Reading the Field – May 2025

In a moment saturated by digital interfaces, disembodied labor, and algorithmic surveillance, a new wave of performance artists are turning back to the body, not out of nostalgia, but necessity. This isn’t a return to “liveness” as fetish or purity. It’s a deliberate reanimation of the body as a volatile archive of risk, eroticism, ritual, and refusal. A politics of flesh.

These artists are not using the body to represent. They are using it to rupture. Their performances engage pain, slowness, collapse, care, and spectacle, not to sensationalize, but to interrogate what remains unrenderable in a world of smooth surfaces. These bodies tremble, leak, blur, and endure. They are unstable systems that demand new ways of seeing, sensing, and staying with.

In this edition of Reading the Field, we trace how five artists, Florentina Holzinger, Julie Tolentino, Davi Pontes & Wallace Ferreira, Harald Beharie, and Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, are staging extreme embodiment as a response to contemporary conditions. Their strategies are as distinct as their contexts, but they share an insistence: the body still matters, especially when it is too much.

Florentina Holzinger

Trained in ballet and baptized in the ferocity of Viennese actionism, Florentina Holzinger dismantles the idea of choreography as refinement. Her work detonates classical form from within, using the architecture of dance, opera, and myth to stage a feminist spectacle that is part stunt show, part exorcism. From early collaborations with Vincent Riebeek to her solo provocations (TANZ, Apollon, Ophelia’s Got Talent), Holzinger’s aesthetic is maximalist, brutal, and virtuosic in its chaos.

Holzinger doesn’t perform embodiment, she weaponizes it. Her work renders the female body as grotesque excess: leaking, bleeding, lifting weights, flipping motorcycles. It’s a theatrical language of strain and ritual where virtuosity is both celebrated and shredded. In Ophelia’s Got Talent, she stages not Ophelia’s death but her reanimation, a chorus of women enacting grotesque talent routines in a baptismal nightmare of athleticism, blood, and opera. Her strategy is escalation: turning spectacle inside out until it collapses.

Holzinger’s work proposes a choreography of rupture, a refusal of legibility, elegance, and containment. She reminds us that the body’s extremity isn’t spectacle; it’s a method of refusal. Artists might look not to the symbolic body, but to the too-much body, the one that glitches, spills, and exceeds the form it’s given.

Website: 
https://neonlobster.org/florentina-holzinger

Past Works:
Études, TANZ, A Divine Comedy, Ophelia’s Got Talent, SANCTA

Upcoming:
A Year without Summer
21.05.25
Volksbühne, Berlin

Videos:
Danger on stage – Florentina Holzinger – Mind Culture Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R1Y9BEpqGg

Florentina Holzinger “TANZ. Eine sylphidische Träumerei in Stunts”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n88aL1bEtM

Citations:
https://www.documentjournal.com/2025/02/florentina-holzingers-lyric-horror-in-tanz/

https://www.the-berliner.com/stage/berlin-theatre-skateboarding-nuns-florentina-holzingers-sancta-volksbuehne/

Julie Tolentino

Julie Tolentino’s practice moves at the speed of blood and breath. A foundational figure in New York’s queer performance lineage, Tolentino’s work emerged out of ACT UP, the Clit Club, and the AIDS activist-art continuum. Rooted in care and queer survival, her installations and durational performances create space for witnessing rather than watching. Her history is embedded in her body: every gesture is layered with the weight of political love, erotic loss, and fugitive intimacy.

Tolentino stages the body as a porous threshold, slowing time to such an extent that presence becomes tactile. In REPEATER, she repeats minimal gestures in long arcs of time, enlisting scent, proximity, and touch as active collaborators. Her embodiment is not extreme in volume but in density: a compression of affect, memory, and attention. Rather than rupture, she proposes saturation, a slow flood of meaning that resists extraction or immediate comprehension.

Tolentino teaches us that extremity is not always explosive, it can be durational, devotional, and microscopic. Her work challenges artists to think of the body not as instrument, but as archive. In a time of speed and simulation, what happens when we perform at the pace of healing?

Website:
https://julietolentino.com/

Past Works:
HOLD TIGHT GENTLY, .bury.me.fiercely., RAISED BY WOLVES

Videos:
Lineages of Duration, Empire and Queer Reciprocity in the work of Julie Tolentino
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=IFcPlzqwRPk

Julie Tolentino/Abigail Severance, evidence
https://video.visualaids.org/Julie-Tolentino-Abigail-Severance-evidence

Citations:
https://www.frieze.com/article/julie-tolentino-flood-vessel-commune-2024-review

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2023/02/14/shawne-michaelain-holloway-and-julie-tolentino/

Davi Pontes & Wallace Ferreira

Working out of Brazil’s racialized landscapes, Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira choreograph exhaustion as insurgency. Their practice emerges from Afro-Brazilian cosmologies, queer resistance, and the structural violences of colonization. In Repertório N.2: Sentença and Delirar o racial, they reject choreography as control and instead use it as a means of unmaking, performing fatigue, friction, and collapse in place of line or technique.

