Helter Skelter Vol. 2

dance performance (2006/07)

Supported by video fragments, live music and spoken words in helterskelter Stephanie Thiersch composes a perfidious choreographic arrangement between tableaux vivants and dance with the surrounding medial images of every day about stereotypes of bequeathed and prevailing gender ideas that are set in our minds and bodies.

Five dancers explore the stage, create a playing field for themselves, discover hidden inner rooms, and make themselves visible through the looks of the others. It seems as if the show itself – the initiation of an intimate setting of different gazes – becomes the theme of the play. Stephanie Thiersch takes trivial multimedia images, poses and role-clichés of traditional and contemporary female iconography that always surround us. With such images, she creates scenes which treat the borderline of inner and outside world, reality and illusion by employing video images, live-music and spoken text.

choreography/dance: Viviana Escalé, Alexandra Naudet, Karen Piewig, Teresa Ranieri, Agustina Sario
video: Olaf Hirschberg, Tom Schreiber, Martin Rottenkolber
music: Joseph Suchy
lights/technical direction: Ansgar Kluge
stage building: Eberhard Weible
production management: Christine Florack
costume: Svea Kossack
dramaturgy: Andrea Heller
concept/direction/ choreography: Stephanie Thiersch
assistance: Alexandra Naudet

Co-production: tanzhaus NRW in cooperation with “Festival Temps d’Images” and Freihandelszone – Ensemblenetzwerk Köln, Temps d’Images, funded by the program Culture 2000 of the European Union. HELTER SKELTER is funded by Kunststiftung NRW, Ministerpräsidenten des Landes NRW, Kulturamt der Stadt Düsseldorf, Kulturamt der Stadt Köln and Fonds Darstellende Künste.

With virtuosity Thiersch is indenting scenes of more of less subtle gender violence to a meditative cosmos of bizarre tableaus. The dancers court for acknowledgement in the spotlight, they denude themselves. It is one of Thiersch’s greatest excellences that those disrobements never end as mind-striptease. Another excellence is that she sometimes leaves the audience pretty stumped. Even the most ensanguined puzzle stays what it is: a game.
(Markus Küper, Westfälische Nachrichten)

Stephanie Thiersch proves to be a master of the atmosphere, touches lightly with traces of blood, disturbs with baby puppets as suspended alien elements, transforms a bra in leading-strings…. then, the air vibrates, a breath of Hitchcock blows along.
(Bettina Trouwborst, Westdeutsche Zeitung)