Bilderschlachten / Batailles d’Images

Excessive, vulgar, power-hungry! This, the most current production by choreographer Stephanie Thiersch and composer Brigitta Muntendorf for eight dancers, string quartet and orchestra, focuses on one question: What happens when questions for proportion, for “how much” and “how little” cannot be answered any longer? When we lose orientation in familiar surroundings and start believing in taking creation in our own hands? In a genre-crossing collaboration, a ballet on the end of the world emerges, a “ballet noir”, riotously hunting throughout our cultural history. The monumental, the devouring as symbols for power and patriarchy encounter silent, soft and tender expressive attempts in this act of artistic rebellion.

Stephanie Thiersch and Brigitta Muntendorf want to instigate a thought process on the condition of permanent overload with “Bilderschlachten”. The starting point is an excellently composed collection of quotes by composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, “Musique pour le souper du roi Ubu” from 1968, a musical danger room of excess, vulgarism and power massing that is due for deconstruction. The staging for 55 artists in all celebrated an overwhelming success at its premiere in Nîmes.