Pontes and Ferreira use their bodies as overloaded circuits, grinding against repetition, slipping into gestures of refusal. Their work does not seek transcendence; it performs weight. Movement breaks down, becomes sound, becomes stillness. They explore how the Black queer body in performance can glitch the archive: not by representing history, but by embodying its unbearable density. Their choreography is a refusal to resolve.

They offer a performance methodology of exhaustion, a radical dismantling of the able, upright, productive body. For artists working with systemic oppression, their work asks: Can collapse be choreographic? Can we treat fatigue not as a limit, but as a form of resistance?

Website:
https://somethinggreat.de/something-great-davi-pontes-wallace-ferreira-1

Past Works:
Repertório N.3, Repertório N.2, Delirar o Racial (To Rave the Racial)

Videos:
Davi Pontes & Wallace Ferreira – Repertório N2 (short excerpt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pJJGMbo7TE&t=9s

Citations:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-drama-review/article/hold-that-gaze/A72E7B8CC334BFF3E26BDE8CA0B4D435

https://pivo.org.br/en/_satelite/delirar-o-racial/

Harald Beharie

Harald Beharie operates within the soft violence of masculinity. Trained in contemporary dance and shaped by diasporic identity, his solo Batty Bwoy (a reclaiming of a Jamaican slur for effeminate gay men) stages queer embodiment as oscillation, between camp and sincerity, grace and collapse. Based in Oslo, Beharie is part of a generation using dance to map the politics of softness, visibility, and erotic tension.

Beharie uses choreography to flirt, fold, and falter. In Batty Bwoy, he moves between drag, intimacy, and exhaustion, never quite settling. His performance is a practice of destabilization: gender, posture, rhythm, and tone are constantly reframed. He doesn’t embody a stable subject but a shifting vibration. In this, Beharie proposes that queerness is not a position but a choreography: a constant adjusting.

Beharie expands extreme embodiment into the minor key, where exhaustion is not failure, but recalibration. He invites artists to think not only about what the body can do, but what it can un-do. What if collapse is not an endpoint, but a form of queer possibility?

Website:
https://haraldbeharie.com/

Past Works:
Undersang, Batty Bwoy, Shine Utopians

Videos:
Batty Bwoy – Harald Beharie (Excerpt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJqk97eIcfM

Citations:
https://springbackmagazine.com/read/harald-beharie-the-present-body/

https://alt-africa.com/2024/10/07/interview-harald-beharie-on-solo-piece-batty-bwoy-and-dancing-as-a-career/

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins works at the edge of the museum and the night club, building slow, collective choreographies that dissolve the distinction between seeing and feeling. A founding member of the Warsaw-based collective Kem, his durational performances unfold in art institutions across Europe, using repetition, relational touch, and shared breath to craft fugitive intimacies. His practice draws on queer ecologies of care, drag, and club culture, diffused through the stillness of the gallery.

In Untitled (Holding Horizon), performers engage in looping gestures, leaning, pulsing, resting, while audience members drift between them. Time is stretched. Touch becomes technique. His work suggests that choreography need not be structured around goals but can instead become a space of relational maintenance. Extreme embodiment here is affective: subtle, sensual, and diffused through collective attention.

Baczyński-Jenkins asks us to consider duration and extended time as a queer tactic. What happens when choreography resists climax, arc, or narrative altogether? His work proposes that in a culture of spectacle, the most radical gesture may be to stay long enough to feel.

Video:
Alex Baczynki-Jenkins, Artist and choreographer, Berlin/Warsaw
https://vimeo.com/646073441

Citations:
https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/alex-baczynski-jenkins-eliel-jones-2019/

https://culture.pl/en/article/queerness-oppression-of-the-body-non-humans-the-latest-in-polish-choreography

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/72701/alex-baczynski-jenkinsthe-tremble-the-symptom-the-swell-and-the-hole-together

To return to the body now is to return to a site of contradiction, intimate and exposed, regulated and unruly, legible and illegible. These artists do not offer clarity or catharsis. Instead, they offer the body as a system under strain: erotic, excessive, exhausted, and alive. Their performances do not resolve. They insist.

What can performance do when it stops representing and starts embodying rupture? How might risk, slowness, or collapse become compositional tools rather than signs of failure? As artists, curators, and audiences navigating an era of hypermediation, we are invited to reimagine presence not as aesthetic purity but as tactical intensity.

This is not a return. It is a re-entry into the mess, into the muscle, into what still resists translation.