Stephanie Thiersch studied classical dance (Gabriel Sala, Petra Westermann/Wiesbaden) and contemporary dance (CNC Montpellier, Dominique Bagouet), and subsequently studied cultural sciences in Mannheim, which she completed with an awarded final thesis about media dance. Later she graduated in media arts at a post graduate program at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne with Valie Export and the media archaeologist Siegfried Zielinski. Visual Arts, contemporary photography, and literature thus form a fruitful base for Thiersch’s approach.

In 1999 she founded her company MOUVOIR, which she developed innovative and experimental stage works, films, and installations with. Their whiff of cinematographic aesthetics constitutes her international reputation. Her work thus represents an essential contribution to the profile of contemporary dance in Germany. Often in cooperation with the Goethe Institute moreover she created choreographies and exchange projects lastly in Togo, Jakarta, Singapore, and Palestine as well as different projects in Central America.

In the maddening mix-up of reality – but isn’t craziness lurking behind the eyes in the brain and projecting its images on the world in front of it? Where exactly does the mix-up perception and reality begin? The body, with its senses, its intellect, its form and its feelings, is permeable and exposed to that reality, even the reality created by humans. – I search for (…) conditions of weightlessness. Instead of holding on to something, the movement in between is to be revealed, the questionable tormenting, as well as the dreamingly beautiful.
Dance, photography, tableaux vivants and video-art are combined for a research assignment, which observes gestures, dance, personality and artificiality, the world and the own internal artistic workings. (Melanie Suchy, tanz NRW catalogue 2007)