About
Thor places particular emphasis on performance as a space for interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation, where choreographic practices meet other artistic practices.
This support takes the form of two different alternating events: the (Pas si) Fragile! springboard in even-numbered years, and the TROUBLE international festival in odd-numbered years.
Trouble festival
In odd-numbered years, the festival takes over every corner of Studio Thor, and many other venues in the surrounding area and beyond. Cultural venues such as the Musée Charlier, Ateliers Mommen, KANAL, Point Culture, Centre culturel arabe, Maison des Arts de Schaerbeek, Théâtre La Balsamine and others, as well as churches, sports halls, wedding halls, nightclubs, school playgrounds, disused museums, community centres, hotels, parks, squares and streets in Saint-Josse, Brussels and Schaerbeek… Thanks to this in situ programming, many projects have a socio-artistic dimension, sometimes involving participation.
Last edition
Springboard(Pas si) Fragile!
The biennial showcases young artists involved in performance art, recently graduated from art schools in Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. With a specific formula for each edition (3 so far), each one aims to bring together around 10 young artists from ENSAV-La Cambre (including the Dance Master), erg, ARBA-ESA (and ISAC training), ESA Le 75, Beaux-Arts de Liège, Académie de Tournai and Arts² in Mons.
Last edition
Trouble
Every two years, the festival takes over every corner of Studio Thor, and many other places around and beyond. Cultural places such as the Charlier Museum, les Ateliers Mommen, KANAL – Centre Pompidou, PointCulture, Institut Européen de la Culture Arabe, Maison des Arts de Schaerbeek, la Balsamine, etc, but also churches, sports halls, wedding halls, nightclubs, school playgrounds, disused museums, community centres, hotels, parks, squares and streets in Saint-Josse, Brussels and Schaerbeek.
As a result of this in situ programming, many projects have a socio-artistic and sometimes participatory dimension.
Trouble #13 : Invocations - Evocations
The Trouble performance festival turns twenty and expands its partnerships across the city for its thirteenth edition. Since the festival’s creation at Les Halles de Schaerbeek in 2005, much has changed in the world of performance—once marginalized, it is now well-established in Brussels.
Trouble 2025 aims to broaden its scope, particularly by breaking free from Western aesthetics and embracing peripheral perspectives from artists in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. As a central theme: invocations, evocations, magical or even shamanic gestures, political actions in public spaces, and dialogues with the invisible.
Performance as clairvoyance?
(Pas si) Fragile!
The biennial highlights young artists involved in performance art, recently graduated from art schools in the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. With a specific formula for each edition (3 so far), each one aims to bring together a dozen young artists from ENSAV-La Cambre (including the Master’s degree in dance), erg, ARBA-ESA (and the ISAC training course), ESA Le 75, Beaux-Arts de Liège, Académie de Tournai and Arts² in Mons.
Over recent years, visual arts schools across French-speaking Belgium have been devoting part of their curriculum to performance art, thus responding to the innovative dynamics of these practices in the professional artistic sphere.
We can thus observe a new generations of artists making deep inroads into the Belgian and international performance art scenes with individual or collective works, multiplying collaborations. These artists do not do perform as their elders did, however, these artists are inventing other forms all while searching for new spaces in which to present themselves and their work.
European projects
As part of the 2 festivals devoted to performance, Trouble and tremplin (Pas si) Fragile!, Compagnie & Studio Thor was right at the heart of two pan-European projects: the first, “Time For Live Art” brought together 4 performance festivals, those of Ljubljana, Turku, Athens and Brussels, while the second “Performing Identity” was a showcase nomadic program focusing on the training and practice of performance art.
With the support of the European Union’s Creative Europe programme, “Time For Live Art” is a project shared by Studio Thor / Festival Trouble (BE), Infinite Present (SI), New Performance Turku Biennial (FI) and MIRfestival (GR).
Time For Live Art
Time For Live Art is a collaborative project gathering Studio Thor / Trouble Festival (BE), Infinite Present (SI), New Performance Turku Biennale (FI) and MIR Festival (GR), supported by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.
Time For Live Art saw 4 human-sized live art festivals join forces to underline the resilience of the live art sector, in a contemporary world suffering from ecological and health wounds. These festivals believe that gathering around a live event has never been so precious and necessary, though our current conditions urge us to do it in a different way. With this in mind, the partners addressed and answered to questions of ‘time’ : time to in present, time for presentation and circulation of live artworks: time given to relate the creation to a context, time to experience the artwork, time for mediation around the presentation, time taken for the travel of the artist and time to develop the memory of the audience.
The coordination team is currently considering and working on the possible extension of the project.
> Time For Live Art website
TFLA events
Performing Identity
Performing Identity is a nomadic program of training and practice for performance art that will take place, on an ad-hoc basis, over the upcoming two academic years (2022-2023 and 2023-2024).
Focused on the question of identity, this project proposes a series of workshops devoted to artistic practice, professional and theoretical meetings, visits to festivals, as well as the realisation of performances in diverse public settings and venues. A living archive will be built up throughout the project. At a festival open to the public and professionals alike, students will present their works in a thoughtful and creative way.
Bringing together four art schools – ENSAV La Cambre and ESA Le 75 in Brussels (BE), UAP in Poznan (PL), Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan (IRL) – and three festivals – Verão Azul in Lagos (PT), New Performance Turku in Turku (FI) and (Pas si) Fragile! in Brussels (BE), this program is aimed at some fifteen students of higher arts education practising performance art.
> Performing Identity website
Merging these two European projects thus lead to an intensely compact edition of (Pas si) Fragile! (renamed (Not So) Fragile! for the occasion) during April and May 2024, bringing together, in addition to the fifteen artists participating in Performing Identity five other artists from Greece, Finland and Slovenia, as well as the customary selection of a dozen emerging artists recently graduated from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles’s écoles supérieures des arts.
