fLorentina Holzinger’s theater of shocking images and obscene insinuations is being chased by the visual world of social media, by a reality where far more horrifying things are happening and documented than are allowed to be imitated in the theatre. Holzinger may muster so much, the film and the computer games can do more material battles and thrills, the Internet can do more nudity and sexual violence and self-exposure than could ever be accommodated on a stage. With an almost touchingly defiant ambition, the Austrian choreographer tries to make her live theater so blatant that people come anyway – or because of the trigger warnings. Part of her success is that people can feel her struggling up there, physically exhausted, stripping naked for them, over and over again, in every new track.
The Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz rolled out the red do-what-you-want carpet for “Ophelia’s Got Talent”. The sold-out house is first shown a film in which a female, blonde, curly-haired pirate climbs out of a yellow helicopter in front of the Volksbühne and waves to the camera to follow her into the theatre. A moment later, this female Captain Hook gallops through the audience onto the entertainment stage. As the host of the talent show, Hook is the depressing adult in Neverland, just like in “Peter Pan”. Later she will sit sadly and tell about her father’s alcohol addiction and that because of this she will never have children herself.
Houdini Mage
The other dozen women, however, turn the tables on endurance and show how to confront one’s individual fate and possible impairments. They do things to themselves on behalf of the audience. Whether this is compensation and wants to be acted out as a result of the suffering suffered is only explicitly mentioned once, when a woman talks about being raped by her tattoo artist. Once the three-person jury has taken their place on the left by the portal, a pole acrobat in the air, a tattooed sword swallower and a Houdini-like magician in a water box, who frees herself from chains and locks in a race against time and the lack of oxygen, perform their numbers.
The merry game of controlled self-mutilation, with nasal prongs, fishtails and plumbing tools, with plastic bottles and children, with helicopters and wind machines, swan bathing caps and quotes from Schiller, old phallus symbols and new self-liberation gestures, bad tap dancing and bawled shanties goes on and on. Blood flows through the water of the rear, huge aquarium on stilts, the helicopter from the opening film descends over the even larger swimming pool because the naked, self-masturbating Amazons are simply doing it too wildly on it.
“Ophelia’s Got Talent” shines with disturbing images
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Image: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
Florentina Holzinger’s dance theater spectacle, the Johann-Kresnik-Hafte, is also striking in “Ophelia’s Got Talent”. On the one hand, the choreographer and performer laments the destruction of nature in the piece, on the other hand, while society is discussing the necessity and consequences of possible closures of public swimming pools, she organizes a material battle in three heated pools. At the top of Holzinger’s theatrical feminism to-do list is obviously that she and her wives adopt everything that men like to use and also live out the same XXXL theater stage design megalomania that the Volksbühne under Frank Castorf stood. Second, it has to be long, epic, three hours long. Third, things have to happen on stage that are otherwise shown in stunt shows or at sex parties and in porn, in variety shows and at fairs. Holzinger’s theater is “I like doing that too” theatre, a theater where real blood flows when hooks pierce cheek flesh, where a small actress has an anchor tattooed on her bottom, a camera shows live images of an esophagus shows, a disgusting and creepy theater that constantly tenses your biceps and says, look here, we women do all these blatant things up here, that’s awesome.
The female trumping and trumping experiences a lot of approval on this evening. In contemporary theater there are so many performances in which those affected appear themselves, everyone should now be able to speak for themselves instead of just speaking some old text. Holzinger does that for the women. “Ophelia’s Got Talent” is intended to prove once again what limit-breaking and self-empowering actions women are capable of. What a stupid man’s fantasy of William Shakespeare to turn Ophelia into a drowned corpse when she is gifted for such beautiful things.
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