Florentina Holzinger’s Naked Ambition

It was the day before the press preview for the Venice Biennale, and the toilets at the Austrian pavilion were broken. In Venice, plumbing problems are routine; the city doesn’t have a modern sewage system, so it relies on its canals and the tides to flush out wastewater treated in thousands of septic tanks. A heavy rain can flood the streets, and private bathrooms. But the two bright-blue porta-potties were not here for convenience. They were part of an installation opening the next day.

Between the toilets, Florentina Holzinger was naked, in a decent-sized tank of water, maintaining a defiant, full-frontal pose, wearing a diving mask and breathing through a scuba. A steady stream of bubbles was making chunks of her long hair float straight up. Occasionally, her left pinkie twitched. Otherwise, she barely moved. The water contained urine from the porta-potties that had been filtered through a system visible beneath the tank. “It is maintained by the pee of the people,” Giulia Messia, Holzinger’s publicity manager, explained. “But no shitting.”

Most often referred to as some combination of choreographer, director, and performance artist, Holzinger, who is forty and goes by Flo, usually works in a theatre, though what she makes is not necessarily, or only, theatre. Before she was selected to represent her birth country at the most important event in the art world, she had never done an installation. Two years earlier, she and her stage designer, Nikola Knežević, had visited the Biennale, and when they saw the Austrian pavilion, an austere, geometric building, they thought they could “for sure do something interesting there,” Holzinger said. At the time, she had just premièred a blasphemous stage production, “SANCTA,” described by the Daily Mail as “a radical feminist opera which includes explicit lesbian sex scenes, real blood and injuries, and naked roller-skating nuns,” and the pavilion reminded her of a cathedral: nave, transepts, altar. She and her team agreed that a “radical gesture was needed” to justify participating in the art-market “circus.” They’d fantasized about putting the building in the lagoon and guiding visitors through in scuba gear, but this wasn’t practical.

Instead, at the pavilion’s entrance, they hung a huge church bell from a crane. Every hour, for eight hours a day, a performer in a rotating cast climbs a rope hanging from the bell, flips herself upside down inside it, and acts as a Boschian clapper, using the force of her body and a heavy metal belt. That’s the cue for most of the other performers—who range in appearance from basically unassuming to covered in tattoos and piercings—to change shifts, in what Holzinger calls a “ritual.” In addition to the “piss tank,” the pavilion has four other enclosed spaces, each flooded with water and featuring a different attraction. When I arrived at the rehearsal, these were: a naked woman riding a Jet Ski in circles, going faster and faster until the air smelled of gasoline; naked performers slowly climbing a utility pole, pausing in languid acrobatic poses like live nudes; the artist Hannah Finn, also naked, performing contortion on a raised platform, mirroring two robot dogs splashing around her; and a room lined with machinery, where the water was ominously brown. Nearby, two performers were smoking in white Monobloc chairs, costumed in long aprons and scrubs, rubber gloves close at hand. Other performers dressed as cleaning ladies circulated throughout the space, occasionally running lines: “We tell people not to shit in the toilets. . . .”

The atmosphere was relaxed, though various collaborators assured me, looking haunted, that the technical coördination of this work was more challenging than anything they’d ever done. In the tank, Holzinger’s hands were now pressed against the glass. The dramaturges Sara Ostertag and Michele Rizzo discussed: Was it too much? Yes. Rizzo began roaming around and dropped an open notebook that he’d been using in front of me. I could make out typical production notes, in both English and German; a doodle of Holzinger’s current pose, with starfish hands and exaggerated goggles; and the phrase “slapstick in shitstorm.”

A scripted plumbing issue was unfolding alongside the actual one. As a producer hunched beneath the tank to show a service technician the filtration system over video call, a cleaning lady entered the room with machinery. Brown water suddenly spewed from the equipment, shooting into her mouth and eyes. Hoses in the water flailed. The performer yelled, splashed, and fell, trying futilely to fix it. Holzinger and her technicians had arrived in Venice only three weeks before; since then, the cleaning ladies had taken on a much bigger role than planned. Now that the show, “SEAWORLD VENICE,” has opened—to long lines and a deluge of press that have made it, without question, the most discussed work at the Biennale—visitors often assume that they are actual janitorial staff, and treat them accordingly.

