Florentina Holzinger impresses with a series of highly physical performances – inescapable advocating the full expression of stamina, the force of life – creative, sexual, physical and humorous. Her brutally sensual productions are often full of physical techniques drawn from other disciplines – such as kickboxing, ballet, weightlifting and acrobatics. For Apollon she invites Apollon’s muses to collide with all American side show acts.
With Apollon, Holzinger hints at Balanchine's neoclassical ballet quartet Apollon Musagète. The story centres around Apollon, the Greek god of art. In pointe shoes and with Olympic weights on their shoulders, the choreographer and her muses throw that poster boy off his throne with a smile on their face. Through this humorous and furious destruction of a classical narrative Holzinger addresses the myth of this supposedly perfect woman, the artist herself. These perfect women – what do they even want?
Nourished by performance history, Holzinger explores our dualistic relationship to perfection and beauty, lust and disgust, projection and delusion, destruction and construction as well as the rupture between high art and entertainment culture.
Six women tackle the neoliberalist cult of the body with all their performative brilliance and vicious physical virtuosity. Apollon limbos between the aesthetics of an occult fitness-studio, a cyborg-bullfight and classical side show. Fin de siècle freakshow and 1960s live art applied to a current perspective on high art. The coexistence of utopian creatures, future narratives and, as Donna Haraway puts it, ‘tentacular realities’.
NB! This performance contains scenes that some viewers may find disturbing
Florentina Holzinger studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. Her diploma solo work Silk got awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe at the lmPulsTanz Festival 2012. Her collaboration with Vincent Riebeek resulted in a trilogy of pieces –Kein Applaus für Scheisse, Spirit and Wellness – that are currently touring under guidance of arts centre CAMPO in Ghent, whom produced their later two works Spirit and Wellness. Holzinger premiered her second solo work Recovery in autumn 2015.
Recovery was an experimental meditation on Florentina's recovery from a traumatic stage accident and explores different modes of female representation trying to explore and question the full potential of female physicality. The show, that hosts a sport psychologist and the current female Croatian K1 champion, led to public request to offer martial arts training for artists.
Similar to the starting point of the show Florentina started proposing the training for a fight as training for the life as an artist. This workshop was offered for the first time for choreographers at lmPulsTanz 2015 and continued in succession as 'fighting for curators' at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 'fighting for sex workers' in the Red Light in Amsterdam, 'fighting for protesters' at the 2016 tumults in Toulouse, 'fighting for refugees' at Sommerfestival Hamburg. The trilogy with Vincent found continuation in the making of their newest work Schönheitsabend - Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Extase at CAMPO in summer 2015, which parallels their story and label of Europe’s most provocative dance couple with the story of Vaslav Nijinsky and Ida Rubinstein. Florentina is co-author and performer of the webseries Body and Freedom, initiated at Berliner Festspiele, that targets the powerlessness of a live audience. Further episodes get shot and tour on various performance platforms and pop-up venues. Alongside the performances, the Body and Freedom collective offers 'Audience Training Sessions', to help their viewers to maintain an active but comfortable role throughout the performance, as well as a chance to offer criticism, input and veto as integral part of the show.
Florentina Holzinger is currently artist in residence at the International Choreographic Arts Center ICK Amsterdam and produces there her first ballet with a female dancer investigating classical repertory through ideas of dualism: banal vs sublime, artificial vs authentic, theatre vs clinic, etc… This ballet will form a stepping stone aimed to culminate in the making of Apollon.
In collaboration with TantsuRUUM Florentina Holzinger and Orinta van der Zee will give a transformatory fighting workshop "Inside the Octagon" on the 30th and 31th of August.
For more information and registration: http://tantsuagentuur.ee/event/tootuba-florentina-holzinger-austria-orinta-van-der-zee-holland/
