Cobalt Garden

A choreographic concert

Inspired by the idea of a utopian space beyond fixed order, choreographer Stephanie Thiersch, in collaboration with the Kölner Vokalsolisten, explores forms of togetherness that resist certainty and control. Her paradise is not a perfect state, but a fragile weave of proximity, listening, and transformation – a space where new modes of being emerge through permeability, and the conscious embrace of vulnerability.
Yet even this seductive garden remains unstable. Beneath its shimmering surface, emotional undercurrents unfold – shifting between desire and disorientation, intimacy and loss of control. Here, light appears only as a fleeting metaphor for freedom: vibrating, elusive, never fully within reach.
Joined by dancers Manon Parent, Magdalena Öttl and Polina Sonis, and featuring a newly commissioned work by Japanese composer Malika Kishino, COBALT GARDEN unfolds as a sensorial landscape of breath, sound and shifting relations. Music by Claudio Monteverdi, Carlo Gesualdo, and Thomas Tallis encounters madrigals and arias by Baroque pioneers Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi, performed by sopranos Natasha Goldberg and Marina Schuchert alongside theorbo player Sören Leupold.
These historical voices resonate with Kishino’s contemporary vocal composition Iroha Chant, inspired by Buddhist sutras, the rhythm of breathing, and the physicality of the human voice.

The title evokes an element of striking blue luminosity – precious, toxic, and alchemical at once. COBALT GARDEN becomes a charged terrain where light and darkness, body and mind, decay and creation continuously encounter one another.

For many years, Stephanie Thiersch’s artistic practice has moved fluidly between choreography, concert, music theatre, and installation. In COBALT GARDEN, this movement between genres becomes the work’s very substance: an open experiment in which bodies carry music into space, voices begin to move, and sound itself becomes architecture.