Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Theater Kempten
Director and Choreography: Chris Comtesse
Stage and Costume Design: Michael S. Kraus

Merkur.de 15.04.2025
Sex strike in a hail of bullets: Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" staged in Kempten in a brand-new way. A Courageous Production.
"Lysistrata" at the Theater in Kempten is not a slick production. It aims for
a lot – and it is courageous. It features strong acting moments, sophisticated choreography, and a clear stance against war.      Steffi Kutz

Allgäuer Zeitung Kempten 12.04.2025
No Sex: How Women Make Men Dislike War
For her version of "Lysistrata" at the theater in Kempten, Chris Comtesse has opened up the original text (in the 1980s translation by Erich Fried) and confronts the satire about war with the cruel reality of war. A concept that works. Also because the director has invented a fascinating form: she combines theater with dance...............Five strong women conspire barefoot to sacrifice war for peace, as Lysistrata so beautifully puts it. As a former dancer and freelance choreographer, Chris Comtesse knows how to combine acting with movement. She charmingly enriches theater with classical and modern dance. Corinne Steudler, Julia Jaschke, Paula Herzig, Gamze Alakus, and Sandra Schmidbauer, in their beige-brown dresses, pace the stage of the small theater hall, sometimes alone, sometimes as part of the ensemble. The lithe Corinne Steudler, who repeatedly shines in such roles in Kempten, acts as a kind of leader.

Alexander Sichel, as the representative of the male species, cuts an equally fine figure. At times he pursues women with an almost uncontrollable urge, at others he confronts them with aggressive and arrogant scrutiny. This creates scenes of wonderful comedy and artistry, such as when the five women tie up and harass the man with a long, thick rope. And then the theater's movement chorus joins in: The 20 men and women, armed with mops and buckets, engage in a battle of the sexes.
Another delightfully absurd scene with choreographically ingenious slapstick.              Klaus-Peter Mayr

"Kleider machen Leute"  Alexander von Zemlinsky
“Clothes make the man”  Staatstheater Cottbus
Music Director Alexander Merzyn
Director: Stephan Märki
Choreography and Co-Director: Chris Comtesse
Stage & Video: Silvia Merlo, Ulf Stengl
Costume Design: Elina Schnizler
Dramaturgy: Julia Spinola
Choir Director: Christian Möbius

Opernwelt, März 2025
“One fondly remembers the humorous choreography by Chris Comtesse, in which a village quartet of gentlemen sways rhythmically back and forth as they devote themselves to a game of skat, while the ladies dance and giggle as they negotiate the art of cake baking.”        Wolfgang Schreiber

Oper & Tanz Ausgabe 2/2025
“In his final production as Cottbus' artistic director, Stephan Märki staged the work with sober nonchalance. Chris Comtesse sharpened the Krawinkeleien—set in Gottfried Keller’s Switzerland—with choreographic finesse.”       Roland H. Dippel

Das Opernglas, May 2025
"The choreographic details are fascinating, as bourgeois women gossip about kitchen recipes and men engage in cigar-smoking rituals, maintaining the level of lightness in this directorial work without letting the serious and timeless content of this opera be forgotten."

"Jemand ein Hommage an Johann Kresnik"
"Someone a homage to Johann Kresnik"
CCB Production Austria
Director: Hannes Hametner
Dramaturgy: Christoph Klimke
Stage and Costume Design: Gottfried Helnwein
Music: Stefan Thaler
Choreography Christina Comtesse

KRONE 18.July 2021
......Christina Comtesse, with her dynamic, classically underpinned choreography (in fantastic execution!), succeeds in quoting Kresnik without copying him; the movement choir takes on the role of the caustic folk voice. Conclusion: an outcry. A declaration of love. A must!  
Irina Lino

tanz.at 19.July 2021

The premiere audience thanked the management team consisting of Stefan Thaler and band (music), Christina Comtesse (choreography), Christoph Klimke (dramaturgy) and Hannes Hametner (director), the performing artists and committed laypeople with barely contained applause and a standing ovation - Performers of the movement choir,; not to forget Gottfried Helnwein, who wore unusual costumes and a memorable mask...           
Eveline Koberg

"Das Was Bleibt" - "That What Remains" 
TANZLIN.Z ​ Black Box, Musiktheater Linz, Austria
​Inspired from Dante`s Inferno

Choreography and Concept Christina Comtesse
Stage and Costume Design Corina Krisztian  
Music Collage Christina Comtesse

Kronen Zeitung / OÖ 3.04.17
Das Was Bleibt – A Jewel of Dance
A danced social criticism, which upholds a humanitarian focus. This dance piece from Christina Comtesse in the Black Box of the Musiktheater has much strength and expressive bluntness. To be seen is a jewel of dance in an enthralling dance interpretation.
Movement, which makes the human body appear direful and at the same time graceful: “Das Was Bleibt” is outspoken, brutal obscene rape insinuations contrasting with fragile butterfly movements.

