In Florentina Holzinger’s staging of Paul Hindemith’s opera Sancta Susanna in Stuttgart this past October, 18 audience members suffered nausea so extreme that they required medical attention. Holzinger’s 2019 Tanz (Dance) is comparatively tame. Though the all-female cast does disrobe before they’ve gotten to tendus in the simulated ballet barre that begins the piece, and their naked middle-aged instructor does finger them excitedly, no one is neatly razored open before our astonished eyes or lifted to the rafters via wires hooked into their flesh. Indeed, it’s not shock or nausea that the 38-year-old Holzinger induces in Tanz but exhilarating relief. With a cheerful matter-of-factness, the Austrian star of the European art and theater worlds brings to the surface pathologies that have long menaced the dance world: the lopsided power dynamics between teacher and student; the routine, if not required, self-mutilation; the constant subtext of sex that no one addresses because it’s not supposed to exist. Tanz isn’t cathartic, it’s refreshing, for making the obvious obvious—and with such directorial rigor, such lack of gloom or pretension. —Apollinaire Scherr