Florentina Holzinger: TANZ

The 2019/20 season opening at Tanzquartier Wien on October 3 will be headed by TANZ—Florentina Holzinger’s radical take on the ruthless practice of ballet. This will be followed by an intense and diverse program of performances and theory throughout the new season. Among the highlights in the performance section is the world premiere of Doris Uhlich's biggest choreography to date featuring 120 naked performers on October 25.

Season opening: TANZ by Florentina Holzinger

An eagerly awaited new group choreography by Florentina Holzinger celebrates its world premiere at the start of the new season. Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger has enriched the international performance scene with dizzying acrobatics, muscular women’s bodies and martial-arts fight scenes since 2011, a generous helping of pop-cultural references and a penchant for trash included. TANZ—a sylphic reverie in stunts completes her trilogy—Recovery and Apollon were the first two parts—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 de Printemps naked (John Neumeier’s Le Sacre, 1972), provides the framework for TANZ. The performers undergo rigorous training in “action ballet”, the so-called “sylphic studies.” In joint rituals, they learn to master their bodies and minds, and they acquire supernatural powers, such as flying. A quest for perfection in an ephemeral world, during which the gross is transformed into the sublime. In an operatic setting, brutal parodies of sensationalist images emerge, as seen in ballet, comedy and pornography. The gaze regime finds reflection in the character of a porn producer who documents the performance. With a cast of women between the ages of twenty and eighty, all of whom have different backgrounds in dance, TANZ raises the question of the legacy of dance. How can the cult of beauty inherent in this tradition be reconciled?

Highlight: Habitat / Halle E by Doris Uhlich 
Habitat / Halle E is Austrian choreographer Doris Uhlich’s biggest choreography to date. The naked bodies of 120 people flick, vibrate and slap against each other to electronic sounds and abstract techno tracks. The performers celebrate their unity in diversity. As individuals and as a crowd at the same time they conquer the space in a choreography that is captivating, highly energetic and, at times, collectively reposing. Hall E at MuseumsQuartier Wien is transformed into a “habitat” full of unexpected life forms—the audience moves about freely in the available space. Habitat transcends conventional ideas of the body, of dance and of nakedness in a subversive manner. Habitat is a utopia. A shameless but also a free-of-shame hymn to a naked body beyond cultural inscriptions and conventional ideals of beauty. The body is not devalued to the level of a fetish, an object; and carnality is neither metaphorically nor poetically ideologised but understood in a material sense and is therefore presented in all its mass and weight yet also in its fragility.

For press inquiries please contact:
Franz Jud
T +43 5813591 65 / presse@tqw.at