Florentina Holzinger: Apollon

“They refer to Balanchine in an ironic celebration of beauty. The lyre becomes an executioner’s axe, god is a mechanical rodeo bull, and they take the road to Mount Parnassus by way of a polonaise coupled with dildos, definitely not unplugged. A superbly intelligent, fearless, terrific evening.” Egbert Tholl/Süddeutsche Zeitung

Florentina Holzinger has no reservations when it comes to remixing unusual genres in a fresh way. She has enriched the international performance scene with dizzying acrobatics, muscular women’s bodies and martial-arts fight scenes since 2011 – pop-cultural references and a penchant for trash included. In her latest work, Apollon, six naked women conquer George Balanchine’s neoclassical ballet of the same name from 1928 about the god of the arts and his three muses. But prancing around the poster boy of Olympus is not what Holzinger and her colleagues have in mind. They are themselves the stars of this show, and have some quite bizarre and daring tricks up their sleeves. Armed with black humour, elements of a circus freak show and 1960s live art, the performers challenge the neo-liberal cult of the body and its voyeuristic mechanisms. In pointe shoes and with Olympic weights on their shoulders, they push the vain god off his throne on Mount Parnassus.
In some scenes of the performance Apollon self-injurious acts are portrayed, which could have a disturbing effect on some viewers.