Florentina Holzinger
Apollon Musagète

Performance, Dance / Ballet / Premiere in German-speaking countries

Dates
28.–29.9.2017

Details
Premiere:
28.9.2017
Wiederholung:
29.9.2017
Talk nach der Vorstellung am 29.9.2017

Location
Dom im Berg
Graz

Production specifics
Produktion CAMPOKoproduktion steirischer herbst, Frascati Producties, La Bâtie – Festival de Genève, Münchner Kammerspiele, Sophiensaele, Künstlerhaus MousonturmMit Unterstützung von MA7 Kulturabteilung der Stadt WienDank an Sina Christmann, Alister Mazzotti, Ghani Minne, Philippe Marchal, Blaze

Six women armed with pointe shoes and dumb-bells set out to lambaste the omnipresent neoliberal body cult. The young choreographer Florentina Holzinger rallies her muses to topple poster boy Apollo from Balanchine’s ballet of the same name from his carefully guarded throne.

Florentina Holzinger’s productions are characterised by uncompromising bodies. Kickboxing, ballet, weight-lifting, freak show and stunting: in an endless tour de force, Holzinger appropriates a wide range of body techniques, both mastering and destroying them on stage. An invocation of human vital force – with sexuality, humour and out and out daring.

In “Apollon Musagète” Holzinger dissects the freak show genre, allowing it to clash with neoclassical ballet. An all-female cast pulls apart Balanchine’s choreographies with great passion, confronting stringent form with the performers’ unpredictable power and taboo-free humour. Occult fitness equipment, tools and heavy artillery all play a part, revealing the bizarre similarities between the revolutionary performances of the 1960s and 70s and the historical entertainment of “All American Freak Shows”: categories of genius and dilettantism are shaken to the core, with virtuosity the dancers debunk the classical myth of the perfect woman, as manifested in Balanchine’s muses. 

Holzinger seeks her muse in the perfect performer – knowing full well that this figure too is only an assertion. In a duality of genius and madness, pleasure and revulsion, brilliance and trash, entertainment and high culture, the performers assemble body images to create heaps of meaning, only to cleverly slip up on them the very next moment: a utopian narrative on the coexistence of sensual, interwoven realities, or, in the words of Donna Haraway: “Tentacular thinking produces tentacular realities”. No one is spared, neither the audience, nor the artists.

Konzept / Idee: Florentina Holzinger
Tänzerin / Tänzer: Renée Copraij
Tänzerin / Tänzer: Florentina Holzinger
Tänzerin / Tänzer: Evelyn Frantti
Tänzerin / Tänzer: Annina Lara Maria Machaz
Tänzerin / Tänzer: Xana Novais
Tänzerin / Tänzer: Maria Netti Nüganen
Tondesign / Sound: Stephan Schneider
Dramaturgie: Sarah Ostertag
Dramaturgie: Michele Rizzo
Bühnenbild, Ausstattung, Raumgestaltung: Nikola Knezevic

Mediathek

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