After an hour, the bell rang, and Holzinger handed off the scuba and emerged from the water. Her face lined from the goggles, she put on a huge tie-dyed sweatshirt, baggy shorts, and reflective Oakley sunglasses. She then immediately removed the shorts and began going over notes with Rizzo and Ostertag. The hands were too much, yeah. The crossed arms were O.K., except that she looked cold. She hadn’t had a problem with the temperature, but performers would stay in the tank for longer, so they should warm it up. It was then that Ostertag explained what was happening with the porta-potties—the pressure levels kept changing, which is why they couldn’t flush the toilets earlier.

“Are you kidding me?” Holzinger replied, calmly. She put her shorts back on and asked how the shitstorm had gone.

It’s hard to imagine Holzinger freaking out about anything, except maybe slowing down. While “SEAWORLD VENICE” is on view, through November, she is also touring three ensemble productions and organizing several one-off performances, which she calls “Études.” The last time we spoke, on a video call from her apartment in Venice, she described the Biennale piece as “minimal.” “It gets depicted as this shocking, radical thing, but if you come from experimental theatre there is nothing shocking or radical about it,” she said. “Actually, my biggest complex was that it’s so gentle. You know, not much happening.”

She was being serious. A typical Holzinger show lasts for around three hours and begins with a premise that is abandoned when it no longer suits her “schizophrenic” pace. In “TANZ” (2019), it’s a ballet class; in “Ophelia’s Got Talent” (2022), a talent show; in “SANCTA” (2024), the one-act Paul Hindemith opera “Sancta Susanna,” in which the title character has heretical visions of lesbian sex that Holzinger represents live, followed by a “Mass.” Her most recent stage work, “A Year Without Summer” (2025), reimagines the summer of 1816, when a volcanic eruption in Indonesia blocked out the sun and, among other consequences, led to Mary Shelley writing “Frankenstein.” (The show is a musical.) The productions may feature aerial pole dancing, live tattooing, hook suspension, hair hanging, wood chopping, the heavily sound-effected masturbation of ceramic penises, hypnosis, blood, and flesh eating (a very small piece of skin). Performers change roles throughout, and during onstage interludes they narrate autobiographical confessions, near-death experiences, and sexual assaults. Almost everyone is naked, including opera singers, musicians, old women, disabled women, camerawomen, and women with no formal dance training.

Like all interdisciplinary artists, Holzinger is constrained by the language of category. She is often linked to the Viennese Actionists, of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and to performance artists like Marina Abramović, but figures from theatre and dance are more helpful in answering the question “But what is it?” Formally, her closest predecessors are probably post-Wall, post-dramatic German directors like Christoph Schlingensief and René Pollesch, whose political, self-referential work pushed beyond traditional literary elements like plot, dialogue, and character to examine the relationship between performer and audience. (Theatre for people who hate plays.) Much of the action in Holzinger’s work, especially the body horror, is projected live onto large screens on either side of the stage—common in European theatre, but used here to show what is otherwise hidden, often some kind of upsetting process. (In “Ophelia,” the professional sword-swallower Fibi Eyewalker seems to swallow a fish, followed by an endoscopic camera.) The result is not just a spectacle but something that produces the satisfaction of narrative, as the songs, dances, scenes, and feats of daring accrue: a Gesamtkunstwerk that knows and resists the term. “She’s always kind of saying ‘Fuck you’ to Wagner,” Brandon Woolf, a professor of dramatic literature at New York University, told me.

Feminism-wise, Holzinger uses the obviousness of nudity to make fairly nuanced interventions. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of a tampon string, just as you might see the complicated rigging of a set; the effect is to emphasize what the female body can be and do. The scholar Caroline Lillian Schopp has described Holzinger’s mode as “feminist decadence” that “luxuriates in the violence that so-called high art and its histories conceal.” In other words, Holzinger is funny. In “Ophelia,” she perverts “Apocalypse Now,” among other works, by having five women—herself included—literally have sex with a helicopter, which is suspended from the ceiling and piloted by Saioa Alvarez, a little person who, elsewhere in the Holzinger universe, gives a furious sermon as “the first lesbian Pope.” The performers grind and moan as rain pours from above and a wind machine roars. Eventually, the helicopter ejaculates a waterfall from its door, and the storm subsides.

