{"id":10863,"date":"2026-04-09T08:54:28","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T12:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/?p=10863"},"modified":"2026-05-01T08:54:45","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T12:54:45","slug":"teresa-kovacs-indiana-presents-on-the-theater-of-florentina-holzinger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/2026\/04\/09\/teresa-kovacs-indiana-presents-on-the-theater-of-florentina-holzinger\/","title":{"rendered":"Teresa Kovacs (Indiana) presents on the theater of\u00a0Florentina Holzinger"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Pulcinella\u2019s Wake: Clitoridian Pleasure and Joyful\u00a0Caprice in the Theater of\u00a0Florentina Holzinger<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Visiting speaker: Teresa Kovacs (Indiana University, Bloomington)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

April 9th
6 PM
Gilman 479<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, Austrian choreographer, director, and dancer Florentina Holzinger has established herself as a leading figure on the international theater and contemporary art scene. With works such as Ophelia\u2019s Got Talent <\/em>(2022), Sancta<\/em> (2024), and A Year Without Summer <\/em>(2025), she has challenged what can and cannot appear on the stage of standing state theaters and operas, complicating and expanding this stage through large-scale works that collapse and recombine genres\u2014from ballet, theater, and opera to musical, body art, and sideshow\u2014while foregrounding the collective presence of bodies rarely centered on such stages. Accordingly, critics have situated her work between spectacle and critique, often tracing its lineage to feminist performance art, Viennese Actionism, and notions of the Gesamtkunstwerk that continue to resonate within her practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite Florentina Holzinger\u2019s significant impact on contemporary theatre, critical scholarship on her work remains scarce, especially outside the German-speaking contexts. My talk addresses the relative lack of scholarly attention to Holzinger in North America and proposes a framework for approaching her complex works. It brings together Catherine Malabou\u2019s reading of the clitoris as a \u201cclitoridian,\u201d anarchic organ of pure pleasure and Giorgio Agamben\u2019s meditation on the commedia dell\u2019arte<\/em> figure of Pulcinella, whose compulsive, repetitive performance of lazzi<\/em> never fully counts as action\u2014nothing changes through them. While Holzinger\u2019s works at first glance gesture towards a feminist reclaiming of female bodies and agencies, at second glance, her performances become readable as a transformation of agency into mere lazzi<\/em>. In so doing, they open a space beyond feminist action that allows for the survival of the subject outside of the paradigm of victim or heroine. In Holzinger, the most one can do is to comically rehearse how to die and how to come to an end, again and again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"teresa<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Pulcinella\u2019s Wake: Clitoridian Pleasure and Joyful\u00a0Caprice in the Theater of\u00a0Florentina Holzinger Visiting speaker: Teresa Kovacs (Indiana University, Bloomington) April 9th6 PMGilman 479 In recent years, Austrian choreographer, director, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":786,"featured_media":10758,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_tec_requires_first_save":true,"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_tribe_blocks_recurrence_rules":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_description":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_exclusions":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"program":[10445],"class_list":["post-10863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","program-german"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/786"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10865,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10863\/revisions\/10865"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10863"},{"taxonomy":"program","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program?post=10863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}