Wet, bloody ecstasy: Angelita Biscotti Reviews Florentina Holzinger's TANZ (Melbourne 2023, RISING, Arts Centre)
Posted: 12 June 2023
CONTENT WARNING: This review contains brief references to self-harm, sexual harassment, and violence.
Femininity is bloody. We emerge from our mothers soaked in their blood, piss and shit, our cries entwined. Those of us who bleed, do. Those of us who weren't born to bleed monthly, bleed anyway when acquiring those bits of us. We bleed, sometimes, during our first times. We learn that skin, the site of the durational performance that is Existing While Feminine, is regenerative tissue. In Florentina Holzinger's TANZ, flesh, blood and vomit are displayed in unflinching brutality. The feminine nude here is not a posed illusion that deflects from the less dignified parts of having a body; it is the canvas on which the grotesque details of embodiment is presented. The performance calls not for the gaze, but the gaping jaw.
TANZ opens with a scene familiar to anyone who's ever done a ballet class. (I've done a few, and the most I've retained is the five positions). It’s impossible not to think of Foucault while listening to the master's instructions to instill a sensibility, not simply discipline the body. Obedience and humility are demanded of students, as the body is taught to open. This opening up of the limbs is not for the dancer’s inner transformation but the audience’s. To open oneself before the other is to open the other up. The body is a system rigged to produce sublime experiences for the spectators. The process of embodying and performing beauty, hurts. It takes years of intense and painful self-regulation to transform the body into a thing with an graceful upright back, sucked-in core, high chin, featherweight wrists and a placid gaze. To turn the feet into an assemblage that can withstand the onslaught of dancing en pointe, and the face, a blank canvas that receives other people's desire without asserting one's own. I've read work that likens the complex satisfactions and distress in professional ballet training to masochistic submissiveness in BDSM. Both are endurance art forms. The capacity to withstand pain is currency here. In her 2018 debut book Females: A Concern, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu writes, “A female is one who has eaten the loathing of another... Gender is not just the misogynistic expectations a female internalises but also the process of internalising itself, the self’s gentle suicide in the name of someone else’s desires." Recognition as female comes at the cost of wholeness. To be legible as feminine to exist in a shattered interiority while sustaining a poised, smiling masquerade.
Depending on your seat, your experience of the show might be drastically different. My partner and I were in the stalls, so we had a wide-angle view of the whole stage and a majestic sculptural view of the suspension scenes as the performers' aerial stunts progressed upward in our direction. The same scene from the front row might have been a view of primarily nostrils, chin, inner thigh, hair. Both perspectives demand the audience to consider the many contradictions in contemporary femininity. The unnaturalness of beauty and the pressure to be beautiful anyway. The icky, dank, wet, visceral flesh, blood, bone, love, contempt, and closeness to death that we all share, that we all conceal beneath clothing, convention, and shame. In TANZ, the body offered up as a spectacle, and so are the very human realities of vomiting, urinating, bleeding. I imagine the stage must stink.
That this is a shared corporeality is highlighted by how the choreographer Holzinger is also performing onstage throughout the entire show, as nude as the rest of the cast, subjecting her own body to the same intense choreography, the same attention from the audience. During the interval, she breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience, unclothed. She holds out her hand, asks for money, naked. What can a woman choreographer do differently? A woman choreographer who is also a dancer has been through the same experiences, and confronts the same expectations, as the dancers she directs. A woman choreographer knows what it's like to put the body out there, facing the possibility of applause, admiration, assault, tokenism, ridicule, yawns, walk-outs, mixed reviews, being reduced to a cliché. Shared histories do not always lead to solidarity, but sometimes they do.
"The way to gain knowledge is to penetrate something" is projected onto the screen at one moment during the show. Femininity is associated with already-being castrated, the site where pentration happens, not its agent. "To have knowledge of woman" is to fuck her, according to the Bible. Can a woman have knowledge, and how? There is much contemporary discourse around the pussy as a wound, a hole, as a vacancy to be filled by something that is not woman. To be a woman is to be told that you exist in a state of woundedness.
The references to sexual harassment within dance are the most disturbing moments. To experience harassment, or even the risk of it, is to carry in the mind a heightened wariness. Dancing requires risk-taking, not just with one's physical safety, but with the audience's ideas about what a body can do generally and what your body can do specifically. Risk-taking is an expansive gesture, but fear of assault calls for defensive closing down and closing in. To be a woman is to move through the world longing for expansion but finding the self contracting.
The penetration that happens in this show is unrelenting, abrasive for the most part, and occasionally tender. In Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam writes: "Cutting is a feminist aesthetic proper to the project of female unbecoming... The cut.. represents her attempt to remake herself as something other than a repository for her mother, her country, and her class, but it also crafts a version of woman that is messy, bloody, porous, violent, and self-loathing." Limbs are sawn off with glee. Cannibalistic, animalistic attacks abound. Drowning, electrocution, and other murderous acts take place without hand-wringing, without apology. Yet the most daring display of breaking skin is also the most moving display of trust, in one of the most poignant reveals closer to the end. This act of literally putting one's skin in the game is crucial for the final lift-off, a bloody and rapturous defiance of gravity. Holzinger's dancers take flight so we can soar vicariously. I knew the show had become more than merely bodily display when I started feeling the collective cringe in the room, when we all started imagining the women's piss and sick and blood and ripping skin and scars as our own.
Investment in live performance, as witness and performer, cuts up the ways we understand time and space, and the way we inhabit our bodies and receive others'. To discover what you're capable of withstanding is an education, a self-unmaking. There is something sincere about all that in-your-face impurity. Gender is a mud-wrestling match, not a script, not a parade. The only way up is through.
Florentina Holzinger's TANZ was performed in Melbourne, Australia at the Arts Centre for RISING 2023.
Creator, Performer, Choreography: Florentina Holzinger
Performers: Renée Copraij, Beatrice Cordua, Evelyn Frantti, Lucifire, Lydia Darling/ Luz de Luna Duran, Annina Machaz, Netti Nüganen, Suzn Pasyon, Laura Stokes, Veronica Thompson and Josefin Arnell
Video Design, Live Videography | Josefin Arnell and Jessyca R. Hauser
Sound Design, Sound Technician | Stefan Schneider
Lighting Design, Technical Director | Anne Meeussen
Technical Assistant | Koen Vanneste
Stage Design | Nikola Knezevic
Stage Assistant | Camilla Smolders
Dramaturgy | Renée Copraij and Sara Ostertag
Outside Eye | Michele Rizzo and Fernando Belfiore
Music Coach | Almut Lustig
Coaching | Ghani Minne and Dave Tusk
Stunt Support | Haeger Stunt and Wireworks
Stunt Instructors | Stunt Cloud GmbH (Leo Plank, Phong Giang and Sandra Barger)
Theory and Research | Anna Leon
Costume Advisor, Tailor | Mael Blau
Prothetics and Mask Design | Students of Wigs, Make-up and Special
Make-up Effects for Stage and Screen - Theaterakademie August Everding Munich and Marianne Meinl
Production | Spirit
Co-Produced by | Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna - AT), Spring Festival (Utrecht - NL), Theatre Rotterdam (Rotterdam - NL), Mousonturm (Frankfurt - DE), Arsenic (Lausanne - CH), Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich - DE), Take Me Somewhere Festival (Glasgow - UK), Beursschouwburg (Brussels, BE) deSingel (Antwerp - BE), Sophiensaele (Berlin - DE), Frascati Productions (Amsterdam -NL), Theater im Pumpenhaus (Muenster - DE), asphalt Festival (Düsseldorf - DE)