Apollon
“They refer to Balanchine in an ironic celebration of beauty. The lyre becomes an executioner’s axe, god is a mechanical rodeo bull, and they take the road to Mount Parnassus by way of a polonaise coupled with dildos, definitely not unplugged. A superbly intelligent, fearless, terrific evening.” Egbert Tholl/Süddeutsche Zeitung
Florentina Holzinger has no reservations when it comes to remixing unusual genres in a fresh way. She has enriched the international performance scene with dizzying acrobatics, muscular women’s bodies and martial-arts fight scenes since 2011 – pop-cultural references and a penchant for trash included. In her latest work, Apollon, six naked women conquer George Balanchine’s neoclassical ballet of the same name from 1928 about the god of the arts and his three muses. But prancing around the poster boy of Olympus is not what Holzinger and her colleagues have in mind. They are themselves the stars of this show, and have some quite bizarre and daring tricks up their sleeves. Armed with black humour, elements of a circus freak show and 1960s live art, the performers challenge the neo-liberal cult of the body and its voyeuristic mechanisms. In pointe shoes and with Olympic weights on their shoulders, they push the vain god off his throne on Mount Parnassus.
(b. 1986 in Vienna) studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam. She consciously plays with a shifting of boundaries between high culture and entertainment in all her works. Kein Applaus für Scheiße (2011), the first joint production of Florentina Holzinger and Vincent Riebeek, earned them a reputation as “most provocative new choreographers” straight away.
Shortly after, Florentina Holzinger won the Prix Jardin d’Europe for her solo Silk at lmPulsTanz in 2012. In addition to further collaborations with Riebeek (Spirit, Wellness and, most recently, Schönheitsabend), Holzinger presented the solo Recovery in 2015, which served her as a means to process the trauma of a very serious accident she had during a performance.
Credits
If available, 60 minutes prior queue numbers for remaining tickets are handed out directly at the evening box office.
No admission under 18 years
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