This event is part of the 2023 RISING Festival.
Romantic ballet leaps into a shadow-world of nudity, needles and highwire gore.
Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger’s latest, wildest work about the body as a spectacle, and its disciplining.
A ballet class under the direction of Beatrice Cordua, the first ballerina to dance Le Sacre du printemps naked (John Nuemeirer’s Le Sacre, 1972) provides the framework. From there, the quest for perfection gets stripped down, pulleyed up from the scalp, haunted by witches, hoisted onto flying motorcycles and strung out, abattoir-style.
Since its premiere in Vienna, TANZ has stirred walkouts and fainting, along with its accolades and rapturous applause. It’s part gross-out comedy, part schlock-horror show, part ghost story, part superhuman dance work. It glides by wearing the carcass of the most graceful of artforms, and asks: how can the cult of beauty inherent in this tradition be reconciled?
