Mute Comp. Physical Theatre

Written by writer and poet: Malene Engelund

Mute Comp. Physical Theatre is an award-winning company situated at the intersection of theatre and contemporary dance. Their dance performances incorporate live music, poetry, stunts, acrobatic, physical comedy, martial arts, and crash dance, resulting in a unique stage language that transcends defined genres, forging connections between performing arts and new audiences. The company explores the physical space with the body as a sound breaker. In choreographies that examine the physical and empirical limits of the body, their works challenge both the dancers’ abilities and the audience’s perception of dance as an art form.

In 1999, Kasper Ravnhøj founded Mute Comp. Physical Theatre with choreographer, dancer, and actor Jacob Stage. Since then, the company has created numerous ensemble works, earning multiple Reumert Award nominations and international acclaim. They have toured nationally and internationally across Sweden, Norway, France, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Ireland, Syria, Macau, the USA, Russia, Holland, SouthKorea, Portugal, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Uganda, Libanon, Greece, and Egypt, among others.
In addition to performances, the company is engaged in a wide range of activities such as researching, teaching, give workshops, masterclasses, participation in conferences and political networks, fieldwork, creating dance films, and collaborating on other artistic projects. They also provide choreographic consultation services.

Since 2008, Kasper Ravnhøj has served as the company’s primary choreographer, and the collaboration with Stage ended in 2014 The company has since continued under Ravnhøj’s creative direction, with Klaus Hildebrandt Frederiksen serving as dramaturg for their productions.

To understand Mute Comp.Physical Theatre, one must understand Kasper Ravnhøj himself—the company is interwoven with his life, existing almost as an extension of his being. Dualism is perhaps the best way to describe Ravnhøj as an artist; he navigates both physically and spiritually between deep focus and fleeting moments. His choreography and performances embody the meeting point of meticulous, uncompromising research and a deep trust in intuition and chance encounters. Ravnhøj’s works are characterized by a profound and nuanced understanding of the themes he explores. This refers to the spontaneous ideas, experiences, and encounters that become part of a dreamlike collection of chance elements at the core of his creative process. Serendipitous meetings with musicians, dancers, and other artists may surface months later and shape Ravnhøj’s work, driven by his faith in intuition; when he senses a response within himself to a momentary impulse, he lets it guide him.His artistic approach is to drill deeply into the subject matter of each work, engaging in extensive literary, philosophical, and historical research, while simultaneously embracing the unfiltered, raw experience he seeks to convey through dance. This method often leads him into dark and complex territories and fieldwork.The personal toll can be high, but the result is ambitious and intense works, shaped by lived experience rather than rehearsed practice. An example of this is seen in one of Mute Comp.’s productions, Strike of No Thought, where his knife solo became a central metaphor. The symbiosis between human and blade became the theme of the performance, with the dance serving as the physical manifestation of this concept. Consequently, it was crucial for Ravnhøj that the choreography not be a rehearsed sequence of movements, but rather an experiential process, where the knife, initially foreign to the body, became a sensory extension of it. A performance by Mute Comp. is thus an experience of borderlands—where dance and dancer move at the edge of physical ability, where the performance navigates a terrain between genres, and where the thematic journey is a continuous movement through life and death. With Ravnhøj as its beating heart of the company explores through its productions—and with a supporting cast of dancers, opera singers, poets, musicians, acrobats, and others—the burning, dangerous, and transcendent no-man’s-land we enter when we stand at the forefront of the art of dance.