Laurie Anderson’s first single, “It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You (It’s the Hole)” is dedicated to Chris Burden, who in a now infamous piece was shot by a friend in the arm at close range with a rifle. All recorded on film for posterity. Anderson, a mixed media artist, composer and poet, riffed on that early piece of body art, “I used to use myself as a target. I used to use myself as a goal… I was digging me so much, I dug myself right into a hole.” A peppy fiddle and harmonica drive Anderson’s vocals in a rather more feminine and ironic revisitation of Burden’s piece, “Shoot” (1971).
Florentina Holzinger’s Tanz is a more excessive piece than Burden’s; and like Anderson’s, she puts the female body at the center of narratives of violence. As such, it exists in the same lineage of what I would call extreme body art: a genre made visible by Burden, as well as feminist and queer performers — Carolee Schneemann in the 1960’s; later Ana Mendieta in the 1970s; later Orlan, Ron Athey and Bob Flanagan in the 1980s — who strove to challenge the porous boundaries of what is socially acceptable, using their individual bodies as a social canvas, made and re-made under the watchful eye of an audience.
Holzinger brings these legacies of the individual performance artist into a collision with the corps de ballet, a more refined yet similarly disciplined body made up of ballerinas. In Tanz, eleven women — including Holzinger — choreograph their individual experiences into a collective body. The work is wider, more expansive, demanding that attention be served. As such she fills up that place of absence Anderson riffs on, asking what happens when women have to dig themselves out of the myriad forms of violence — socially sanctioned and otherwise — demanding that they are not disappeared into the darkness of the hole.
Dr. Gwendolyn Alker is an Associate Arts Professor in the Department of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where she specializes in gender & performance, embodiment and Latine theatre.