Non-Professionals Vol. 1
Our inaugural nonprofessionals are performance artist and choreographer Florentina Holzinger and dancer and artist Trixie Cordua.
Trixie Cordua trained at the Royal Ballet School in London (UK), and at the Staatsoper School in Hamburg (DE) and worked with George Balanchine, Todd Bolender, John Cranko, Agnes de Mille, Maurice Béjart and John Neumeier, among others. In the 70’s and 80’s, in parallel with her dance commitments, she began a personal choreographic research in NY and started choreographic and filmic collaborations with Nam June Paik and Dieter Roth amongst others. In 1972 she caused a scandal in Frankfurt being first
ballerina to dance The Rite of Spring naked. She recently worked with Nicole Seiler on The Wanderers Peace, a documentary piece about her own life. Today she produces her own pieces in Berlin and performs for Florentina Holzinger, being awarded the FAUST Price for her role in A Divine Comedy.
Florentina Holzinger studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development at The Amsterdam University of the Arts. In 2020, she presented for the first time the work Etude for an Emergency at the Münchner Kammerspiele; a stunt opera developed with a cast of opera singers and stuntactresses – a musical composition for 10 bodies and a car. Currently as an artist-in-residence at the Volksbühne in Berlin she created Ophelia’s Got Talent (2022), which was selected for the Theatertreffen 2023. Her dance pieces are driven by the notion of identity, sexual and physical transgression. Drawing inspiration as much from Viennese Actionism, body art and bodybuilding, martial arts as from classical ballet, cabaret, and circus; Her work is intrinsically linked with the aim of exploring modes of embodiment and the development of practices to support a physical life in action.
Florentina Holzinger’s works are first and foremost experiences that have to be lived. Describing the things that can be described leads to a sensationalized reading of the work although they often enough illustrate the aspects of the body that we are intimately familiar with and take for granted: the body naked, the body doing the bodily functions that it knows how to do. But the aspects that are harder to describe are the powerful, visceral beauty, of cinematic quality, facilitated by an incredible technical mastery and discipline. All are presented with a very generous intimacy, which revels in vulnerability and humor. In many ways it feels like being in the privacy of a place where bodies are first and foremost bodies, liberated from the many boxes the outside world has ready for them, where Bodies are never just bodies – as Silvia Federici reminds us the birth of the body (in the 17th century) also marked its end, as the concept of the body ceased to define a specific organic reality, and became instead a political signifier of class relations, and of the shifting, continuously redrawn boundaries which these relations produce in the map of human exploitation.
In Florentina’s work bodies forge a deep relationship of trust to become their own kind of instruments in a unique orchestra that she is directing. This collective leap of faith is set almost always in historical context whether it is Apollon, a hack on Balanchines’s 1920s Apollon Musagete, A Divine Comedy, or Ophelia’s Got Talent. Tanz, which will be performed in Lausanne Feb. 23-26, was awarded „Best Performance of the Year” by Theater Heute and with the NESTROY Price for Best Direction. It reflects on tradition and narrative departing from the romantic ballet La Syphide. It is a lesson in dance history told through contemporary eyes, the desire to fly, a constant leitmotif in theatre, is being reimagined at what seems the limit of physical ability, meanwhile, a sober homage to ballet draws on its affinities to porn. The ballet instructor is none other than Trixie, the professional ballerina who in fact shaped the role herself, telling Florentina she wanted to play a dirty old ballerina, saying “I want to do horrible things”.
