Florentina Holzinger (born 1986) is an Austrian choreographer, director and performance artist. Her stage work involves nude all-female casts and sexual acts. She is based in the Netherlands. [1]
Florentina Holzinger (born 1986) is an Austrian choreographer, director and performance artist. Her stage work involves nude all-female casts and sexual acts. She is based in the Netherlands. [1]
Holzinger was born in Vienna in 1986, [2] the daughter of a pharmacist and a lawyer. [3] As a child, she was baptised and confirmed Catholic, but left the Church as a young adult "to avoid paying tax". [4] She began studying to be an architect, but soon lost interest, saying that it involved "too much desk time". [5] She studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) at the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam. [2] In 2018, Holzinger was living and working in Vienna and Amsterdam. [6]
Holzinger's 2020 dance work Apollon at NYU Skirball, partly based on George Balanchine's 1928 work Apollo , was called a "feminist freak show" by The New Yorker , with a nude all-female cast, and Apollo as a mechanical bull that they ride for pleasure, along with "playful self-mutilation, dildo use, defecation, and coprophagia". [1] As of 2024, she is an artist-in-residence at Volksbühne Berlin. [7] In August 2024, Bergen Kunsthall presented Havneetyde/Harbour Etude, a new large-scale commission, with a warning that it "will contain explicit depictions of self-mutilation, piercing, needles, blood, loud sounds, and nudity". [7]
Her first opera production, Sancta, based on Paul Hindemith's 1920s expressionist opera Sancta Susanna , was staged in October 2024 at the Mecklenburg State Theatre in Schwerin by the Stuttgart State Opera. It includes live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse among the all-female cast and plentiful (fake and real) blood. [8] Over the opening weekend, eighteen audience members required medical treatment for severe nausea. [8]
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