Audacious Choreographer Florentina Holzinger Is Back With Ballet Horror, ‘Tanz’

That weightlessness, or the effect of it, is “what Romanticism was about,” Cordua said. “They all wanted to get to a higher sphere. I found it really interesting to see and meet people that do all those scary things that I don’t find so scary — these artists that do all these extreme things with their bodies.”

Holzinger sees the body modification scene similarly. In the circus sideshow world, people have trained their bodies “to deal with pain levels so that they can do this physical suspension,” Holzinger said. “People who have not seen or experienced this themselves, they think, this is physically not possible. The skin will rip. We will see all the skin rip! And then they see the skin doesn’t rip, and of course, for them, it’s like magic.”

How different is it “to what people feel when they see a ballet dancer in pointe shoes looking like it’s completely effortless?” she said. “They are all also a bit like, ‘That is something I could not do. How is it possible?’”

Holzinger continued, “A mainstream audience that goes to the ballet house would never question whether this is unhealthy for the ballerina to do,” Holzinger said. “Or that when we watch it, we are experiencing something violent. But when they watch ‘Tanz,’ and they see people suspended, they are shocked that I make my people do something as violent as that.”

In the sideshow arena, people are proud “to call themselves pain artists,” Holzinger said, “but a ballerina would never call herself a pain artist. It’s exactly about the illusion: It is painful, but it should not look painful. And let’s not talk about the pain. It’s effortless.”

Pain, she knows, can be even stronger and more intense in sports. But her experience in contemporary dance, with its focus on somatic ideas of internal attentiveness, was that pain was negative. “Like as a dancer, you should not feel pain,” she said. “When it’s painful, you stop. That was, I guess, also a big fascination for me, to deal with my body in a different way. — where it actually also gets interesting when it is painful. How can you still produce something that you have not felt before?”