Featured in Numéro Berlin

In Conversation with Florentina Holzinger Interview by Carolin Desiree Becker

1 September 2023

In doing so, she questions and explores the limits of physicality and conventionally prevailing ideas – and often leaves her audience wondering.
As part of this year’s Berlin Atonal, festival for experimental music, performance and visual art, Florentina Holzinger presents her publicly effective study “Étude For Church”

You once said dance was almost something meaningless to you, yet you’ve literally been at it for almost 15 years. What had moved you to dance in the past and what was the turning point that led you into choreography/performance, or was it simply a logical development?

Yes, I didn’t literally mean senseless, but functionless, it has no concrete function or practical use. The metaphysics, which dance deals with a lot, has always interested me and is also inexhaustible inspiration – at the same time it was always clear to me: dance is functionless and therefore you don’t need to take it so obsessively seriously. That’s why it’s the constant underdog of the art forms – but I experience exactly that thing about it as very refreshing and pleasant.

It tends to be primarily the audience that experiences the thrill of a performance, in that sense you are more the string-puller in the role of choreographer, or the executive as performance. Performance in itself is a lot of organization. What does a performance have to have for you personally that it carries you away, entertains you or makes you think?

I like humor. For me, art can be complicated, defying, questioning the social consensus, cynical, and a challenge to everyone involved. I expect a lot from my audience: openness, trust, participation, courage and above all time. Beautiful and ugly, good and bad – what fascinates me about art and especially dance is that these supposed opposites are so close together and interchangeable.