Bilderschlachten

About This Artwork

We live in an era of "too much" — too many images, too much noise, too much to consume. Bilderschlachten (German for Battle of Images) starts from that feeling and turns it into a piece of theatre. It begins with a 1968 musical composition by Bernd Alois Zimmermann called Musique pour le souper du Roi Ubu — a chaotic, deliberately excessive piece where Stockhausen and Stravinsky collide with Bach, marching bands, and polka. It had never been choreographed before. Choreographer Stephanie Thiersch and composer Brigitta Muntendorf took it and built a whole visual and physical world around it. On stage: 8 dancers, a string quartet, and 41 musicians from the full Les Siècles orchestra. The result is simultaneously a ballet, a concert, and something that doesn't quite have a name. What happens during the show The choreography weaves together contemporary dance, classical ballet, urban dance, and 16th-century court dances. At one point, the conductor is displaced from his podium by a female musician. The orchestra raises its voices and splits into camps, creating a soundscape somewhere between a football stadium and a protest march. A dancer eventually takes over conducting. Later, to Chopin's Funeral March, the musicians gradually lay down their instruments, leave their seats, and join a procession on stage — until only harp and four double basses remain, trying to hold the melody in the highest harmonics. The point The central question: how many images can we absorb at once? What happens when there's nothing more to see or hear? Voracity and excess are the heart of it. But it's not a lecture — it's more like a provocation. Between purity and saturation, it tries to offer new perspectives on what's artificial versus authentic, on history versus the present. Why it's artistically significant Three things make it unusual. First, the piece actively unravels itself — as it progresses, the composer and choreographer create "reveals" that disentangle the layers of Zimmermann's original collage, so you're watching the machinery of influence being exposed in real time. Second, the boundary between the performer and the person behind the role is deliberately dissolved — voices, breath, and speech were developed collaboratively, so the dancers aren't interpreting someone else's vision, they're genuinely part of authoring it. Third, it treats the orchestra not as backdrop but as body — subjecting classical quotes to pop culture techniques: speeding up, stretching, looping, pitch-shifting, Mickey-Mousing — and then playing those procedures live on acoustic instruments. Critics called it "one of the most astonishing works both in its exploration of the dance-music relationship and in its highly multi-layered structure, yet always in consistent coherence." How to watch it: don't try to follow a narrative. Let it overwhelm you a little — that's intentional. Notice when you stop knowing where to look. That disorientation is the meaning.

Artist

Stephanie Thiersch / Brigitta Muntendorf

Location

Holland Festival, ITA, Amsterdam

Date experienced

Saturday, June 27, 2026