This year Florentina Holzinger, now in-house choreographer at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, challenges the audience of the International Summer Festival for the sixth time with her ever-growing subversive spectacles. After giving Balanchine's ballet »Apollon Musagette« a new coat of paint in 2018, she now brings a radical interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy to the stage. A DIVINE COMEDY tells the story from the perspective of Beatrice, portrayed by the eponymous Beatrice »Trixie« Cordua - the first ballerina to dance Le Sacre du printemps nude in John Neumeier's 1972 Hamburg version, and who has already danced in Holzinger's TANZ (2020) at the Summer Festival. Her reflection on the life and death of a dancer in the 21st century is the beginning of a journey through the inferno and paradise of the present. 23 performers transform the stage into a transcendent battle of material, where literary history and visual art merge as much as dance, athletics and slapstick do. A visually stunning feminist celebration of the female body.
read less