Dazzle —
A Reassembly of Bodies 

Premier: Venice Biennale / Immersive Film Festival 2022
Rotterdam / DeDoelen Theatre, Concert Hall 2022

Dazzle Solo,  the single-player installation has shown at:
British Film Institute / Film Festival 2020
Quills Fest / Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2021
Avignon Festival / Le Grenier Sel 2021
Craft Week London 2022
Milan / MEET Centre 2022

Funders:
Arts Council England
Digital Catapult
Epic Games
Creative Europe 
C.Hafner GmbH

Partners & Supporters: 
Target 3D, HP, VR Ham, Vive, YKK,
Deutsches Technik Museum, Dark Euphoria. 

      

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Paul Steinmann’s Audio-reading of Dazzle Outfits.
Using the black/white patterns to generate sound. 

'Dazzle: A Re-Assembly of Bodies' is a multi-dimensional choreography and immersive installation combining performance, virtual reality and fashion created by Gibson, Martelli, Pollmann and Roth.

Embracing participatory forms of theatre and inclusion with Mixed Reality, VR and AR, we situate our Dazzle Ball in the 21st Century. Our audiences engage in changing virtual environments, bringing to life colourful net-art and post-internet aesthetics. Individual experience emerges alongside collective understanding.

Dazzle offers attendees the chance to find their agency in virtual worlds uncovering and interacting with choreographed digital set- pieces and live improvisations. Our audiences join the exhibition by dressing in one of the Dazzle Collective Outfits handed out at the entrance: an introduction to the dazzling landscape. The visitor embarks on an expedition, fully prepared and supported to explore alternate realities — participants diving in and out of sensual and visual optical illusions, distinctive and part of the spectacle. Live dancers and audience members are modeled as animated dazzle characters, assembling in the virtual worlds.

Concept & Design: Peut-Porter & Gibson/Martelli
Exhibition, Graphic & Motion Designers: Oliver Wrobel & Piero Glina.
Sound designer: Paul Steinmann
Dancers: Hannah Burfield, Harry Alexander, Emily Coates, Alice Tatge, Axelle De Groote, Francesca Orlando, Hannah George
Costumier: Luz Mabel Flores, Malou Van der Velt
Project Manager: Harry Lovstrom

“An experience that stands out for its innovative experimentation capable of integrating immersion, fashion design, dance and art history. It's called Dazzle, an English term that means at the same time "to fascinate, to attract", but also "to dazzle, to blind due to too much light". Precisely the constitutive ambivalence between fascination and misdirection is one of the fils rouges of this complex installation which revisits in Mixed Reality a masked ball in the Chelsea Arts club in London in 1919, in which the participants wore costumes with curious optical colors and invites the experiencer to join the dance on the notes of an intriguing sound of electronic music and synthetic sounds.”

Cineforum, Rosa Cinelli. Sept 2022