At the same time, the helicopter represents a fundamental pragmatism in Holzinger’s work. She feels a responsibility to do something with the resources she has; more than pushing the boundaries of feminist performance art, she pushes the boundaries of logistical and technical coördination. “When we came into the Volksbühne for the first time, we saw this high fly space that you don’t actually see from the perspective of the audience, but that’s fucking unique about this theatre,” she told me. “A helicopter could fly into the building. I mean, we feel an obligation to use this.”

The blatant ambition comes with its own drama; Holzinger’s work can feel rough around the edges, creating the sense that, at any level of a production, something might go very wrong. “Viewers should doubt whether we really have everything under control,” Holzinger has said. In addition to the helicopter, “Ophelia” involves a pool and two dunk tanks. Water “always finds a way to mess with the infrastructure,” Knežević, Holzinger’s stage designer, told me. When they met, he had never done professional theatre before—he trained as an architect—but Holzinger asked a question that excited him: Could he make her a ballet barre that would hold weight but also, eventually, break?

Cartoon by Zachary Kanin

Holzinger was born in Vienna, and her parents, a lawyer and a pharmacist who dislikes the sight of blood, are normal. When she was ten years old, she developed anorexia and drank so much water, trying to weigh herself down for doctors’ appointments, that she gave herself water poisoning. She spent nearly a year in a rehabilitation center, living with “troubled kids” whom she found “much more interesting,” she told me, than her “evil group of friends” from a conservative public school. When she was seventeen, she took a contemporary-dance class, and loved it. Because her parents didn’t want her to pursue the profession—and because she wanted state funding—she took a year of architecture and business courses while training and auditioning for dance schools.

Journalists often claim that Holzinger wanted to be a ballerina but started too late, and with the wrong body, to do so. It’s a compelling narrative: it allows a writer to imply, in an ostensibly feminist maneuver, that Holzinger is kind of short and has the body of someone who could play an M.M.A. fighter in a film, which she has also done. Actually, she’d wanted to be “a really good contemporary dancer,” she told me, but was “very unsuccessful.” (She is “really not good” at remembering choreography.) Eventually, she was accepted into the School for New Dance Development (S.N.D.O.), in Amsterdam, but she never wanted to make her own work. “I wanted to just learn how to move and be a part of a group,” she said.

At S.N.D.O., she met Vincent Riebeek, a Dutch choreographer and director who was a year below her. They were both adventurous, rebellious, and interested in challenging ideas about what a man and a woman could do onstage; they were also both, Riebeek told me, kicked out of school for periods of time. “She was super enigmatic,” he said. “She would do everything a little bit different. Even watching her make a sandwich could be super fascinating.”

They quickly became inseparable. They didn’t really plan or rehearse; they just spent all their time together, making work “for each other and not for somebody else,” Holzinger said. Only later, when they were introduced to production houses, did they realize that other people practiced. An adapted version of a school project, “Kein Applaus für Scheisse” (2010), became a hit on the European avant-garde-theatre circuit; several other works—sexual, aggressive—followed. For years, they travelled and lived together, developing a reputation as enfants terribles. “We were lucky,” Holzinger said of their early success, because it meant that they “never had to hustle for a job.” Onstage, Riebeek was the campy, effortful foil to Holzinger’s relentless cool; watching her today, you can see how she would have been stoic even when her partner was vomiting on her, or slowly pulling a long string out of her vagina with his teeth.

