My role as Michelle in Digital Dreamers, Digital Pet
Digital Dreamers - Written by Emma Kelly. Directed by Tara Brodin
Close Encounters Theater, Zürich, Switzerland
Michelle — the woman who resurrected her dead boyfriend only to uncover his betrayal.
Stepping into Michelle wasn’t “taking on a role” — it was swallowing a storm. She is grief sharpened into logic, love welded to delusion, a woman who hacks the boundary between life and death because she refuses to accept silence as an ending. Playing her meant digging my hands into the soft machinery of fear, longing, ego, denial — all the places humans hide from themselves.
On stage, Michelle is unsettling: equal parts tenderness and rupture. Offstage, she stayed with me longer than I expected.
Her ache, her obsession, her terrible hope — I carried them, lived them, let them haunt my breath until the final blackout.
Digital Dreamers is a sci-fi psychological horror that asks what we become when technology amplifies our most fragile impulses. Michelle taught me this: identity cracks under pressure, but performance is where those cracks turn luminous.
This was not a role I “played.”
It was a threshold I crossed — unapologetic, unguarded, and hungry for the truth beneath the skin.
Set in a near-future, where technology has evolved faster than human conscience, Digital Dreamers unravels the next era of our species: a world where neural upgrades for children are as common as dental checkups, where metahumans—half flesh, half engineered brilliance—compete in the workplace, where robots slip into our most intimate domestic spaces, and where the wealthy, terrified of mortality, begin uploading their consciousness into shimmering digital sanctuaries.
Re-set!