Contemporary Cruising

by Contemporary Cruising |October 19, 2015 4:29 pm

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Pushing the boundaries, or: choreography and its expanded fields.
Moderator: Andre Lepecki with: Francois Chaignaud & Cecilia Bengolea, Florentina Holzinger, Ofelia Jarl Ortega

by Contemporary Cruising |October 15, 2015 11:47 pm

On Schönheitsabend by Vincent Riebeek and Florentina Holzinger
By Ellen Söderhult

Schönheitsabend is a performance created and performed by Florentina Holzinger and Vincent Riebeek. It is a collage of references taken out of context and manipulated in ways that makes us experience them differently and messes with ideas of dramaturgy, puts beauty right next to silly, romantic next to cheap, formal next to trashy, sexy pole dance next to dramatic ballet. The experimental approaches popular, megalomaniac or avant-garde meets lame and skillfulness overlaps just-enough. Or other ways around, but it restructures sensuous relationships between things. In that sense, one could put it under the label “postinternet”, because dance history is no longer necessarily chronological, and what is considered dance history does not anymore have to be confirmed by the same gate-keepers. The internet does not only change what is archived and available, but probably also how we are conditioned to or abled to think dramaturgy. The way of using and mis-using dance history is made even more exciting because of Holzinger’s and Riebeek’s way of executing the material in an almost sport like manner, and by insisting on transforming the heteronormative heritage into something queer, in which gender roles are dispersed, re-written or opposed.

The opening of Schönheitsabend is a scene from a ballet that is performed convincingly but technically not especially well executed. Florentina Holzinger enters the state in a remarkable, very long, red, glittering robe, platina blond hair and makeup enough to fit into the opera ballet. The heterosexual love story and the display of beauty and conventional romance through the vocabulary of ballet make ballet float since it is not contextualized by the opera house or performed to perfection but executed more like just-enough-good. Here it is, in the most glorious costumes and full-on sound, the gestural expression well worked but with the technical excellence removed. What can be taken away from the form, for it to still be intact? What is this dance, ballet, when re-contextualized?

As the loving couple meet, the representation of the well behaved, tempered subject is destroyed by lust and desire. After a from a ballet perspective inappropriate undressing, revealing too much flesh for the well behaved protagonists of a ballet, the next scene shows the loving couple displaying pole dance tricks and showing off beautiful bodies and lots of skin. Still with the just-enough-to-make-it-work-kind of style that points out any partly hidden criteria for quality in defining or evaluating a thing. The explicit dealing with sexiness after a ballet duet ends in a very long scene in which Holzinger with a penis prosthesis penetrates the prince (Riebeek) as they execute an acrobatic duet resembling a version of a youtubeclip of Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste (except with a penis in an anus, staying there for the full duration of the duet). The ways things are transformed and put in relation points to a different way of considering logic that seems relevant. The quoting tests borders and relations, or create meaningful relations between things that seems non-sensical when at first put side by side. This asks for new relationships between things to be formed.

Schönheitsabend is a title that in relationship to the content could lead ones thoughts to the importance of aesthetic pleasure in performing arts history.

When the most random fairy-tale-techno-rave costumes, the fashion of the hottest pole dancing and the most grandiose ballet costumes are put side by side, it surfaces the performing arts history’s past (and present) of didactics, conditioning or social control – of leading by example, educating, shaping our ideas of a good subject, of taste, of decency and proper ways of presenting the self. But side by side with an history of queer-performance, utopian promise on stage, eroticism and ideas of sexy. Schönheitsabend is confusing how beauty is related to heterosexual love, gender stereotypes, ideas of harmony, sex and control.

Schönheitsabend is misusing mechanisms of control to serve other purposes. The display of the good, rich, heterosexual love couple is getting high on drugs, destroying things, displaying the trashiest sexiness, clumsiness and destruction. Representational values are ignored.

In the performance, Holzinger ang Riebeek confuses theatre with reality, being oneself with pretending to be or impersonating another. It confuses relationships within a narrative or a defined fiction with relationships outside of the stage. It confuses what a subject is and what theatre means. It is blurring borders between techniques, styles, aesthetics and tone, to confuse the border of each thing and make me ask questions about where the end of it is or if it actually has ends. Which makes it more like a rehearsal for life than a conservation of something passed or a sport put on stage, sort of approaching the function proposed in Theatre of Cruelty (Artaud). It challenges my ability to create other relationships between the familiar ingredients. The violent distortions of whatever material is being considered is an emptying out of meaning and acutely re-contextualize or confuse subjects, notions and whatever comes their way.

Schönheitsabend, by Florentina Holzinger and Vincent Reibeck, follows (after making a solo each) the trilogy made by the performance couple with the alluring titles Keine applaus for sheisse, Spirit and Wellness.

Making an attempt to write about it, the references on youtube is quite easy to trace. That makes sense. The use of references, the use of youtube, the use of the official inofficial in this show interests me. Florentina’s winning presence makes even the long part of re-enacting Nijinsky’s last performance, sitting on a chair waiting for the drugs to make her do something somehow provocative and seductive. The use of skill and non-sensical sensuousness is what makes this show without a doubt one of the better attempts to make something move.

by Contemporary Cruising |September 13, 2015 10:27 pm

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Body + Freedom, Nils Amadeus Lange, Florentina Holzinger, Vincent Riebeek, Manuel Scheiwiller, Berliner Festspiele, Foering Affairs, Berlin, 2015

by Contemporary Cruising |March 29, 2015 8:15 pm

Three scenes from Kein Applaus für Scheisse: by Lauren Bakst
American Realness at Abrons Arts Center

One. I remember Florentina Holzinger’s first costume. It was an oversize, orange-dyed dress, a muumuu really. She was sitting in a chair center stage. A minute or so earlier, a high fan kick had revealed her lack of underwear. Vincent Riebeek, in a similarly loose blue garment, kneeled to sneak his head between her legs—the image momentarily evoking a familiar sexual position. He inched away from Holzinger to display a red string exiting her vagina and entering his mouth. Turning his body to face the audience, he pulled and chewed and the string kept coming.

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