Controversial ballet TANZ hits Melbourne for the Rising Festival

It has revolutionised — and repulsed — the dance world and audiences everywhere. Now the controversial TANZ has arrived in Melbourne for the Rising Festival.

A scene from Florentina Holzinger’s cotroversial ballet, TANZ.

There was ample warning. TANZ, the controversial dance work by Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger included upfront cautions about “nudity, blood (fake and real), needles, self-injuring body acts, live urination, strobe lights, smoking and smoke/haze.”

Thankfully, there was no evident water works at Melbourne’s Arts Centre on Thursday, though TANZ had enough irony and barbed commentary to qualify as a genuine piss-take.

But the show that proudly describes itself as grotesque body-horror provoked, and packed punches, everywhere else.

There was nudity, so much nudity. But the naked bodies — 10 performers, all women — blurred into normalcy once the shocks rolled in.

TANZ begins in a ballet class, where an unclothed teacher gently suggests her students disrobe as part of a lesson to “govern the body.”

“Gravity will pull you down,” the instructor coos. “Clothes ... pull you down.”

Soon, everyone is naked at the barre, with limbs and legs stretched, spread and splayed with everything in view. The teacher implores: “Show me your jewels, young powerful courageous women of today. Your vaginas are glowing.”

This was the tame part.

There was nudity, so much nudity. Picture: Nada Žgank

From there, the class pirouetted off the rails into a tutorial about masturbation. Later, when a student who was bent over shouted, “In the name of Lord Jesus Christ, let me have it in the butt,” a flying broomstick swooped down to oblige.

TANZ, in parts, balanced the gross-out moments with absurdist humour. At best, it was slapstick. At worst, it was stupid. Elsewhere, it was a revealing, but revolting ride.

A low point involved a creature, with the voice of a crying baby, being held upside down, repeatedly punched, dipped into a bubbling cauldron of water, and drowned.

A well-timed “intermission” to “check in” the audience’s “wellbeing” followed. Holzinger also attempted explain the meaning behind her bonkers ballet, concluding: “We took the research ... pretty f---ing seriously.”

In the past, she has said TANZ is about “the body as a spectacle” and the history of romantic ballet. On Thursday, at TANZ’s opening night in Melbourne, as part of the Rising Festival, the show’s themes of strength, sacrifice and discipline were performed with absolute commitment by a courageous and fully focused ensemble.

In a balletic quest for weightlessness, one dancer was hoisted high above the stage by her hair, another with meat hooks in her back.

Holzinger’s welfare check on the crowd pre-empted the show’s second act which included a woman giving birth to a rat, with close ups of anatomical bits, blood and the newly-arrived rodent.

Act II, with themes of the metaphysical and magic, rites and ritual, was genuinely chilling, a loud cacophony of animals, ghostly figures, shadows and strobes.

TANZ is definitely not for the faint of heart, and it has to be especially squeamish for Rising’s risk-averse stakeholders in Spring and Swanston streets.

To its credit, the daring and disgusting TANZ took those risks, and left everything, good and bad, on the stage.