Angels of Anarchy (WT)

Premiere 2026 (autumn)
dance-text-composition
Stephanie Thiersch/Kathrin Röggla/Monthati Masebe
Production: MOUVOIR/Stephanie Thiersch

ANGELS OF ANARCHY is an interdisciplinary stage piece created for a collective of nine performers who use the body as a site of protest. The work responds to the resurgence of authoritariansystems and territorial fantasies by transforming bodies and language into a rhythmical, anarchic fabric that subverts rigid orders and envisions utopian community.
ANGELS OF ANARCHY is a collaboration between Austrian writer Kathrin Röggla, South African composer Monthati Masebe, and German choreographer Stephanie Thiersch. Nine performers develop a practice of resistance through house dance and contemporary dance, choral voice, and spoken word. The artists trace a trajectory from the “terrace terror” of small-town life to the “hijacking of outer space,” from African throat singing and Afrotech to New Music, and from sweat-inducing cyclical moves to performative still lives.

“With ANGELS OF ANARCHY, I aim to unfold a sensitive, productive chaos. Instead of binaries or rigid oppositions, I seek a living texture of gestures, sounds, and movements, where comedy and tragedy, tradition and the future, intimacy and expansiveness interweave. House dance carries within it a history of visibility and resistance, while texts and sounds open up new spaces of meaning. In the powerful beats, in the uncontrollable and timeless aspects of our bodies, and in the surreal nature of their communities, a space emerges where something happens—open, ambiguous, and in the process of becoming.”
(Stephanie Thiersch)

The title is borrowed from the sculpture “Angel of Anarchy” by the English surrealist Eileen Agar.

Photo: © The Estate of Eileen Agar/mondo-blogo.blogspot.com