Bringing the Bodies: Florentina Holzinger Corrupts the Female Nude
By Caroline Lillian Schopp
“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. (Holzinger typically performs as one of them.) Over the next thirty minutes, Trixie’s training in bodily governance shifts dramatically. At first, she disciplines the “girls,” as she calls them, in postural conformity: “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.”
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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”). In documentation from the performance’s first years, Trixie can be seen prowling passionately among the barres, demonstrating poses; in 2025, at eighty-two years of age and with diagnoses of Parkinson’s and lung cancer, she performed TANZ seated in a wheelchair. As she gracefully noted in a monologue, Trixie knew she would soon die; she did, in July that year.
Holzinger’s performance art persistently grapples with these discrepant figurations of the body: the passionate, punctual, biological body on the one hand, and, on the other, the continuities of its representation through historical time. It does so with unwavering attention to the tensions that accompany what she calls “the naked body that reads feminine onstage.” Intensely, excessively, Holzinger and her ensemble use their naked corporeality to intervene in the long misogynist tradition of the female nude. To use Trixie’s term from TANZ, they “corrupt” this tradition in works that disclose how ecology and iconography intersect in the movements, moods, and modulations of the naked female body. Holzinger’s artistic commitments are provocatively on view in SEAWORLD VENICE, a performance installation for the Austrian pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. It exhibits nudes à la Titian’s 1538 Venus of Urbino, a figure she described to me as wanting to “wake up.” These nudes climb a rope to invert their bodies and ring a giant bell, ride a Sea-Doo in ever faster circles in a flooded pavilion wing, and pose defiantly while immersing themselves in a tank filled with the viewing public’s recycled urine.
Physical discipline, hardcore training, and the explicit embrace of what Holzinger calls “a strong female body” are central tenets of her performance art.[4] So are uninhibited pleasure, slapstick, storytelling, collective care, and a tangible investment in what she describes as the ensemble’s “intergenerational contract.”[5] Combining “high” and “low” art forms, and assembling performers of different ages and abilities, her work brings together body techniques from classical and modern dance with sport, stunting, sex, circus, and so-called freak-show arts. Risky ascents and breathtaking falls, feats of physical and mental endurance, and an array of specialized body techniques like self-piercing and body suspension are interspersed with musical interludes: quiet choral songs, bawdy sailors’ chants, and saccharine Schlager.
