Compagnie Thor (Belgium)
V.-Nightmares
Part 1+2 (first evening: Fluid Mechanics + TAN)
Part 3+4 (second evening: Moss & Mould + ICE)
British Premiere
Tramway Fri 22 & Sat 23 February 1930
Special Ticket Offer:
Tickets for Parts 3 & 4 half price when purchasing tickets for Parts 1 & 2
“Another time, another place, another season! This time Thierry Smits rediscovers his taste for nudity, sex (all sexual preferences included) and for camp images ... The whole is spiced up with openly kitsch and on-the-edge scenes, an unsettling text, a camera, feathers, water, and honey...” (Zone 02, Brussels.)
Compagnie Thor turn Vivaldi’s Four Seasons into a nightmare in four movements – a memento mori, a reminder of time’s passing and the inevitability of death. Irreligious and antipsychological, Thierry Smits’ new production stretches the possibilities of the performing body and its capability for pain and pleasure. He demands his dancers operate Peter Maschke’s mechanical set, perform Peter Verhelst and Caroline Lamarche’s original scripts, become amateur video filmmakers according to Jacques André’s instructions, struggle with Thomas Beni’s lights, and embody Maxime Bodson’s sound production. All this generates a poetry of bodies in space, and a mood in which both the dancers’ and the audience’s most basic expectations of live work are challenged.
Smits’ baroque decentrings, reversals, and revelations are echoed in the metamorphosis of Vivaldi’s masterpiece, each season of which is made physical in this performance: fluids in the spring, fire in the summer, organic matter in the autumn, and ice in the winter.
Thierry Smits founded Compagnie Thor in 1990. Their performances move back and forth between pure dance and real drama, and are based upon technical rigour and gestural invention. At the heart of their work lies our relationship to sex and the sacred, and the human body – as the object of desire, the carrier of pleasure, and the reminder of limits – is always central to Thierry Smits’s choreography.
Production: Compagnie Thor, in association with Kaaitheater, Théâtre de la Balsamine, CNCDC Châteauvallon. Compagnie Thor is supported by Ministère de la Communauté française de Belgique, Service de la Danse and by Commissariat général aux Relations internationales de la Communauté française de Belgique
http://www.thor.be/