T H E C O M P A N Y
Based in Brussels, Belgium, Compagnie Thor was founded in 1990 by choreographer Thierry Smits whose work explores, often in an eclectic manner, the bonds between mystic and erotic, the ambiguity between the sacred and corporal, and questions the metaphysical problems of the individual’s state of mind and emotion. The company has produced over twenty dance works, among these: Eros délétère (1991), Cyberchrist (1995), Soirée dansante (1995), Corps(e) (1998), Red Rubber Balls (1999), Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (2001), L’âme au diable (1994/2002), Dionysos’ Last Day / Stigma (2003) and Reliefs d’un banquet (2004).
Since its founding, Compagnie Thor has been supported by several public institutions in Belgium, and the company’s growing influence as a major part of Belgium’s dance landscape has been acknowledged by an increasing support from its primary funding source, the Ministry of the French-speaking Community. Since 2001, the company is in residency at the Théâtre Varia in Brussels.
Gathering excellent performing artists from around the world, the company has established its reputation touring extensively throughout Belgium and abroad, notably in France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, the UK, Hungary, Croatia, Egypt, Morocco, Poland and Germany.
Born in Koersel (Belgium), Thierry Smits studied ballet and modern dance in Brussels and Paris. After a short career as a dancer, he soon began choreographing. With his first choreography, La Grâce du tombeur, presented in 1990 at the Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels, he quickly gained international acclaim in the world of contemporary dance. Since then, he has been a tireless choreographer for his own company and other theatre companies and groups.
In his performances, oscillating between pure dance and dramatization, and in which his technical rigor and his gestural inventiveness are always present, mankind’s relationship to sex and the sacred frequently occupies a central role. The body – as object of desire, pleasure and finiteness – has been the very subject of Thierry Smits’s choreographic research over the past several years. This is not only because the body is obviously the matter and tool of the choreographer’s trade, but also with Eros délétère (1991), followed by the solo Cyberchrist (1995), Corps(e), based on the works of Mapplethorpe, Bacon and Caravaggio, (1998); and Red Rubber Balls, based on a text by Peter Verhelst, in 1999, Thierry Smits has founded his work upon the very notion of corporeality and the tensions that exist between the climaxing body, the ‘body as sex’, and the intimately diseased body that is doomed to disappear.
In addition to his work focused on complex subjects and linked to an element ‘outside’ dance, Thierry Smits concentrates on dance itself — referring to nothing other than itself — as he had done for the first time in Soirée dansante (1995). With Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (2001), Dionysos’ Last Day / Stigma (2003), and D’ORIENT (2005) he continues this line begun previously giving priority to a study of form, choreographic composition, and the search for movement.
In 1995, Thierry Smits’ work was recognized by the awarding of the SACD-Belgium prize, and in 1998, for his creation Corps(e), he received Belgium’s Océ prize for the performing arts of the French speaking community.
