Performed by Florentina Holzinger and company at the Battersea Arts Centre, 1st November 2022.
Witches on brooms, & bikes. The calming Madame french teacher ballet class. Hooks, endurance, the second act. Rats, planting trees, magic, nakedness, blood, holes, red slippers, swan, wolf, all this & more. Read on for a deconstruction of the flabbergasting performance that was TANZ.
Apart from a stark naked 80-something-year-old ballet teacher (played by Beatrice Cordua), we are among four striving ballerinas who obediently stand at the barre. These young ladies are pulled through a series of classical dance exercises narrated by Madame’s calming instructive tone and the 19th century romantic ballet music. We are lulled into the comforts of the class. This by no means is going to be an ordinary training. What ensues is ‘a combination of things that don’t usually fit together to form a fully new constellation’.
Madame asks her dancers to remove clothing, layer by layer, and indeed – her dancers eventually join her in the nakedness. Madame’s initial shocking lack of clothing is soon the costume of the evening. In this first act, I find myself examining the bodies I see before me. Intrusive and judgmental thoughts cross my mind. ‘They aren’t as lean as the ‘usual’ ballet dancer.’ My eyes scrutinise the very proportions of their fruity bodies, comparing them to each other, choosing which one is ‘best’. The audience is transported into the hearts and minds of what professional dancers may often fear; ‘am I thin enough?’, ‘am I nimble enough?’. Yet here we have healthy women who stand in their nakedness unashamedly. The stress of ‘being enough’ is no longer the TANZ performer’s burden to carry but rather the audience’s. Who, as the mirror, obsess over their skill and beauty.
The imagery of witches runs through the entire piece. Our first protagonist wears nothing but pointed witchy boots, a black jacket and a witches’ hat, galloping in and amongst the dancers as if she herself is running late to the dance class. She crashes and bangs around the scene, again tripping us up and away from a ‘normal’ dance piece.
There is always something to keep the viewer’s eye engaged. Apart from the ongoing ballet class, the side-lines are fizzing with action: we see other naked dancers preparing: washing and combing their hair & putting on makeup; one wakes up from a slumber of white sheets suspended in mid-air; another sits by the wayside on a chair observing her contemporaries. In essence, there is no ‘backstage’. The scene is set. The very choreography of the piece weaves in backstage and preparatory action for the next chapter. Everything emerges right before our very eyes.
A handheld camera begins to film the dancers individually. The livestream is projected up onto screens, hung at both ends of the stage. Not only do we have a view of the stage front-on and from afar, the audience is now also given the opportunity to zoom-in and take in each dancer more personally, from a 360-degree angle.
This is where it gets whacky. Madame asks her dancers to line-up, bottoms-out to the audience, elevating their right leg into the air. She inspects their innermost intimate lady part, giving commentary whilst the live-feed camera films their facial expressions. Everything is on show. This entire sequence likens our voyeuristic content-creating social media age, where one chooses to share life’s (live) updates, little remains for the imagination. The more one chooses to share, the less it belongs to oneself. It is so personal and crass, I feel beyond uncomfortable, squeezing my body tighter together to protect myself.
When you think it cannot get more troubling, it does. The smallest dancer attaches herself to a lever and pulley and by her hair is hoisted upwards. In a later scene, a red-haired performer is shown lying face down on an operating table. We see via the livestream how her counterpart inserts two hooks into her back, foreboding of what is to come. The company gathers around, they share a look, before Red Head is attached to the lever and pulley system and literally by the skin of her back pulled up, only to perform to the music of Swan Lake. She spins high above, given a red broom for good witchy measure. Her skin does not tear. Her back begins to turn purple from the strain. Blood seeps down her body. It draws parallels to Ron Athey’s live performance work wherein body harm acts and endurance forms the crux of his pieces. The audience does not know whether to look away or to stare on in morbid fascination. A young man is carried down the Battersea Arts Centre’s grand hall steps having passed out from this flabbergasting live performance act. My only question is ‘WHY? Why would you do this to yourself?’ It is the embodiment of the performer’s willingness to endure pain in exchange for the audience’s applause and all-encompassing fascination.There are no boundaries. These ladies go beyond. I question whether the shock factor is deeper and more intrusive because these acts of self-harm are performed on the feminine body.
As we push into the second act, the witch gathers force. She is now hooded and long-nosed, causing the entire enchanted forest to fall into disarray: bodies splatter, the big bad wolf is put on a spit, the dancer’s bodies are dowsed in fake blood. The appearance of a rat prop between the bloodied legs of Madame leaves an especially bitter taste in my mouth.
We are taken on a wild ride that is made up of moments of pure brilliance such as the motorbikes suspended in the air impressively danced and writhed upon by the company, as well as radical acts appearing as plain banal. Florentina Holzinger, the lead choreographer as well as performer of this company, expects total commitment and trust from her dancers. Indeed, she does not believe in boundaries and examines the female form in this series of performance experiments.
Insect in Amber 