Florentina Holzinger Roundtable: How to Stage a Performance in Venice

Florentina Holzinger: I’m a dancer and choreographer, and my project is called ‘Seaworld Venice’. I don’t want to say too much, but we’re dealing with a lot of water in the pavilion.

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It’s fucking challenging. It made me reconsider my choices, because I’m not a long-duration performance artist. I’m not used to working for seven months in this way. As a student, I made money working for people who had me roll around museum floors for hours. I don’t want the performance to become labour or something you wish was over. In shows with shorter runs, it’s already a complex effort to take care of everything. After three months, people may stop caring, and things can get sloppy. How do we avoid that?

But the biggest issue is money. Thinking the Biennale is a good thing for performance is the wrong perspective. It’s not made for that, so you need to hustle like a motherfucker. I come from state-funded systems, and suddenly I’m busy with private funding and sponsors. I know I’ll have to make compromises. And of course, it’s different because you need to bring production units and equipment onto an island! I won’t be able to fulfil everything I had planned; this will be a process of transformation until the very end. There are all kinds of bureaucratic challenges, too – we don’t want our pavilions to get closed down. It’s interesting to try to solve these riddles somehow. 

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It’s cool to be faced with impossibilities and find solutions. But it’s also scary for me because it’s different from what I’m used to. It asks for flexibility and openness – you can’t control it all the time.