WELLNESS – Get our healing
JOKE HEYLEN
WELLNESS, is the third piece in a trilogy. The starting point for their new show is a search for ‚healing‘. Florentina Holzinger and Vincent Riebeck examine which aspects of popular culture have ambitions to influence, change, and heal the world. KEIN APPLAUS FÜR SCHEISSE was a coming of age performance of two young artists, at the time still in school. A bond made between two people, riders for the same cause, an agreement strengthened by the sharing of body fluids. Spirit, the second show of these series, focused on the ‚meaningfulness‘ of producing work in a professional environment, it being that the couple transitioned into being ‚young professionals‘. The piece deals with the urgency to make a performance as it deals with the Higher Force that moves us to do so.
In WELLNESS, the physical boundaries and healing qualities of all sorts of wellness methods & treatments are explored, and translated into performative possibilities. Florentina, Vincent and their performers do research on how to live up to your full potential. Each of the characters sets their own wellness goals. Firstly there are the purely physical-aesthetic goals: the aim to look perfect, with muscles in all the right places, a goal for which people submit themselves voluntarily to militaristic, almost fascist, crossfit workouts. And then there are the philosophical and holistic approaches, as used in yoga and psychotherapy, trying to reach „a full body or breath“ – or a healthy mind in a healthy body. WELLNESS is a search for ways to get rid of our personal fears.
One of the main sources of inspiration for this new performance was the world of beauty contests and pageant queens. In WELLNESS this results in a new personal target: approaching the looks of a beauty queen – not just your ordinary pageant queen, but Miss Universe. Complete with high cheekbones and beautiful make up. Even so for the men. So in this way, although very different, the world of drag queens was equally inspiring. Without turning it into a gender issue, a serious level of drag queen content is never far away.