Behind these physical ambivalences is a deeply profound message, in which the stage hold up a mirror to mankind.
The awesome dancers make it possible to tell the story on many different levels. Side by side using body control, grace of movement and changeability they bewitch also with their emotional acting. Kayla May Corbin, as Lilith impresses with her artistic movements, producing moments of goose bumps, and an authentic interpretation of the roll.

​The choreography of Christina Comtesse is extremely complex (multilayered), there seems to be a whole world of thoughts hidden behind every moment, burning themes are subtly and yet clearly taken hold of. The simple and yet extremely appropriate set (Corina Kristian) is used clearly with versatility and skill, supporting and transporting the story line.                  LA


OÖNachrichten 3.04.17
The production of Christina Comtesse is omnipresent. It guides the audience to a nightmarish world where the only hope of a way out is a door – through which Lilith will come just as she will vanish. ............Above all what remains of this evening is the memory of an impressive dance performance.                
Karin Schütze

“7 Tage” – “7 Days”     
Kammerspiele Staatstheater Darmstadt
Inspired from Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté or Seven Deadly Elements .

Choreography and Concept Christina Comtesse
Stage and Costume Design Corina Krisztian  
Music Collage Christina Comtesse

Critiques from “7 Tage” – “7 Days”  
Main Echo 12.11.13
A bemusing cosmos. So bemusing and yet so extraordinarily fascinating, that your eyes become fix and unable to move. Then always new, bizarre and disturbing scenes making the stage a cup of unremitting creativity. After 90 Minutes without a pause, one is saturated from the many pictures – and yet still hungry for more. Hungry for dance, which can tell a story so captivatingly. And dance that has nothing artificial about it, but which throughout achieves an aesthetic that is astonishing.
.......“7 Tage” is a captivating danced intimate play, which tells of the cycle of life, cleverly spun into beautiful bizarre pictures, which make you want yourself to be a part in this evilly scintillating and then benevolent shimmering dream.        
Bettina Keller

Frankfurter Neue Presse 8.10.13
What a paradox! Classical Ballet often sets literature in pictures which are ofter hard to understand, because silently danced feelings make is harder to tell an exact story. Christina Comtesse on the contrary compacts five volumes of a novel, with182 picture collages (Une Semaine de Bonté or Seven Deadly Elements) into ninety minutes and into the bargain forms a surreal sculpture in the dance space. That should makes things even more complicated.
Instead, she finds a way of telling in movement that is more literary than usual and in its wittiness takes the burdens off the audiences's shoulders. Is this surreal humour due to being British? The English tend to less abstraction and speculation as the Germans. Also Darmstadt's Dance Director Mei Hong Lin is so much in Linz, that the cat is out of the house, and the mice are dancing on the table. And how they dance!
....... This beautiful danced story is fun.         
dek

Kultur Nachrichten
Comtesse, together with her company creates a harmonious interpretation of Une Semaine de Bonté. Corina Krisztian is responsible for the set and cotumes, which she reduces to the essential elements of the novel. This leaves the audience enough space to make its own associations. The principal of the surreal collages is to choreographically direct to a complete package: A resulting artwork leaving the observer to his own thoughts and interpretation.
.....The premiere on the 5th October was rewarded with ecstatic applause.        Anja Häfner

Darmstädter Echo
Already in 2009 the ballet mistress with “The Third Sense” inspired from Patrick Susskind's “Perfume” made a haunting piece for the Kammerspiele, which was just as bizarre and full of fantasy........
......disturbing pictures above all: the evil and cruelty of mankind.
These pictures are presented by the British choreographer Comtesse who brings the mythical creatures of Max Ernst to life on Stage. At the same time she gives the dancers freedom to develop and interpret their own movement. …....
…..Comtesse finds dreamlike pictures that open up a big associative space. Instead of sharp scissors and glue with Max Ernst, Christina Comtesse has cut over many long nights a collage of music and sounds of an enormous breadth.      
Julia Reichelt

“Der Dritte Sinn” – “The Third Sense” Kammerspiele Staatstheater Darmstadt
Inspired by Patrick Süskind's Perfume

Choreogarphy and Concept Christina Comtesse
Music Tobias Gremmler
Stage Design Corina Krisztian
Costume Ulrike Schörghofer

Theater und Konzert 2009
Greetings from Hitchcock and “Psycho”.........
.....The humour makes the pleasant difference from the usual Dance Theatre pieces. Christina Comtesse's wit accomplishes to tell the humourless theme of a smell searching murdering man. Like British black humour, that plays with the dark side, she also sees in the murder of young women, not only the moral and social aspects, but rather a grotesque fiction. This is really what it is about. …..

