Florentina Holzinger / Vincent Riebeek

German Premiere & Co-Production

They’re back! After last year’s audience-overpowering WELLNESS, the radical-aesthetic dance-innovation-duo now presents SCHÖNHEITSABEND.

The duo has long stopped being the well-kept secret it once was. With their performance trilogy about contemporary body image – whose final part, WELLNESS, was performed at last year’s Summerfestival – Florentina Holzinger and Vincent Riebeek have become fixtures of the European theater scene. Now, in SCHÖNHEITSABEND, they take a look back at littleremembered role models of dance history: choreographer couples like Vaslav Nijinsky and Ida Rubinstein, or Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste, in whom they found the precursors to their own transgressive aesthetic. During their residency at the Julius Hans Spiegel Center for Exoticism in Modern Dance, Holzinger and Riebeek came upon a number of early-twentieth-century pioneers of the dance avant-garde – who, like them, had developed new concepts of beauty and imbued their perfomances with senses of madness, ecstasy, explicit eroticism and self-estrangement in the exotic. Despite limited knowledge of ballet technique, they appropriated the orientalist Ballets Russes classic SHÉHÉRAZADE, which led them to create an absurd love story interwoven with ballet history. After AVAILABLE LIGHT and the performance of Ballet de Lorraine, SCHÖNHEITSABEND is the youngest reflection of the history of the avant-garde in dance.