Wrecked cars, treadmills, mechanical bulls, fights and naked girls.

Soap&Skin feat. Florentina Holzinger – Sugarbread | Marche Funébre – Live

Original was uploaded on 2021-05-15

70 Jahre Wiener Festwochen – Das Konzert
Live vom Wiener Rathausplatz – ORF broadcast

Florentina Holzinger Festzug

As part of 70 YEARS WIENER FESTWOCHEN – THE CONCERT

A journey back to the early days of the Wiener Festwochen: in 1929, Rudolf von Laban, the pioneer of modern European dance, organised a Festzug der Gewerbe, or Pageant of the Trades, along Vienna’s Ringstrasse, as a mass event honouring handicrafts. In celebrating this ‘triumph of diligence’, the choreographer was less interested in ‘the people dressed in their finery and the showpiece floats’ than in rhythm as the element linking labour and dance. In Florentina Holzinger’s intervention at 70 years Festwochen – a concert, ostentatious vehicles and daredevil performers put on a dazzling exhibition. In this gleaming fleet of vehicles, body and machine have seemingly become symbiotic. Stunts, crash tests, or an occult fitness studio: here the choreography sets the rhythm with physical abandon in sync with the mechanical gearing. But to what end does this dystopian procession toil away? Is it a frantic pedalling within the hamster wheel of disciplined self-optimisation? Or a warmup session in anticipation of ruthless resistance? Florentina Holzinger, a feminist figurehead of the Austrian dance scene, excels at continually blurring the boundaries between high culture and entertainment. Grandly and mightily, her dancing street proceeds across the Rathausplatz to the music of Soap&Skin and, later, as a video installation through the city itself.