A naked woman hangs just off the ground by two hooks stuck through the skin of her back. As a small amount of blood drips from the wounds onto the stage, the audience can’t help but inhale sharply and cover their faces. But there are no jump scares in store here. An earth-bound woman, who pierced the hanging woman on stage moments ago and now holds her hands in encouragement, makes sure of that. It’s only when the piercer gives a nod of approval that two other women yank on a rope and hoist the pierced woman high into the air in an astonishing feat of physical endurance. The piercer looks up to her, beaming with a smile of pride.

Nudity, blood, stunts: it’s just another day in Florentina Holzinger’s world. But this climactic moment in TANZ, her 2019 production that had its North American premiere at NYU Skirball, exemplifies the unexpected lyricism and serenity that runs through her no-holds-barred mashup of circus sideshow and classical ballet. Holzinger is specifically interested in 19th century Romantic ballets like Giselle or La Sylphide, which put women en pointe to evoke flying spirits or sylphs. TANZ takes this historical anchor and subverts its tranquility by pairing pointe shoes with more extreme bodily feats of levitation. And no matter what happens, everything is done by and for the 11 female cast members.

Pictured left to right: Renée Copraij, Veronica Thompson, Evilyn Frantic (left image). Beatrice Cordua, Netti Nüganen (right image).

Act I opens with a disciplined stunt that is rarely seen as the grotesque spectacle that it is: the ballet class. Beatrice “Trixie” Cordua, an 83-year-old German dancer and choreographer, expressively leads the cast through rote pliés, tendus, and développés by referencing every truism in the book. She calls on the girls to not just feel beautiful but be beautiful and reminds them that George Balanchine, a titan of neoclassical ballet, said “if the music is fast you have to dance fast.” Then she beckons everyone to take off all their clothes.

This is just the start of the codified studio’s unraveling. Cordua starts making overtly sexualized comments about the dancers’ bodies (“girls you are so hot and sexy… I’m dripping!”) and orders them to line up so she can examine their genitalia, a command that they enact expediently and silently. But this devolution feels less like a jarring aberration than a revelation of what lurks beneath structures of discipline and power in dance. After all, ballet and pornography share an intense obsession with the body and its climactic powers. And as the women put the ballet barres away and use the rings in their buns to lift themselves into the air, they remind us that hair hanging, like dancing on the tips of your toes, is just another feat that takes training, pain management, and endurance.

“No matter how much this full-throttle bacchanalian fantasy challenges and provokes, it never ruptures its culture of trust”

The hair hangers come back down to earth as the ethereal classical music stops and Holzinger herself (naked too, of course) steps forward to welcome the audience and explain that Act I, which more or less took place in the real world, is over. It’s now time for the second act, when the dancers will veer into the metaphysical spirit world in the tradition of Romantic ballets. Holzinger’s oration is direct and lucid, but it doesn’t feel like spoon-feeding. As she shared in a 2023 interview, “I see it as my responsibility to entertain the audience. Not so they switch off their minds, but precisely to allow them to look at more difficult things.”

And difficult things do indeed come in Act II. Holzinger builds a mythical forest of levitating creatures on her way to the climactic body suspension. Women climb onto suspended motorcycles to ride them like mechanical broomsticks, the soon-to-be-pierced woman narrates a mime sequence from Swan Lake about escaping a witch’s avian curse, and Trixie unearths a plastic rat from her vagina. An unpredictable sonic tapestry, which shifts from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake to ethereal electronic soundwaves to the Y2K classic “Crazy Frog,” gives the audience multiple modalities for working through the on-stage difficulty and validates Holzinger’s promise of entertainment.

Pictured left to right: Beatrice Cordua, Netti Nüganen, Veronica Thompson, Annina Machaz, Laura Stokes, Florentina Holzinger.

No matter how much this full-throttle bacchanalian fantasy challenges and provokes, it never ruptures its culture of trust. The cast pulls all of their stunts together and in full view of the audience. Want to fall on and off a platform? Someone downstage will pull the rope that controls your harness. Want to lift into the air with your skin? Someone will pierce your back on the upstage left tattoo table and then hold your hands as you rise up.

Amidst calls to roll back women’s agency from the ongoing catastrophe of overturning Roe v. Wade and viral tradwife content alike, TANZ is a pressing intervention even six years after its premiere. The thought of naked women using their bodies’ capacity for pain to entertain might only bring to mind BDSM practices or Alfred Hitchcock’s call to “torture the woman.” But the cast of TANZ explosively disrupts these expectations, asserting their power over their own bodies with lyric horror and brash beauty.

Holzinger’s next project is representing Austria at the 2026 Venice Biennale, and she’s acutely aware of the stakes of making radical work when the right-wing Freedom Party is on the rise in her home country. In a press statement, she reminds us that “the body becomes the stage where social and political conditions and processes are negotiated directly.” The stakes of Holzinger’s work in the Biennale are raised further because audience members will encounter it in the Austrian Pavilion as well as in outdoor sites around the lagoon city, unbounded by the safety of seat assignments in either environment.

Political references can be oblique in gallery performances, which often draw on defamiliarized displays of visual art to estrange audience members or abstract the body. But Holzinger has proven that if she’s throwing a circus, she’s also inviting us into the ring. What’s going to happen when the stuntwoman, her assistants, and her onlookers are all on one playing field, with nowhere to hide when her agency gets to be too much? I can’t wait to find out.