MOUVOIR / Stephanie Thiersch

In her many-layered stagings, Stephanie Thiersch deals with the central areas of our modern lives, in a manner both authentic and experimental. An uncompromising observer, she dissects her environs: Popular culture, philosophy and fine arts become her tools. Thiersch’s interest in physical and emotional conditions that defy a clear definition, the human tilt, informs her style.

"When confronting bodies, images and body-images, Stephanie Thiersch tries to strip away any habitual behavioural patterns and everyday communication in order to make it possible to experience a different, archaic form of coexistence in the intermediary spaces. At the interface of nature and culture, of the group and the individual, dancers become estranged to themselves. While swimming through and against streams of images, they attempt to find their way in a reality which repeatedly threatens to slip away from them, until it tips over and assumes surreal qualities. Between adapting to an unreal world and resisting powers they are unable to appreciate, they end up creating a reality with rules of its own"
Gerald Siegmund, Brochure of the German Dance Platform

Stephanie Thiersch studied dance, humanities and later media arts at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. With her company MOUVOIR, founded in 2000, she develops stage plays, films and installations that go on to guest nationally and internationally and for which she recieved numerous awards. Apart from her work for the company, she also develops guest choreographies, most recently at the UNEARTE Caracas in Venezuela as well as at the Staatstheater Kassel. She taught as a guest lecturer at the Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft in Gießen and at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne. With the ensemble network Freihandelszone, she also serves as the artistic director for the GLOBALIZE:COLOGNE festival. Since 2009 she receives support through the Promotion of Excellence in Dance Programme of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.