Reclamation is a powerful thing. When you take what oppresses you and weaponise it you don’t just neutralise your enemy, you take a step closer to some kind of equanimity. In Tanz, playing briefly at Melbourne’s Rising festival, the Austrian performance artist and choreographer Florentina Holzinger seizes on the pointe shoe, ballet’s deeply troubling symbol of beauty through physical pain, and makes of it a totem, bloody and brutal.
Not that she’s the first artist to see ballet as a form of torture. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan explored the prima ballerina’s career through the prism of body horror; Powell and Pressburger spun a nightmarish vision out of the creative urge with The Red Shoes, transforming it into a literal dance of death. Even Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria exploited the idea of dance as a manifestation of witchcraft, an act of violence against the self and the other.
