A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger | © Katja Illner / Ruhrtriennale 2021

»death is not the worst thing that can happen to women« loosely based on Plato

About the production

Notes: We recommend a minimum age of 18 to attend the performance. There is nudity and sexual acts in the play. We also note that stroboscopic effects are used in this performance.
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Exceptional choreographer Florentina Holzinger will transform the Kraftzentrale into a giant autopsy room and place death itself on the dissecting table. In a spectacular performance, Holzinger will devise her own Divine Comedy, journeying through European choreography together with an ensemble spanning seven decades in search of connections between generations and what anchors of images and fantasies of death in our culture.

In A Divine Comedy, commissioned by the Ruhrtriennale, Holzinger constructs an experimental field of extremes upon which she practises dances of death as exercises in dying that refer to death but mean life. 

How can we represent what cannot be imagined? How much presence can something have that no longer exists – a corpse, for example? Florentina Holzinger populates her own afterlife with the faults and fears of our time and asks no lesser question than whether spirituality is possible in the 21st century. Here she uses dance traditions as material along with the history of music and literature. High culture is as rich a source for her as entertainment, stunts, motocross and hypnosis.

Commissioned by Ruhrtriennale. Produced by Something Great, Spirit, Ruhrtriennale and Staatstheater Kassel.
Co-produced by Tanzquartier Wien, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin, deSingel, Theater Freiburg and Julidans.

A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger | © Katja Illner / Ruhrtriennale 2021
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger | © Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger | © Katja Illner / Ruhrtriennale 2021
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger | © Katja Illner / Ruhrtriennale 2021
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger | © Katja Illner / Ruhrtriennale 2021
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger
A Divine Comedy, Florentina Holzinger | © Katja Illner / Ruhrtriennale 2021

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