….A speciality of this choreography are the smells, which occur in almost every scene. It begins with a rather nasty smell from an old tin of fish, which comments the abominable beginning scene, then follows different perfume smells, some sweet, some heavy, some bitter, some feminine, depending on the interpretation of the scenes, and these smells arouse the public to the appropriate associations...

At the end, the premiere audience is ecstatic and bestows a strong applause, calls of “Bravo” and trampling feet. The ensemble showing themselves exceptionally casual, so that one notices that the performers themselves also had a lot of fun with this work.      Frank Raudszus

Main Echo 4.2.2009
“The Third Sense” is 90 minutes long without a pause, a piece for all the senses.
  ......The choreography has humour, ironically attacking today's trend, to eliminate all body odours with a spray. The dancers are highly concentrated, they sing, speak and move in a fragile choreography dreamlike over a metallic stage, changing into a wild mob or loving pairs.
Fee Berthold

Tagespiegel 17.5.97
Christina Comtesse distils from Susskind's roman, rich raven black humour and bloodcurdling comic. In monstrously fantastic scenes, she succeeds in producing grotesque body pictures, with an almost surreal anatomy. …..
.......The fetish female attributes, dismembered female bodies – this production drives a monstrously-ludicrous game.      Sandra Luzina

T.A.Z. Berlin 20.5.97
With joy and laconic humour the director Christina Comtesse deploys a panoptic of femininity, which Grenouille will murder in the most absurd ways. Comtesse's staging cannot deny, that she (as well as her dancers) come from the company of Johann Kresnik: the narrative of a life's story in individual stations, as well as many choreographic moments in this her first full length work show the master's influence. But she directs in a more relaxed way, in a positive sense more superficially. Without pathos, free from theoretical and analytical ballast she narrates a story full of bizarre and grotesque comedy.            Michael Mans

Berliner Zeitung 18.5.97
…..a surprising achievement. Comtesse has her own metaphorical language a flair for compacting and can narrate.       
Michaela Schlagenwerth

"Greyzone"  Graz Schauspielhaus Austria
Choreography Christina Comtesse
Music Gary Carpenter
Set and Costume Design Gabriele Mai

Kleinzeitung - 10 March 2002
“GEWALTTATIGE AMAZONEN” (VIOLENT WOMEN)
Five modern Amazons, dressed in black garments, sadistically torment five prisoners using long metal poles, which also function as cage bars.
......Christina Comtesse investigates the behaviour between victim and perpetrator in her ten-woman piece “Greyzone”, which is rightly placed at the beginning of the dance performance “Starke” that premiered on Friday at the Playhouse Theatre in Graz. It is one of three tailored choreographies for a just as homogenous and engaging ensemble “Tanz Graz”.

Utopia – The English woman’s contribution displays on the one hand a very clear narrative structure, which makes one’s entry and understanding of the piece easier. On the other hand, artistically influenced by Carinthian Johann Kresnik, and with a mother from Klagenfurt, the choreography possesses a richly changeable, danceable and abundant movement vocabulary. Last but not least: the unique tailor-designed score composed by Gary Carpenter. The wide spectrum of sound, from inexorable ticking of a metronome to compelling vocals (beautifully sung by Fran Lubahn) and expressively rich string tones (performed live and conducted by Albert Seidl), provides a platform for the impressive scenes. It is not the finale in which the Utopian victory of freedom is conjured, but the expressions of the victims suffering in their cages which leaves the strongest imagery.      
Ernst Naredi-Rainer

Kronen Zeitung - 10 March 2002
“EINE “STARKE” OHNE SCHWACHEN” (A “STRENGTH” WITHOUT WEAKNESSES)
"The strengths”, the programme title for three ballet pieces for “Tanz Graz” in the Playhouse Theatre, was not only correct in its literal sense, but in the way in which ten women and ten men displayed tremendous physical and conditional strength. The dance theatre evening also showed no weaknesses in substance.
In the first work “Greyzone” by the English woman Christina Comtesse, with gripping music by Gary Carpenter – a commissioned score for Tanz Graz – ten women were used in an intensive study of captivity, liberation, brutality and counter-violence. Especially impressive is the melancholy final sequence with the insertion of a solo mezzo soprano Fran Lubahn. Under the direction of Albert Seidl, Carpenter creates a carrying sound which is less experimental as calculatingly effective.        
Bernd Schmidt

Tanz.at Aktuell - 15 March 2002 
"DIE STARKE: POESIE UND GEWALT” (“THE STRENGTHS”: POETRY AND VIOLENCE)
In “Greyzone”, the English choreographer and Kresnik collaborator Christina Comtesse shows clear lines and virtuoso use of light and space. Heavy bars are used, sometimes as prison bars and sometimes as weapons, by the acrobatically performing ensemble. A rather austere, yet gripping and changeable, game of suppression, oppression, revolt, desperation and hope, played to hard, prickly tones from Gary Carpenter.
Andrea Hein