision, Glitchless questions how meaning is assigned, who gets to act, and how supposedly passive figures might reclaim narrative power.
In residentie LIFE IS STRANGE, CHOOSE YOUR OWN
22.06.2026 – 03.07.2026
Life Is Strange, Choose Your Own is a hybrid live performance and original videogame created by choreographer and director Cécile Bally, together with an interdisciplinary team of performers, designers, and young FLINTA* co-creators.
At its centre are NPCs — Non-Player Characters, the scripted background figures who populate digital worlds without ever taking the lead. Trapped in repetitive loops, they keep everything running while remaining invisible. On stage, this becomes a lens through which to examine the hidden labour of care, the politics of visibility, and the quiet strangeness of ordinary gestures.
The stage transforms into the surface of a live-played videogame.
Drawing on Bally’s practice of DIY magic, maximalist scenography and worldbuilding, the performers embody a range of NPC figures – each caught in their own loop, each bound to the others through relations of interdependency – while the game is projected onto mobile objects, sculptural elements and the performers’ own bodies, collapsing the boundary between physical and virtual space.
The repetition itself becomes a source of absurdity and unexpected humour.
The videogame is also available as a standalone work, playable by audiences before and after the show, extending the encounter with the piece beyond the stage. Projection replaces conventional stage lighting entirely, wrapping game imagery, movement and sound into a single immersive world.
Life Is Strange, Choose Your Own is designed for adults and teenagers (12+) premiering at FELD Theater für junges Publikum on 10/11/13/14 October 2026, following with presentations at Ballhaus Ost (Berlin).
