TANZ

A ballet class under the direction of Beatrice Schönherr, the first dancer to dance Le Sacre de Printemps nude (John Neumeier's Le Sacre, 1972), frames Florentina Holzinger's work TANZ. Holzinger's performers also don pointe shoes and soar through the air—or rather, hover in it—but there is much more going on here. Rigorous ballet training at the barre, collective rituals in which they learn to master body and mind, and the acquisition of supernatural powers, such as flight. In an operatic setting, brutal parodies of sensationalist images, such as those seen in ballet, comedy and pornography, emerge. With a cast of women in their twenties and eighties, all with different backgrounds in dance, TANZ raises the question of the legacy of dance itself: how can the cult of beauty inherent in this tradition be reconciled?