Tanz

Since 2011 Florentina Holzinger has enriched the international performance scene with dizzying acrobatics, muscular female bodies and martial arts fight scenes - pop cultural references and a soft spot for trash are not neglected. With Dance, Florentina Holzinger concludes her trilogy - Recovery and Apollon were the first two parts - about the body as spectacle and its disciplining. The framework of Dance is a ballet class led by Beatrice Cordua, the first ballerina to dance Le Sacre du printemps naked (in John Neumeier's adaptation Le Sacre, 1972). The performers undergo a rigorous training in "action ballet," the so-called "Sylphic Studies." In common rituals they learn to control body and mind and acquire supernatural powers such as flying.

A quest for perfection in a transient world, where the crude is transformed into the sublime. In an operatic setting, brutal parodies of sensationalist images familiar from ballet, comedy, and pornography are created. The gaze regime finds reflection in the figure of a porn producer who documents the performance. With a cast consisting of women ranging in age from twenty to eighty, all with diverse backgrounds in dance, Dance raises the question of dance's legacy. How does one reconcile with the beauty cult of this tradition?

(Tanzquartier Wien - October 2019)