Florentina Holzinger

Bodies in Action

“Fearlessly exploring the body as a multifaceted medium.”

Florentina Holzinger is an Austrian choreographer and performance artist whose body of work has enriched the international performance scene with award-winning pieces that meld dizzying acrobatics, martial-arts fight scenes, and pop-cultural references.

Holzinger consciously plays with the ever-shifting boundaries between high culture and middlebrow entertainment. From her career’s outset, she has made a point of challenging different modes of female representation on stage and exploring the full physical potential of the human body. Often featuring especially muscular women as performers, the artist’s work is intrinsically linked with the aim of exploring embodiment in relation to identity, and the development of practices to support a physical life in action.

A Divine Comedy. Photo: ©Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
Apollon Musagete. Photo: ©Radovan Dranga

Holzinger’s latest productions are ensemble works for the stage that adapt themes from classical ballet, such as Apollon Musagète or Apollon and La Sylphide. She crafts these into pieces that straddle the line between trashy spectacle and theater, incorporating stunts, gory splatter scenes, and crude sideshow humor into the canonical ballet repertoire. Since 2021, Holzinger is a member of the creative team at Berlin’s Volksbühne theater, working with artistic director René Pollesch.

A Divine Comedy. Photo: ©Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
A Divine Comedy. Photo: ©Nicole Marianna Wytyczak

As a mentor, Holzinger seeks applicants from all disciplines who share a strong interest in the body and physical work, and who “fearlessly explore the body as a multifaceted medium,” she says. She is interested in working with artists who think multidisciplinarily and are working toward “extending physical possibilities through material, media, or (meta)physical means,” she adds. “People who are comfortable working very practically and like to put words into action; who might work around resistance or resilience within their own and others‘ bodies.”

Proposals can consist of any kind of project, as long as it uses the body or physical action and experience as the prime medium and preferably has a live element to it. Proposals can, but don’t have to, be theater or dance-based.

floholzinger.wordpress.com/

Watch the video statement to find out more about what Holzinger is looking for in applications:

Nominees

Tom Cassani

Expanded Magic

A performer working in the contexts of theater, circus, cabaret, live art, nightclubs, and gallery spaces, Tom Cassani’s research focuses on the body as a site of apparent deception in contemporary performance practices. Cassani, who also performs under the moniker Strange Boy, proposes a series that highlights the performing body as an unreliable measure of truth. Drawing on an expanded approach to magic and sideshow, Expanded Magic will test the limits of body-based illusion while mapping new territories in the fields of choreography, contemporary magic, theater, and performance art. By deconstructing and reconfiguring the aesthetic and linguistic indicators of magic, Cassani seeks to observe the change in audience perception of physical possibilities.

Cochon de Cauchemar

Mégère de fille en mère!

Cochon de Cauchemar and their alter-ego Nympho-Ménage are active in Berlin’s queer feminist, sex- and body–positive scene. They create costumes, props, sets, installations, designs and narratives for experimental performances. As a personal strategy for coping with deep anxieties related to the sexed, sexual, and sexualized body, their artistic practice focuses on the domestic sphere—an environment of paradox and cultural relevance, and one in which they can indulge their obsessive-compulsive passion for housework. Long fascinated by pop-cultural tropes such as neurotic housewives and tyrannical mothers, Nympho-Ménage’s project celebrates and acknowledges the family members who have both terrorized and shaped them, leading them to become a self-proclaimed “domestic dominator.”

Thaís Medeiros

Estar uma Árvore

Actress, director, and visual artist Thaís Medeiros, working with the São Paulo-based collective Galeria Gruta, proposes a performance and installation project that draws inspiration from a text on women, healing, and the sacred by Indigenous leader Shirley Krenak. The work will unfold in two stages, beginning with a meeting with Shirley Krenak to learn from her perspective as an Indigenous activist and to get in touch with the history, rites, memory and customs of the Krenak people, indigenous to the region of Minas Gerais. In the second stage, a poetic manifesto will be created from the exploration of individual and collective responses to the words “forest” and “territory." The project is a collaboration with musician Ivan Medeiros and artist Ulysses Sanchez, both members of the collective Galeria Gruta.

Mentee

Expanded Magic

Tom Cassani

Mentors Edition 7

Daliso Chaponda

Daliso Chaponda

Humor and Storytelling

Alia Ibrahim

A Dance with Reality

Florentina Holzinger

Bodies in Action

Laura Huertas Millán

Reworlding Stories

Ana Prvački

Ana Prvački

Slapstick and Seduction

Rully Shabara

Rully Shabara

Your Voice Is Your Sound