Florentina Holzinger is on the move. Before logging on to our call from her home in Berlin, the choreographer and performance artist phones from her bike to say she’s running a few minutes late (three, to be exact). Then she quickly appears on-screen from the apartment into which she has just moved: things have been particularly hectic, she says, as she has just returned from Ukraine.
Between navigating the war-racked country’s air-raid sirens while doing research there and restaging her work Tanz, which comes to Dublin Theatre Festival this month for two sold-out performances, Holzinger is also representing Austria at this year’s Venice Biennale, where her installation Seaworld includes a performer in a scuba mask spending up to eight hours in a glass tank filled with urine while another performer jet-skis through water and foam.
It has been described as an exploration of the human body, using water as a subject, where nature and technology collide. Dedicated fans as well as protesters travel to see it.
Róise Goan, the head of Dublin Theatre Festival, has followed Holzinger’s career since its beginning. She says that Tanz, which is set in a ballet class, “was so urgently important for me to present. It’s visually arresting and shocking, yet the horror comes from it saying, ‘Here are all the things our bodies do.’”
In some ways, discussing a topic as sublime as ballet with Holzinger feels like a rather stark juxtaposition, considering much of her work involves nudity, blood and extreme physical challenges. Then again, practising ballet often involves those things.
“I did not come from the world of classical dance myself,” she says. “I mean, there are certain experiences of my own as a contemporary dancer that connect me to this world, but still I didn’t consider myself an expert.
“So it was very important for me to dive into dance history, and specifically ballet history, and involve many people who come from that world into the process.
“We are dealing with the notion of tradition, how we deal with tradition, dance history, and what influence this has on us.
“What in particular interested me is there are very clear rules as to what is supposed to happen on a ballet stage, how a ballet dance is supposed to look, what the training is supposed to look like.
Pain is very culturally different in the way that we have accepted types of pain that optimise the body
Florentina Holzinger
“It’s very formulaic. That’s also the power of ballet. It’s a very strict, very formal approach. And it’s exclusive in that way. Not just anybody can do this.”
Tanz pushes the idea of physical impossibility to the edge, probing the extremes, way beyond perceptions of ballet being beautiful. At one point a dancer hangs from her skin in a technique known as body suspension.
“With dance training for me there was always this notion of pain being quite relative,” Holzinger says. “For sports you are also dealing with pain. Maybe it’s muscle pain. Or maybe you have done an Ironman. I mean, all these things are very extreme. I even compare it to things like beautification routines.
“Pain is very culturally different in the way that we have accepted types of pain that optimise the body. It’s a great thing if you suffer in a CrossFit gym. Even if you pass out, you did the right thing. It’s encouraged because you’re working on your health and fitness.
“Or if you go waxing, it’s just a thing you need to handle, like laser treatment or plastic surgery. I mean, a lot of very normal people have experiences with that and accept this as a part of their life. For me this is remarkable.”
Holzinger, who believes in trying everything she asks her performers to do, embraces pain and discomfort as part of her creative process. Her opera production Sancta, which premiered in 2020, is based on Paul Hindemith’s 1921 opera Sancta Susanna.
In the Hindemith opera, a nun is punished for failing to hide her sexuality. Holzinger and her performers magnify this in their interpretation, which includes nuns on roller skates and ample amounts of blood, some coming from performers’ open wounds.
After a weekend of performances of Sancta at Stuttgart State Opera in 2024, numerous theatregoers were treated for severe nausea.
During an hour of conversation with Holzinger, her grasp of the subject at hand reveals an artist who is open-minded, intensely curious and committed to exploring the world on a deeper level.
“I take ballet as a practice very seriously. And I take ballet dancers very seriously. And then of course there is this other side of my mind where I definitely had very difficult experiences with my body growing up.
“Being a teenager and handling the expectations set upon you as a female-identifying person and your sexuality, and having the feeling your body just never fits, the ballet lens kind of amplifies all of this. It’s like the body is also an alien thing that is never enough.
