Florentina Holzinger

Cyborg freak-show for the strong, featuring ballet history and a rodeo bull.

This is not an evening for the weak of nerves. Instead, this sideshow version of Georg Balanchine’s »Apollon Musagète« is one of the most spookily beautiful and radical contemporary attempts at female self-empowerment on the European performance stage. The original ballet, with music by Igor Stravinski, was about Apollo, the god of music, who assigns the three Muses of art their purpose and leads them to Mount Parnassus. Ninety years after its premiere, choreographer Florentina Holzinger uses Balanchine’s neo-classical showpiece as a taking-off point for an unsparing (for both the audience and performers) exploration of voyeurism, body cult, sexism and artistic genius. Here, the »leader of the Muses« is merely a castrated rodeo bull. Holzinger, who has tickled the nerves of the Summer Festival audience three times already in her collaborations with Vincent Riebeek, once again turns a self-confident destruction of genre borders and of the (high-culture) stage into a stylistic device: sideshow, ballet, artistry, slapstick, live art and sport come together to transgressively explode old and new myths. Shocking moments aside, audience members will get to experience a charming, masterful and sometimes very funny spectacle that will get under their skin.

Audience Discussion on FRI 17th August

APOLLON production leaflet (PDF download)