FLORENTINA HOLZINGER

In these last several years, Florentina Holzinger’s performances have caused a sensation for their ability to articulate registers and references, and for the unprecedented enthusiasm with which they reference pop-culture and entertainment as a way to place great art and great performances at the service of a decidedly emancipatory message. Ophelia’s Got Talent is the latest demonstration of this. A meditation on the figure of Ophelia takes place on a stage resembling a television studio, in which the aquatic element serves as a framework for a series of variations on the feminine, death, and transformation. For two and a half hours, a sword swallower and a singing child, dancer-trapeze artists and swimmers, harpists and harpies, a pool and a helicopter compose a succession of astonishing scenes. This entangling of metaphors and metamorphoses, an ocean of cultural and historical references yield brutal, violent episodes. Through Ophelia as well as her ancestors and cousins, multiple generations of women talk about the strength, fragility, and incoercibility of the female body. As they mark the twilight of the “Age of Aquarius”, they also probe our capacity to reinvent ourselves and adapt to new forms of life.