Author: Contemporary Cruising

Instead of consistently staying with one protocol it rather changes everything all the time, including how the audience is addressed and what is put in the frame of a dance performance. The result is continuously surprising and throws me in between emotional states and ways of relating and making sense. The cohesion within the piece is created by relating to Agon in the sense of protagonist, recuperation through violence but also by it all coming from Florentina Holzinger in somehow autobiographical sense. Though, most of the time this autobiographical idea seems secondary, and most of the time I can not tell if it is her as a private person standing on stage reading us her personal notes or a continuation of a theatrical proposal or something in between. It doesn’t bother me, rather the way those “either or’s” are challenged is invigorating and appealing.

This piece makes me excited. It comes across as rigorously insistent on ignoring what is expected of it, without making that a purpose in itself. It seems not to care about what it looks or doesn’t look like and as such, it can fulfill dreams about things to stage in a fancy theatre in Vienna one did not know about. The displacement of the recognizable, the removing from context and expected meaning, functions as alienation. It opens for experiencing them as they are instead of through recognition. Where recognition is reaffirming the knowable, this kind of displacement makes things useless in relation to their original function, separates the purpose from the thing. In that sense, the ballet dancer warming up in the background and then doing a pas de deux in the boxing ring with Florentina Holzinger (in kick-boxing outfit and as herself), is taken out of the ballet tradition, the context of the opera, the ballet company, the narrative and the display of the good subbject. What is made visible is very different, and requires another way of perceiving it. It offers the spectator to create meaning on difference premises. When the audience is asked by the coach if anybody wants to challenge Holzinger in a fight, the audience is addressed as in a street performance, and when the very obviously planted accomplice begins the fight it is all of a sudden very clear that the fighting is in no way pretended. The kick-boxing match taking place within a dance performance, with strange layers of it being a part of a personal recuperation-narrative estranges not only the content but also the contract of the theatre. Through all this, it opens for newness that is not within what we already know and recognize.

A theater can feel like a strange place in 2014. From an audience perspective it can be considered as place for a break from screens, social media and as place for a state of being that is both passive – like a hostage or a prisoner staying put in ones seat quietly, upright and attentive and as always in Vienna policed so that we don’t take photos or behave inappropriate – and hopefully also active. Active in the sense of making sense, having an experience, ungrounding ones understanding of truths and reality. It is a creation of meaning that is to a certain extent an individual work, that is done collectively and through sharing an experience. A shared experience that is also singular in the sense of what it produces for each and everyone. What AGON offers is not a place for safe identification with ones pre-conceived understanding of things but rather an opportunity for good old alienation. Even so, it manages to be intuitive and inspiring.

Even though including some kind of narrative and quite a lot of speech, it detaches from dramatic theatre through activities like the fight that is obviously not fake and clearly includes actual pain and exhaustion. This fight makes me consider everything that is going on in front of me as what it is, and nothing necessarily representing anything else than that. It makes things exciting to look at Holzingers piece from such a perspective: to watch a dance as an object more than as a way to express something else (like f.ex heterosexual love). the physical exhaustion become a body state that is universal rather than exclusively a narrative component in a psychological drama designed to be understood in one way only. The subjects of exhaustion, healing, intensity is instead presented so that they become like objects for me to experience and reflect upon.

However objectified the activities might be, I appreciate Holzingers decision to appear as herself and be accompanied in her solo-project. It can be seen as an important acknowledgement of the fact that we are not authentic selves but become ourselves in interaction and exchange with others and the environment. Also, thanks to the five brilliant additional performers in very different roles or functions the performance manages major shifts from united and explosive chaos, through multiple activities and agendas activated simultaneously, to energetic and great group dancing in togetherness and not. In other words drastic shifts of both space, attention, temporality and atmosphere. Even when dancing together what is expressed is not in accord – the dancing is going on with different but other agendas than to express. Expression IS, but the manipulative impossibility of controlling the interpretation of expression seems forsaken. Instead, they carry on with their respective agendas while dancing and the expression produced is altered and manifold.

