Florentina Holzinger
Director
Florentina Holzinger (Austria, 1986) studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. She received the danceWEB Scholarship in 2008 and in 2011 at ImPulsTanz Vienna. Her Diploma Solo work Silk got awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe at the lmPulsTanz Festival 2012.
Her collaboration with choreographer/performer Vincent Riebeek, whom she met at SNDO, resulted in a trilogy of pieces – Kein Applaus für Scheisse, Spirit, and Wellness – which toured under the guidance of arts centre CAMPO, whom also produced their later two works Spirit and Wellness.
After causing a sensation with their trilogy, Holzinger embarked on a solo career at the end of 2014 with the production Recovery. In 2015, she reunited with Vincent Riebeek for Schönheitsabend.
From 2015 to 2017, she was artist-in-residence at ICKamsterdam, the International Choreographic Arts Centre. There, she created her first ballet production featuring a female dancer and explored the classical repertoire through dualities: banality versus the sublime, artificial versus authentic, and so on.
This ballet served as the starting point for Apollon, which premiered in the autumn of 2017. Apollon was an unorthodox reworking of Balanchine’s neoclassical ballet of the same name, but this time with an all-female cast.
In 2019, she created TANZ, the second part of her trilogy exploring spectacle and the female body, in which she extended the tradition of classical ballet into performance art, stunt work and witchcraft. The production was awarded the prestigious German Nestroy Theatre Prize and selected for the Theatertreffen in Berlin.
She then took the scale of her work to new heights. A Divine Comedy (2021) was a large-scale reimagining of Dante’s epic, in which she explored the boundary between life and death. With Ophelia’s Got Talent (2022), she created a water ballet about climate change, mythical creatures and female exhaustion.
SANCTA (2024) was her first full-length opera - based on Paul Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna - in which religious symbolism, opera and extreme body art merged to form a much-discussed Gesamtkunstwerk.
Holzinger is now regarded as one of the most influential and pioneering voices in the European performing arts. She is an artist-in-residence at the Volksbühne in Berlin, and her work tours the leading international theatre and opera festivals.
