Florentina Holzinger

TANZ

Florentina Holzinger ©ApolloniaTheresaBitzan-Portrait

How can the cult of beauty inherent in the tradition of dance be reconciled with the cruelty to which female bodies are exposed through this form of art? Third part of a trilogy about body as a spectacle and its disciplining, TANZ by Austrian Florentina Holzinger focuses on the legacy of classical dance.

Performers between the ages of twenty and eighty, under the direction of the first ballerina to dance Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring naked, back in 1972, undergo rigorous training in a ballet d’action.  In an operatic setting, the frantic quest for perfection in an ephemeral world comes alive through brutal, parodic images. 




Suitable for audiences 18+

Viewer discretion is advised: The performance contains scenes of nudity, self-harm acts, and stroboscopic effects.



PROLOGUE | PRE-SHOW TALKS


Young theatre and dance researchers introduce audiences to the performances


For many of us, a Festival performance is a fascinating, unexplored universe waiting to be discovered. What is the starting point of a performance? What “school” does it fall into? What can be inferred about the process of art making through the style of a particular performance?


Through this new practice, launched in the summer of 2021, the Athens Epidaurus Festival, in cooperation with the Theatre Studies Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, as part of the Master’s programme “Greek and World Theatre: Drama, Performance, Education”, invites post-graduate students – theatre researchers and dance experts – to delve into the Peiraios 260 performances and facilitate access to this creative world for audiences. Young researchers and experts will whet festival-goers’ appetites and provide them with theoretical tools in order to give them a better understanding of the performance they are about to enjoy.


Due to the ongoing pandemic, all performance dates are subject to change