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.