• © Eva Würdinger

  • © Eva Würdinger

  • © Eva Würdinger

  • © Eva Würdinger

TANZ

Florentina Holzinger

After the powerful Apollon, created at CAMPO, Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger takes another classic ballet Les Sylphides (mythical spirits), which premiered in 1909, as a starting point. In her reinterpretation Holzinger continues her research around the concept of the female body as a ‘machine for special effects’. With this production she works with a team of professional stuntwomen, dancers and a live camerawoman.

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. In TANZ, 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. 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?

on location: Theaterzaal Vooruit / duration: 2h10 / language no problem
TICKETS via Vooruit (18€ / 20€)


in co-presentation with Vooruit

As part of NO(W)WORRIES, a generous city festival for a fantastically uncertain future

#Calendar in Ghent #All Campo productions