Ophelia's Got Censored
Florentina Holzinger vs The French authorities
The walkouts begin when the kids get up onstage. More follow at the skin-piercing, the live tattooing and the climatic thunderstorm where the naked, harnessed performers shag a helicopter in the sky. But really, it’s the inclusion of the children that has the most people abandoning Florentina Holzinger’s aquatic fever-dream, Ophelia’s Got Talent.
The kids have also been causing problems for the French authorities. This sprawling, splashing performance piece, in which the adult performers are naked for the majority of the show, has been touring internationally with an additional cast of children since 2022. But this week in Paris, the show was forcibly changed to accommodate new rules in France, which Holzinger and her team are calling out as censorship.
No limits exist to what the Austrian choreographer believes the body can do onstage. With her work splaying across dance, theatre and performance art, Holzinger’s 2024 opera of sexual ecstasy and naked lesbian skateboarding nuns, Sancta, (which Natasha Tripney has written about exhilaratingly; I also recommend her piece on Ophelia) features scarification and the eating of pan-fried human flesh. Her latest piece, A Year Without Summer, features an enormous inflatable vagina that swallows the stage, robot dogs and a trigger warning for onstage vomiting.
Only one of Holzinger’s disorienting spectacles has made it to the UK so far. The body-horror ballet, TANZ, showed for three nights at Battersea Arts Centre in 2022 (I enjoyed Sanjoy Roy’s vivid review), which includes aerial artist Lucifire being hoisted into the air by meathooks pierced through her shoulders. A friend said he couldn’t make it all the way through; they got the metal through the skin and he had to get out.
The more I read about Holzinger’s work, the more desperate I was to watch it for myself. Seeing that Ophelia was touring Europe, I planned a weekend in Paris with my dad. Because our version of father-daughter bonding apparently looks like watching sword-swallower Fibi Eyewalker trailing a camera down her esophagus to discover supposedly live fish in the pit of her stomach.
Rooted in stories of women and water, with a swimming pool taking up much of the stage and a separate mermaid tank standing ominously at the back, Ophelia’s sprawling patchwork structure is thematic rather than linear. Borrowing from sideshow acts, reality TV and mythical creatures, what begins as a hammy talent show hosted by a pantomime pirate (toothy-grinned Annina Machaz) devolves into a fever-dream of failed escapologists, drunken sailors and grimy nymphs.
Destruction starts to seep in at the edges, then thunders in all at once. Though it’s described as a dance piece, much of the action is spoken, with folklore and intense, earnest dialogue (in English with a mixture of German, and, in these performances, French subtitles) building up images that will later be chucked aside or brutally, bloodily dismantled. In the middle of this, a group of kids are brought on, as if plucked from the audience, these little bouncing symbols of a hopeful future.
Some of the most striking images come from the performers’ personal stories being mixed with myth and psychology, as when Holzinger tells us about her experience of an eating disorder as a teenager. In front of us, the same tubes that were inserted into her in hospital are used to transform the casts’ bodies into classical water fountains. The tubes are fed up mouths and out nostrils, the backs of their heads resting gently on each other’s shoulders, the water from the swimming pool arching through them, streaming high into the sky.
Later, my dad asks whether I think these scenes where real stories interweave with the action are a form of catharsis. I wonder if they’re something closer to a reckoning. This performance is a demonstration of what these bodies have gone through, of what they have survived, and of what they now do entirely on their own terms. I think it’s about freedom. No wonder, then, Holzinger is so furious at the restrictions being placed upon the performance this week.
Regulations have recently changed in France to prohibit nudity onstage in the presence of children. This may sound like an obvious safeguarding decision, but give me - or rather Holzinger - a minute to explain.
For the 94 performances preceding this one, in Berlin and Rotterdam and Hamburg and Vienna, the adults have been naked throughout the show, bar the odd pirate shirt or sailor shirt - and later the mermaid tails that drag behind them, elegant in the water, grotesquely heavy out of them. For all of those other performances, when the kids come onstage, the adults have not covered up. In Paris, they do.
The children are onstage for a few short scenes, all of which are funny or surprisingly sweet. In one, the kids become our ship’s crew, hyped up to lead us to a victorious future. In another, they hold mirrors up to the adults as the camera watches them watching their own reflections, the children’s’ youth and innocence multiplied on screens.
The adults’ nakedness quickly becomes unremarkable. When the performers gallivant around, tap dancing and tattooing and swimming with powerful strokes, the bareness of their bodies is unspectacular. Almost immediately, the collective nudity dismantles any sense of embarrassment about stomachs and tits and thighs. Their bodies, a variety of ages and abilities, become ordinary and unsexualised. Nakedness merely becomes a better way to see the strength Sophie Duncan employs as she hangs from the ceiling in her aerial act, holding onto a loop with only her feet. Flesh becomes another tool for storytelling.
But then the children come onstage, and the adults wrap themselves up. Through the act of hiding their bodies, shame is introduced to the show.
Ophelia culminates in a riotous blaze of blood, fire and water. Afterwards, Holzinger comes back out onstage to read out a statement. The company line up around her with towels around their waists and objects covering their chests.
She explains the careful structures they used to build the show in a way that is safe for the children. How it was made in collaboration with intimacy coordinators, psychologists, the children themselves and their families. How the kids have been given the relevant information about the rest of the show in child-friendly ways, but they have not seen the other scenes.
“We have worked hard to normalise the female-read body in a way that is not sexual,” Holzinger explains. Then she tells us the reasoning the French authorities have given her for the show being unable to go on as normal:
“They told us the French don’t see a difference between a naked female body and sex. The naked female body belongs in the private sphere, not the public sphere. It belongs only to the partner or porn. There is no other reason a female body should be naked.”
To highlight the absurdity of the words she quotes, images flash on the screens of naked women in French art. There are hundreds of years to choose from. The next morning, I stand behind a group of school children, younger than those onstage, at the Musee D’Orsay. They gaze up at the soft flesh of Renoir’s Les Baigneuses. What’s the difference here? Is it that these performers are alive today? That they’re in control of their image and actions? That they use their own voices unfiltered through a man?
Holzinger’s production is intensely focused on her performers’ bodies, the heft and muscle and shake of them. The ways they are violated and the ways they regain control. Teaching shame and a lack of bodily autonomy, she says, is no way to protect young children. It is a way to teach children that their bodies are something to hide.
Shame, fear and ignorance have long been used by adults to define what is harmful to children. The same argument was used to create Section 28 and to continually deny sex education for young children. It is being used to eradicate trans women from public life today. “When there is no discourse around gender and sexuality,” Holzinger says, by now seething as she speaks, “there can be no way to protect children.”
In many ways, Ophelia’s Got Talent is extreme: someone literally pushes a piece of metal through their mouth and bleeds for the rest of the show. But the inclusion of children in the show is not, when it’s been done with such care, the problem. At the end of the performance, the kids splash about in the pool in wetsuits and shark fins, squealing and dancing, a bright dose of life in a performance that makes us watch the pollution of the very world it creates.
After the show, we stand by the bright red lights of La Villette, giddy, dazed, impressed, grossed out and energised, considering whether any venue in the UK would ever host Ophelia. Which stage could accommodate its scale, with its swimming pool and mermaid tank? What venue would have the infrastructure to dangle a helicopter from its ceiling? Which producers would be willing to fight the inevitable backlash to a show that puts children onstage with naked adults? As we wait for The Barbican or The Southbank Centre to take on the challenge, we vow to follow Holzinger’s work across Europe together instead.
Ophelia’s Got Talent is at La Villette, Paris, until 5 July 2025. You can find all tour dates for Florentina Holzinger’s work here.