Over time, though, what they called their “codependent” relationship became, in Holzinger’s words, “torturous.” Riebeek was frustrated to be pigeonholed as “queer”—“I’m licking pussy onstage,” he said, “but that’s queer, apparently, when I do it”—but Holzinger felt the label was important to the work. They were increasingly at odds about credit and vision. “Maybe we were a bit doomed from the start because we were obsessed with Marina and Ulay,” Riebeek said, laughing, referring to Abramović and her longtime companion and collaborator, Frank Uwe (Ulay) Laysiepen. There’s a scene in “Kein Applaus” that’s inspired by Abramović and Ulay’s first work together, “Relation in Space” (1976), in which Holzinger and Riebeek hurl themselves at each other. But “Relation in Space” attempts to create a unity called “That Self” from male and female energy. In “Kein Applaus,” Holzinger and Riebeek appear to be interrupting each other, hurting each other, as they try to perform something for themselves. “We always knew it was going to end,” Riebeek said, “but it seemed unimaginable at the time.” Maybe, Holzinger proposed, it was just a “typical fag-hag relationship.”

Finally, in 2017, Riebeek needed knee surgery, and they had to take a break. “All of a sudden,” Holzinger told me, “we just never saw each other again.” After that, she stopped working with men onstage, beginning with her first large ensemble piece, “Apollon” (2017). “I haven’t followed his work recently, but he used to be a great artist,” she said. “I think that’s not something you really lose.”

In the spring of 2024, I attended several “SANCTA” rehearsals at the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater, in the German city of Schwerin, where it premièred, hoping to understand how a Holzinger production comes together. I concluded that it happens mostly through doing it. There was a little box of sushi from an Asian grocery store—Holzinger has no special diet—and a very large binder. After an idea for a new piece congeals, a core group travels for research. For “SANCTA,” they went to Rome, and to Barcelona, where roller-skating on a half-pipe could be practiced in nice weather. Meanwhile, Holzinger was going to the opera, which she initially didn’t like, and to Mass, which she grew up attending. Once the whole team assembles, professors and other experts visit rehearsals, offering insights on the production’s themes; for “SANCTA,” Felix Ritter, a former teacher of Holzinger’s and a dramaturge who also worked on “SEAWORLD VENICE,” led them in Bible study. “She never goes blind into a fight,” he said.

In the theatre, Holzinger’s instructions were direct, never agitated or hostile, spoken into a microphone from the front row. She periodically took notes, which she would later go over with the cast. She watched in different postures: with one or both legs stretched out on the wall that divided the orchestra pit from the front row; with both legs dangling into the pit; with her butt balanced on a closed theatre seat. During one dress rehearsal, when her cue to go onstage arrived, she took off all her clothes, put on a metal belt, and left her spot. Soon, a rope hanging from a giant church bell above center stage went taut, and Holzinger appeared, climbing up from a trapdoor to call the theatre to “Mass.” Then she returned to her spot, put her pants back on, and remained topless as she watched the rest of the run, which went on for nearly two more hours.

Holzinger emphasizes that her work is not a “community project”—it’s not that kind of feminism, and if you don’t want to be naked onstage you probably can’t join this group. She enjoys the responsibility, and everyone respects that it’s ultimately her show. During one “SANCTA” rehearsal, I watched the cast perform “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” by Cole Porter, a number in which the opera singer Emma Rothmann is raised in a harness over the rest of the performers as they dance. Initially, this was supposed to happen for about thirty seconds, in the middle of the song, but the transition didn’t work. Rothmann looked nervous as she tried to strap herself into the harness while smiling and belting the lyrics. Holzinger interrupted the run-through: Rothmann needed to sing the entire song in the air.

“Not that one. I can only taste five of its seven grains.”

Cartoon by William Haefeli

Concern fell across the face of Sophie Duncan, a choreographer and an aerialist. “But that means she’s gonna hang in the sky for three and a half minutes,” she said. Later, Rothmann and Duncan told me that Rothmann had never been in the stage harness before that rehearsal, which was a little more than two weeks before the première. Duncan, who has worked with Cirque du Soleil, also noted that no one looks good just dangling for that long.

“But she can do it,” Holzinger replied. She was right. Later, she told Rothmann to perform it “more like a Nazi,” which was also right.

