TANZ

by Florentina Holzinger

A ballet class under Beatrice Schönherr direction, the first ballerina to dance Le Sacre de Printemps naked (John Neumeier's Le Sacre, 1972), provides the framework of Florentina Holzinger’s TANZ. The performers undergo rigorous training in "action ballet", the so-called "sylphic studies". In collective 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?

TANZ is the third part of Florentina Holzinger's trilogy Recovery, Apollon and TANZ. This trilogy investigates how the body is cultivated, shaped and transformed through different physical disciplines.