“Any ballet dancer is highly perfectionist. The beauty and the discipline of it is that you need to practise all the time because there is never an end achieved. It’s always like you are coming closer and closer and closer and you are working, working, working. These are all things that I love and I hate.”
Holzinger has referenced ballet in previous works. In 2017 she created Apollon, a nod to Apollo, the choreographer George Balanchine’s landmark ballet from 1928.
He notoriously referred to his favourite dancers as his muses, going on to marry three of them. Apollo depicts the god of music and his three muses in choreography that was revolutionary in the 1920s.
Even by today’s standards, Balanchine’s technique pushes classical ballet technique to its limits, and in his Apollo the dancers perform extreme leg extensions, off-balance tilts en pointe and lifts so complex and intertwined that at times untangling them seems impossible.
Holzinger’s Apollon takes the idea of woman as muse, then incorporates a mechanical bull, live body piercings, blood and pointe shoes.
“When I was still training as a dancer I was obsessing on Balanchine because of his very athletic style. And I really like the humour in it. For me, it was always quite funny how he was composing couples and groups supercharged with big symbolic meaning.
“And, I mean, that’s why I made a whole show on his Apollo. Because for me, it was also like a really sporty ballet.
It’s not about owing something to somebody else or wanting the audience to love you
Florentina Holzinger
“And, of course, at the same time, it always provoked me, all the Balanchine quotes, like ‘Ballet is woman’ and ‘The gardener is the choreographer,’ and how we depict these muses and dancers. So there was always a lot of interesting friction.”
Holzinger appreciates there are opposing reactions to her work. One reviewer commented on the repetitive sound of seats thumping as audience members regularly stand up and walk out of her shows. That visceral response has also drawn some of her most avid supporters.
Holzinger’s relationship with the late Beatrice Cordua, a well-known German ballerina and seminal figure in Tanz, exemplifies Holzinger’s appeal.
Her rapport with Cordua developed after Cordua repeatedly approached Holzinger over a period of many years, wanting to collaborate. Finally, the two met when taking part in a panel discussion about the late German dancer and actor Anita Berber; Cordua suggested playing the part of a “perverted ballerina” in one of Holzinger’s dances.
Holzinger happened to be working on Tanz at the time, and Cordua, in her 70s, became an integral character. At the time Cordua also was experiencing the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. Their artistic collaboration lasted for more than a decade.
“I remember her as the most graceful person,” Holzinger says. “She still could teach the barre using only her fingers. And unfortunately last year she passed away. Then it was very much for us the question of ‘Can we do this show without her?’ and we decided to do it in Dublin as a show that is actually in memory of her.
“But we will do it with a different dancer, Claire Philippart, who will play her part, who is also great and who is a teacher from the Dutch National Ballet, but a very different type of dancer.”
Although ballet is at the heart of Tanz, Holzinger utilises other movement forms. Martial arts, kickboxing, roller skating and aerial work all feature in other productions, and she commits to them herself.
This could involve body piercing, urinating on stage on cue or straddling a flying motorbike. She is interested in the capabilities of the human body and is unabashedly willing to explore them.
“So the work for me comes from a very authentic place. It’s not about owing something to somebody else or wanting the audience to love you.”
Reflecting on how her career has progressed, she says: “Back then it was so much more about me and another partner doing work for each other, actually.
“So we really did some crazy shit back then. And that means that a large amount of the audience left the theatre when we were doing our crazy shit. For me, it was always relative if success is a good or a bad thing. I never questioned the work that we were doing even though 90 per cent of people left the room.
“Because we were, like, ‘No, but this is great, and the work is difficult, and the world is difficult’, so for us it’s a depiction of the world. And not everybody can handle a depiction of the world, because people want to be lied to most of the time.”
While some audience members might walk out of Holzinger’s shows, others more closely align with Goan’s motivation in bringing Tanz to Dublin.
“In a surprising way there’s something that feels kind of like church. It feels like a community,” Goan says. “There’s a sense of these strong, powerful women doing things that are physically challenging, yet they are doing it with so much love and care.”
Tanz is at the O’Reilly Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, on Saturday, September 26th, and Sunday, September 27th