Florentina Holzinger: TANZ

TANZ is the third part of the trilogy: Recovery, Apollon, TANZ. The trilogy deals with notions of practice through training of different physical disciplines on stage- focusing on investigations of how the body is cultivated, shaped and transformed and on the transmission of experience. TANZ takes early 19th century romantic ballet as a starting point. It uses the frame of a ballet class guided by Beatrice Schoenherr, the first ballerina who danced the Sacre de Printemps naked (John Neumeier, 1972).

The performers undergo a rigorous training in action ballet, the so called sylphidic studies. Learning how to use their skills in a genre of spectacle that deals with supernatural creatures, they use the articulation of the dancer’s body as a tool to penetrate space in order to gain knowledge about flying.

Through techniques of restraint, they collectively practice to govern the body and mind. An ephemeral world- provoking an imminent possibility of perfection by transforming the gross into the sublime and making the functional more than functional.

In an operatic set up brutal parodies of established images of excitement found in ballet, comedy and pornography are made in order to be watched from afar and close. This industry of gaze finds its translation in the work of a porn producer who documents the performance from within. With an all-female cast of twenty to eighty years old performers who represent different dance backgrounds, TANZ poses the question what ‘dancing the lineage’ means and how to reconcile with tradition in the territory of the nonverbal and its relationship to beauty.

Florentina Holzinger

Florentina Holzinger studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. Her Diploma solo work Silk was awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe at the lmPulsTanz Festival 2012. She collaborated with Vincent Riebeek for a trilogy of pieces, Kein Applaus für Scheiße, Spirit, and Wellness followed by Schoenheitsabend- Tänze des Grauens und der Extase (2011-2015). The last of these was presented also in Kiasma Theatre in Helsinki.

In her latest works she continued dissecting the narratives of ballet: first with Apollon (2017), a hack on Balanchines’s 1920s Apollon Musagete, followed by TANZ, an action ballet that reflects on tradition and narrative departing from the romantic ballet La Sylphide. In 2020 TANZ was awarded for „Best Performance of the Year” by Theater Heute and with the NESTROY Price for Best Direction, and it was presented in the frame of Theatertreffen (Berlin).

Florentina Holzinger’s dance pieces are driven by the notion of identity, sexual and physical transgression. Drawing inspiration as much from Viennese Actionism, body art and bodybuilding as from classical ballet, cabaret and circus; she deconstructs, performance after performance, the very definition of femininity.