The two minute showers of violent physicality in the kick-boxing match is contrasted by the breaks in between and is a part of the unsettled overall dramaturgy – clouds of intensively vibrating energy and physical exhaustion in all its sweatiness and heavy breathing countered by confession-like attempts on an elegy, while the ballet dancer simultaneously is performing a sort of slow violence in the back of the room. The warming up and the private conversation interrupting the elegy-attempt is only a few of the many activities performed on the “off-stage-on-stage”. Other such activities are smoking water pipe and slamming side doors or changing clothes.

If we live in times of anxiety, in times where chock value and surprise, social media and pop culture is dominant, it is not impossible to think that much art is created in a try to go against or provide an alternative to this mode of oversaturation and avoidance of boredom. If pop culture is all about consensual acceptance and maximum profit through chock, spectacle and marketing the eccentric individual (basically all the opposites of what already Rainer considered the essence of dance), it is not completely unreasonable to feel a need to contemplate on something that would never get ones attention outside the theatre. That sort of binary antagonism could however be said to in some way reinforce what it opposes. It is generative to read the intensive and dense performance of Holzinger as an all together other proposal, not a negation of something, not a continuation of art history’s negation as creation but as a completely different proposal. It is as if Holzinger were assuming an utopian reality, without making a deal out of it and without letting this become the subject of the performance, or the performance become a comment upon something. It avoids becoming about anything else than itself. Agon is not like pop culture, it is just not the opposite of it either.

It is a dance performance, but a dance performance that changes what a dance performance is, through its lack of adaptation to what I recognize as trends in style and approach to contemporary dance. The not too perfect, but very specific dancing, talking and being on stage in some aspect challenges the idea of the theatre as a place for admiration, identification and being amazed over beauty, skillfulness or cleverness. For dance as a western art form, with its history of easily becoming about technical perfection and the display of the good subject (f.ex. delicate, well-behaved, rich, beautiful, 16-year old girls and princes), it is specifically interesting to push the expression in a way that is not about perfecting. Perfection could also mean cementation, reaffirmation of the aesthetic rules, trends or truths approaching essentialism. In the show other reasons and ways of pushing a body than to achieve perfection in a dance technique that is recognized by a patriarchal and racist culture is definitely bravely invested in. In the same way the superpositioning of the kick-boxing and the ballet training is interesting as two takes on violence (and pain) – one very direct and for some empowering, one as a kind of slow violence through a different kind of discipline and a constant relation to the ideal, though, of course, also possibly empowering for some. When Holzinger does the supporting in a part of a pas de deux that looks very much like what is available on youtube from Balanchines version of Agon, it removes enough context and meaning to alienate and trigger questions. The effortlessness displayed by the ballet dancer, and the exhausted kick boxer brings to my attention violence to ones own body, violence in history, structures and systems. The gap in-between what it is and what it looks like as well as what truths or taken for granteds an opinion is coming out of is highlighted.

If one consider feminism defined not only by women getting equal rights to men, but as a much bigger question concerning the invention of new ways of living together, it includes valuing traits that are traditionally seen as feminine higher. It is then nice that Holzinger doesn’t stay in any of the many states she passes through. There is respectful obedience, violent fighting, violent dancing, kicking and hitting. There is also display of emotional vulnerability, doubt, confusion and softness. When displayed in the same performance by the same person I feel optimistic about a feminism that bothers to try to change what is recognized and appraised, feminism that is not only about the oppressed taking space but also about the oppressors realizing their position, giving space and recognizing other values. Rather than trying to copy or embody a thinkable male stereotype Holzinger ignores what might be expected of a female body on stage. Expectations on female passivity are crushed and the “appropriate” from a normative perspective is let down.

There are important differences between a kick boxing fight that is essentially a game, an agreement with a very elaborate contract and violence outside those frames. Despite that, it is somehow difficult for me to deal with the fact that they are hitting each other just a couple of meters away from me. Even so, it brings my attention to the fact that I am passively part of an extremely violent world where oppressions and injustices doesn’t know any end. (There really seems to be no end to the physical violence instigated by the western world and economical interests). It is a somehow importantly irresponsible proposal, that doesn’t hide behind being correct or interesting in respect of trends and manners. It doesn’t tell me what to think about it, it doesn’t really make sense or finish what it started. It leaves me with fragments, echoes and empathies. It leaves me with work to do, in a state of energized confusion and excitement. It leaves me optimistic and with an interested “What just happened?”
2014