theatre
Audience celebrates premiere of Holzinger’s “Sancta”
After four sold-out performances in Schwerin, the international co-production “Sancta” will be shown at the Vienna Festival. Photo
© Nicole Marianna Wytyczak/dpa
Naked nuns and human skin as communion wafers – blasphemy for believers, art on stage. Performance artist Florentina Holzinger is once again causing a stir with her piece “Sancta”.
The performance artist known for her spectacular productions with mostly naked actresses Florentina Holzinger has once again caused a sensation with her new piece “Sancta”. At the premiere in the sold-out Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin, the audience reacted with thunderous applause and cheers to the almost three-hour, extremely fast-paced and provocative performance based on the biblical story.
In the final scene, almost all of the 520 visitors in the sold-out house stood and sang along to the request: “Don’t dream it, be it” – a reminiscence of the musical film “Rocky Horror Picture Show”.
With her first opera production, the 38-year-old Austrian Holzinger follows on seamlessly from her award-winning previous works such as “Ophelia’s Got Talent” in 2022 at the Berliner Volksbühne or “Tanz” in 2019 in Vienna. After a total of four sold-out performances in Schwerin, the international co-production “Sancta” will be shown at the Vienna Festival in mid-June, and then in Stuttgart and Berlin in the fall.
Access only from 18 years
The production begins with Paul Hindemith’s short one-act opera “Sancta Susanna”, which was surrounded by scandal at its premiere over 100 years ago because of a nun’s devotion to the crucified Jesus, and flows seamlessly into a church mass designed as a pleasurable spectacle.
The mostly naked actresses perform to liturgical chants by the Schwerin theater choir, pop songs, metal or specially composed songs. In the piece, which is only open to audiences aged 18 and over, Holzinger brings lesbian love scenes to the stage with provocative clarity, ridicules Christian rituals and denounces the sexual oppression of women.
Roller skaters rush naked through a halfpipe, other performers symbolically destroy Michelangelo’s iconic fresco of God and Adam on a giant climbing wall, and the Last Supper becomes a rave.
Holzinger causes a stir in the theatre world
A small woman slips into the role of the Pope for her own enjoyment, and a freshly cut piece of human skin becomes a consecrated relic, and shortly afterwards a communion host – all of which can be interpreted as provocative blasphemy and at the same time as a plea for fundamental reforms in the Catholic Church.
Even before the premiere in Schwerin, Holzinger had clearly criticized the discriminatory image of women in large parts of the church and the inadequate investigation of cases of abuse.
Holzinger has been causing a stir in the theater world for years with her work, in which she radically and revealingly stages female bodies, incorporates painful stunts and does not shy away from trash. The choreographer, who was born in Vienna in 1986, has been working at the Berliner Volksbühne since 2021 and was also considered as the successor to the artistic director René Pollesch, who died unexpectedly at the end of February.