Still, Holzinger’s process is inherently collaborative, and the team appreciates the platform that she gives them. Annina Machaz, an actress who often plays the role of deranged m.c.—in “SANCTA,” she’s a douchebag Jesus, vaping and ranting—has been working with Holzinger since they met at a dance festival, a decade ago; she writes her own lines. “She really gives me carte blanche,” Machaz told me. Duncan joined the team for “Ophelia,” in 2022, after she saw a casting call on a circus forum; she became the unofficial harness adviser after noticing the lackadaisical way the group had been using them. Earlier in her career, Holzinger found performers by posting a Craigslist ad seeking “women with special talents.” Many of her performers stick around, or return, teaching others and learning from them. The motorcyclist and stunt rider Keity Meier, who appeared in “Divine Comedy,” riding laps around the stage with a skeleton on her back, is performing in Venice, and not only on the Jet Ski.

Holzinger is also open to networking, if you’re really interesting. Ruby-Kale Roberts, who performs under the name Fleshpiece and works with ceramics, hook suspension, and a host of other things, got Holzinger’s number through some performers in “Ophelia.” She’d heard that “SANCTA” would involve skating. “I sent a sassy text message that said, Hey, I have a beard and a cunt, and I love being naked. By the way, I also skate,” Roberts said, laughing. Holzinger replied that her cast was full, but two weeks later—late in the production process—she wrote back asking for Roberts’s availability. She became a huge part of the show.

It’s appropriate, Ritter told me, leaning over the back of his chair during a “SANCTA” rehearsal one afternoon, that Holzinger was doing a show about nuns. She and her group are kind of like a convent: “sisters,” childless, dedicated to a higher power. “This is our church,” Roberts, channelling an evil evangelical preacher, bellows in the final sequence of the show, “and we will nail you to the present moment like Jesus was nailed to the Cross.” Then she squats, her vagina directed toward the audience, and issues a semi-improvised, sexually explicit monologue as the entire cast sings “Don’t Dream It,” from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

All of Holzinger’s work, even the early pieces, made during what she calls her “trashy days,” exhibits a poignant belief in what is possible, not just for an individual body or an intrepid audience but for the collective. Without an extreme perspective, this message would be sentimental, and she has refined it as she’s matured. In 2013, during a show with Riebeek, a screw holding her weight during an aerial stunt came loose, and she fell sixteen feet. “I saw her whole body snap over her neck, and I was sure I was going to have to take care of my friend for the rest of my life,” Riebeek told me. “I felt like, Now it’s over.” At the hospital, doctors resisted giving Holzinger an X-ray; in the show that she and Riebeek had been performing, Holzinger was “pregnant,” which the doctors assumed to be true. “We had to fight for her to get proper medical care,” Riebeek said. “Like, ‘It’s theatre! It’s fiction! I didn’t really make her pregnant!’ ” When the doctors finally scanned her, she had only a concussion, a broken nose, and a missing tooth.

Since then, she has professionalized and become fastidious about safety protocols, but she continues to “play with risk and the unforeseen and the possibility of failure,” as she puts it. Scenes of care, and of redemption, often ensue. In “Ophelia,” the artist Netti Nüganen performs a Houdini act underwater, with her limbs and her neck chained inside a dunk tank. After more than two minutes, she begins to flail, pulling frantically at her collar. Holzinger jumps into the tank, her movements inelegant and panicked, and pulls Nüganen out. The stage, now covered in water, is quickly cleared as Holzinger comforts Nüganen; the fake-out isn’t entirely apparent until Saioa Alvarez comes out dressed as a plumber to take a look. Then Nüganen, who until recently had been holding her breath for nearly three minutes, begins to tap-dance.

Holzinger appears in her shows less than she used to, but she tries to experience most of what she asks her collaborators to do, and she obviously loves performing. (She first learned hook suspension for “SANCTA,” as “a treat to myself.”) Given that she casts women of all ages—the legendary dancer and actress Beatrice (Trixie) Cordua performed with her until she died, at eighty-two, last year—there is no reason to think she will stop, but the question of how to age with dignity and artistic integrity seems to be bothering her. She developed another little “complex” about “A Year Without Summer,” which required a much slower pace than comes naturally to her. No one else would consider the show calm, of course. It begins with a huge, multigenerational orgy that lasts for twenty minutes, becoming increasingly absurd before morphing into a musical loosely organized around the history of science and medicine and its careless approach to women. (Briefly, Machaz plays a douchebag Freud, skipping through a pile of cocaine and screaming about vagina dentata; Alvarez plays Josef Mengele.)

