"“Activate your waist,” “come up from your pelvis,” “lift to go down.” Such exercises physically inculcate historical convention in the body, rehearsing, as she explains, “grand poses, developed over centuries.”"
"“For the sake of pleasure and corruption let's masturbate!” She wants them to feel it too: “My vagina is glowing!” As the girls sprawl out on the floor and tentatively touch their vulvas, Trixie teaches them another form of bodily governance, beginning with the clitoral hood."
"“TODAY I'M GOING TO TEACH you how to govern your bodies.” With these opening words, the dancer Beatrice “Trixie” Cordua launches Florentina Holzinger's breakout performance, TANZ (Dance, 2019). The stage is set as a dance studio with two barres and no mirrors. Trixie plays a dance teacher instructing four students in pointe technique at the barre."
"All of Holzinger's performance art is dedicated to the paradoxes that inhere in Trixie's training: pain and pleasure, levity and gravity, vitality and inanition, authority and conformity, the duration of the present (“today”) and the endurance of history (“centuries”)."
A dance studio stage with barres and no mirrors frames a teacher figure instructing four students in pointe technique. The training begins with posture conformity through commands that activate the waist, lift from the pelvis, and coordinate movement. The exercises physically rehearse conventional “grand poses” developed over centuries. The studio becomes hot and the students remove clothing between movements. The teacher demands they look out deadpan and then progressively become naked, culminating in explicit instruction to masturbate. The mood changes as the teacher expresses bodily excitement and urges the students to feel it, beginning with the clitoral hood. The performance centers on tensions between pain and pleasure, levity and gravity, authority and conformity, and the present moment versus historical endurance.
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