Berlin — In a rehearsal hall on the outskirts of the city, Xana Novais hung in her teeth. On a recent night, her tattooed 27-year-old performer hung inches above the ground and nibbled at scraps of leather hanging from a rope, perfecting a new skill called the “Iron Jaw.” I was. It didn’t look easy.
Novais was practicing a sequence for Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s new work Ophelia’s Got Talent, which premieres at Berlin’s Volksbühne Theater on Thursday. As part of a performance that blended dance, stunts and sideshow-inspired acts, Nove was meant to hang like a fish on a hook for about half an hour. But after 20 seconds she let go of her hand, crouched down and frowned. “It’s about learning to manage discomfort,” she said.
Discomfort is central to the 36-year-old Holsinger’s work. Holsinger has recently become a star in the world of European dance and performance by pushing the boundaries of what her performers (and audiences) can tolerate. Holsinger, whose fascination with extreme bodies dates back to her own training as a dancer, features a large cast of naked female performers, exploring lofty ideas about art and gender, while sometimes bodily fluids. The limit of deliciousness, including.
2017’s Apollo explored the work of choreographer George Balanchine and the concept of artist and muse, with performers bleeding and defecating on stage. His 2021 riff on Dante’s epic about the wheels of hell, “Divine Comedy,” included a scene in which a woman ejaculates explosively while using a vibrator. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of her performances are interrupted by audience members walking outside.
“Ophelia’s Got Talent” — an exploration of myths and stories about women and water, including mermaids, sirens and the tragic drowning figure of Hamlet — is Holsinger’s most influential theatrical One, Volksbuhne.
The theater’s artistic director, Rene Polesch, was drawn in part to Holsinger’s work because it brought a variety of strong female performers, including older women and women with disabilities, to the stage in bold and demanding performances. “This is radical feminism, not revolutionary feminism,” he said.
Holsinger, who has self-deprecating wit and boxer-like physical prowess, explained in an interview that she and her performers held their breath during the show, pulling fish hooks from their skin underwater for up to five minutes. At one point, the cast members form a fountain shape that squirts water out of her nose, she said.”It would be a great image,” she said.
She added that she drew inspiration from dance history, mythology and action movies, including the James Bond franchise, but she described the stage as a “laboratory” where ostensibly taboo acts were at liberty. “Maybe we can teach people something about what forms of shame are necessary and which aren’t,” she said.
Holsinger added that life under capitalism encouraged individuals to perfect themselves, and her research delved into how this shapes the female body. She finds herself in a society where she can buy and create likeness and optimize herself in the way the system wants her. She added that she tried to find ways to use her body in “unexpected” ways.
Barbara Frey, artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, the prominent German arts festival that commissioned The Divine Comedy, said that Holsinger had “dance, fervent wit, and marvelous tenderness” and “a Roman ‘man’s ‘to the female body’.” While exploring “gaze and female gaze”,
Some have compared her work to the Viennese Actionist, an Austrian art movement of the 1960s and 70s, but its adherents (mostly male) insist that audiences confront their work by: We staged performances performing extreme acts, including self-harm. considered a repressed element of Austrian society. Holsinger had previously said that she drew little inspiration from the movement, but her association with actionists who are now revered in Austrian art history helped her gain respect in her home country early on. She explained that it helped her collect.
Born in Vienna to a pharmacist and lawyer, Holsinger came late to the dance. She said that soon after beginning her training, at the age of 17, she realized it was too late to perfect the skills needed for a classical career as a dancer, and she was “too strong to do ballet. I had too much muscle,” he said.
After being rejected by several traditional European dance academies, she enrolled. New dance training schoolat an experimental school in Amsterdam, she began to explore other ways of using her body as a means of spectacle. “It doesn’t have to be grand jute or tendu, but it can be considered a type of dance technique.”
After several surprising collaborations with Dutch choreographer Vincent Liebeek, Holsinger fell from the height of 16 during a performance at an arts festival in Norway in 2013 after a near-death experience. , said she had reached a turning point in her career. Legs while she does an aerial stunt. She had a concussion and a broken nose that saved her life, but an accident caused by the loosening of a screw that held her weight up forced her to be more vigilant about her work and safety. now pay for
Since then, she has devoted herself to producing more elaborate works for all-female ensembles. Four years after her accident, she debuted her ‘Apollon’. This is a work in which Holsinger struggled with what she described as “the lived experience of ballet” and “the overdone femininity of a ballerina”. The show was widely acclaimed and toured internationally. That work and her 2019 follow-up, Tans The suffering she experiences through her ballet slippers, which she described as often causing the dancer’s feet to be deformed and bloodied, and the gradual violence of more modest acts such as swallowing a sword. I have drawn similarities. body suspension show.
Finding performers for her work wasn’t always easy, she admitted. Some, like Novais, have a theatrical background, while others are sex workers and sideshow performers. As part of her recruiting efforts, she once advertised “women with special talents” on Craigslist, she said.
But her work has also attracted performers from more traditional dance backgrounds, including 81-year-old Trixie Cordua, a former soloist of the Hamburg Ballet who worked with John Cage. In a telephone interview, Cordua, who suffers from pneumonia and sometimes uses a power wheelchair to move around the stage, said he was drawn to working with Holsinger. because of her willingness to go “a new constellation” and “very, very far.”
Holsinger said she was pleased with the fact that the extreme elements of her work often lead people away from her performances. When it comes down to it, I fully respect their decision to leave,’ she said.
Ophelia’s Got Talent
From September 15th to October 25th at the Volksbuhne in Berlin. volksbuehne.berlin.