Finally, the drama lets up. Small groups form; sex returns, softly. A selfie stick circulates, and the results are projected onto screens flanking the stage. It is sweet, and sickening, the impulse to take pictures at the end of the world. Then Bláthin Eckhardt, a guitarist and a dancer, climbs a platform at the back of the stage and begins, incredibly, to ice-skate. On the screens, a message appears. It’s a succinct statement about the duty of the individual, the artist, to others within a haywire system: “NO END.” Eckhardt continues skating in exquisite, small loops, showing her exhaustion at times, through the curtain call. The mess below remains, but it’s no longer ugly. She doesn’t stop skating until every single audience member has left.

On the second day of the Venice preview, it was raining, and a group of curators, journalists, and V.I.P.s met at 9 A.M. to take two chartered boats to an “Étude” that would be performed in the middle of the lagoon. While waiting to board, Knežević told me that the crew had been at the pavilion until eleven the night before; one of the robot dogs had stopped working, and they’d had to reconfigure the room, installing a dartboard so that Finn, the contortionist, could do archery (with her feet). Still, he and Holzinger seemed in good spirits. “It fits the concept somehow, that it is about failing systems,” Holzinger said of the malfunction. Ultimately, she added, the only thing that really needed to work was the toilets.

On the boat to the performance, Holzinger and the pavilion’s curator, Nora-Swantje Almes, held a brief discussion about the work. Holzinger isn’t very good at speeches—her perpetual state is that she’s either about to perform or has just performed—but she was charming, cheekily vulgar, and intelligent. “This is really not theatre,” she said, mischievously. “This is really not a spectacle.” She concluded by exclaiming “I have to stretch!” and decamped to a partitioned area of the boat.

Nearly two miles offshore, we approached a barge carrying a crane. We disembarked onto another barge and sat on a set of bleachers. On the stage barge, seven naked performers climbed on the crane, and a noise band assembled at the bow. Machaz followed the musician Gibrana Cervantes with an umbrella to protect Cervantes’s violin. The mezzo-soprano Andrea Baker, nude but for a wing-tip collar and rubber hip waders, took the position of conductor.

They played ambient drone for a while, menacing, anticipatory. Baker was going to summon something from the depths. Lane Shi, a musician and an artist who uses vocal techniques from Mongolian throat singing, issued high-pitched squeals like a creature. Then Eckhardt, with her electric guitar, began to ascend the crane, pausing to perform rock-star maneuvers. Shi followed her halfway. In position, she sang, and then screamed, conjuring sounds from the sea, mountains, and dirty basement gigs.

Finally, the music reached a crescendo as the crane started to pull something from the water. A bell appeared, and then, inside, Holzinger herself, upside down, her long hair hanging like seaweed. Underwater, a rope had been tracked from the boat to the bell so that she could find her way—the lagoon is basically opaque—but she said that the most stressful part was communicating the timing to the Italian crane operator. She had been going into the water with industrial divers for months, as research. It gives you a rash.

The music stopped. Eckhardt and Shi climbed down from the crane; when they disembarked, Eckhardt took Shi’s head in her arms and hugged her tightly, for several seconds. Everyone watched in silence, in the rain, as Holzinger tolled the bell.

Knežević told me that, while visiting the Sistine Chapel for “SANCTA” research, the team noticed how Michelangelo had painted women to look like men: something about them being upside down. In the bell, Holzinger’s previously compact torso becomes long and androgynous, her arms and lats titanic. But it’s in her neck, the way she controls her head to follow the violent motion of the rest of her body, the force of which seems to come from somewhere beyond herself, that you get the rare chance to see it: she’s a very good contemporary dancer.

The crane moved Holzinger closer to a boat that was stationed next to the barge. Luna Duran, whose brown hair hangs almost to her knees, waited there, with hooks installed in the flesh on her thin shoulder blades. Holzinger picked her up by a cable attached to the hooks. As the pair were lifted back above the water, still hanging from the bell, the band started thrashing and screaming for the climax. With Holzinger in control of the cable holding her, Duran twisted and swung, sometimes like a nymph, sometimes like a caught fish, bleeding from the wounds in her back.