The stage is shrouded in darkness as eerie moans, cackles and chirps pierce the air. The outline of a back gradually becomes visible. As the setting brightens, that shape turns into a woman, Beatrice Cordua, an 83-year-old ballet veteran, seated with her back to the audience. She makes her way to her feet and holds her arms out in welcome.
“Today, I am going to teach you how to govern your bodies,” she says. “Girls, get the barres.”
The first act of “Tanz,” a work by the Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger, an audacious star of the European dance and performance scene, is structured like a ballet class, though fittingly in this darkly humorous work, it bristles with tension. Aside from a microphone pack strapped around her torso, Cordua is nude.
As the class progresses from pliés to tendus, Cordua urges the dancers to shed their layers. “I’m hot and I have nothing on,” Cordua says. “Take something off.”
They comply. Soon the stage is a sea of skin.
Opening at NYU Skirball on Feb. 14 for an all-too-brief two-night run, “Tanz” (2019) is a daring exploration of the aging body, the art of discipline and training, and the illusion of ephemerality in ballet. It also embraces terror — for every sylph, there is a witch. Created for an all-female cast of 11, ranging in age from 30 to over 80, “Tanz” digs into what it means to take flight, particularly in relation to 19th-century Romantic ballets like “La Sylphide” and “Giselle.”
Gradually, ballet class veers into ballet horror. Holzinger, 39, is influenced by circus and sideshow acts — she loves a good stunt — and throughout “Tanz,” high and low art share center stage. One scene involves body suspension, in which hooks pierce the skin of a performer’s upper back and are connected to cords that lift her into the air. As she dangles, her legs bend and curl in an aerial dance that makes you cringe in imagined pain. But with shock also comes a sense of awe.
Holzinger, who was an athlete before discovering contemporary dance, has a gift for making hard-to-watch things absorbing. And a gift for comic relief. “Everything we do needs to be, to some degree, entertaining,” she said. “Otherwise we lose it ourselves. I do feel as an artist, the obligation is to also entertain, to make it easier to engage with the tougher content or more complex content so that they stay with us in those moments.”
Cordua, who goes by Trixie, admires Holzinger for how seriously she takes her work and for its risk. She loves that Holzinger isn’t, she said, “into wishy-washy.”
Cordua isn’t either — nor does she have hangups around nudity. She’s always been open to it. In the ’70s, she performed naked in John Neumeier’s ballet “Le Sacre.” She met Holzinger at a panel discussion in Berlin and was instantly drawn to her.
“My first choreographer was George Balanchine, who I met in Hamburg when he came in the end of the ’50s,” Cordua said. “He impressed me, and I found him very radical as opposed to other people. He was so strong. And Merce Cunningham, too. Pina Bausch. It can be somebody very different, but I have to have this very strong feeling of somebody really is doing something, and that’s what I felt with her.”
Holzinger was struck by Cordua’s wisdom, by how her experience has a way of speaking through her body. “Undeniable truth,” she said.
Nudity is something you don’t often see with a performer of Cordua’s age, Holzinger said: “Trixie has an amazing body, but you see the signs of time on it. Yet at the same time, you see that she is the most professional dancer of all of us.”
“We are all confronted with a body that is aging,” she added. “And what does this mean for a dancer?”
In “Tanz,” the idea of the aging body is clearly seen in the ballet class. As Cordua teaches, encouraging her students to strip away more clothing, she also uses evocative imagery that the best teachers employ to describe exercises, including the fondu, the sinking down or melting of the supporting leg.
“I know we can describe a movement in color, in taste, in music,” Cordua says in the work. “But I would describe fondu as a material. It’s velvet. It’s a very strong and woven material. With a very soft top.”
The scene, as instructive as it is amusing, shows the work and nuance that go into training a dancer. “We were of the conviction that if we really take this buildup of a ballet class seriously as a structure — that this really works for a body to gain knowledge about something,” Holzinger said. “And if you skip a part of it, then it is a joke or a parody.”
When “Tanz” turns into a different kind of experience — enter the witches — the piece moves into more ominous territory, making reference to more sinister characters in Romantic ballet: Madge, the old witch, from “La Sylphide,” and Myrtha, the queen of the Wilis, who forces men to dance to their death, from “Giselle.” Cordua becomes someone else, something else.
“It’s never clear: Is she a good one or a bad one?” Holzinger said. “Because even in that situation, she kind of still is this person that is very sympathetic to the audience.”
The fantastical side of “Tanz” relates to the idea of suspension: Performers hang from motorcycles, which Holzinger referred to as “urban broomsticks” — “these stinky, unfriendly things. They represent actually monsters nowadays.”
They are raised high above the stage just as dancers, in one moment, are lifted into the air by their buns. “To people who are exposed to the circus world, a hair hanger is the most normal thing on the planet,” Holzinger said. “Like everybody’s disappointed if they wouldn’t see that in a show.”
That weightlessness, or the effect of it, is “what Romanticism was about,” Cordua said. “They all wanted to get to a higher sphere. I found it really interesting to see and meet people that do all those scary things that I don’t find so scary — these artists that do all these extreme things with their bodies.”
Holzinger sees the body modification scene similarly. In the circus sideshow world, people have trained their bodies “to deal with pain levels so that they can do this physical suspension,” Holzinger said. “People who have not seen or experienced this themselves, they think, this is physically not possible. The skin will rip. We will see all the skin rip! And then they see the skin doesn’t rip, and of course, for them, it’s like magic.”
How different is it “to what people feel when they see a ballet dancer in pointe shoes looking like it’s completely effortless?” she said. “They are all also a bit like, ‘That is something I could not do. How is it possible?’”
Holzinger continued, “A mainstream audience that goes to the ballet house would never question whether this is unhealthy for the ballerina to do,” Holzinger said. “Or that when we watch it, we are experiencing something violent. But when they watch ‘Tanz,’ and they see people suspended, they are shocked that I make my people do something as violent as that.”
In the sideshow arena, people are proud “to call themselves pain artists,” Holzinger said, “but a ballerina would never call herself a pain artist. It’s exactly about the illusion: It is painful, but it should not look painful. And let’s not talk about the pain. It’s effortless.”
Pain, she knows, can be even stronger and more intense in sports. But her experience in contemporary dance, with its focus on somatic ideas of internal attentiveness, was that pain was negative. “Like as a dancer, you should not feel pain,” she said. “When it’s painful, you stop. That was, I guess, also a big fascination for me, to deal with my body in a different way. — where it actually also gets interesting when it is painful. How can you still produce something that you have not felt before?”
And Holzinger, as the choreographer, embraces feeling her works firsthand. She performs in them, “Tanz” included, so she can know how her dances feel from the inside.
“That’s the fun of it,” she said. “My experiences of staying outside of something tend to feel like exercises to me. So I prefer to spend my time not exercising too much, but being really in that project at the moment when it happens.”
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