Angels of Anarchy (WT)

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

“We are currently experiencing a comeback of authoritarian systems that are always obsessed with the idea of territory. Territories are being re-appropriated, occupied, taken by war – something that we already had long said goodbye to in the 20th century.”
(Kathrin Röggla)

Eleven female-read performers and their male allies use their bodies as a means of protest through movement, dance and choral voice/speaking voice. ANGELS OF ANARCHY reacts physically and vocally to the new and at the same time old territorial fantasies of political leaders. The idea of incorporating territories and resources and the accompanying destabilisation of gender equality raises many questions and is unsettling at the same time:
Aren’t imperial gestures reactivating colonial patterns of thought and behaviour that we want to abolish after all?
The composition and the libretto/spoken word lyrics were created as a collaboration between the Austrian and Cologne-based writer Kathrin Röggla and the South African composer South African composer Monthati Masebe. Together with Stephanie Thiersch, they are developing an artistic practice in which music and text are rhythmically transferred into a performative space.
“With ANGELS OF ANARCHY I want to plunge into a sensitive chaos with everyone and with the audience. I am less interested in binaries and polarisation. I am looking for a texture, for an interweaving of transcultural gestures in laughter, in quiet and loud voices, critical and absurd, in moving beats and sounds of healing, in the uncontrollable of our bodies and the surreal of its communities, where the unheard, the poetry of protest is.”
(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