The Sancta opera has caused an uproar in Stuttgart, sending 18 viewers to the hospital with nausea.
What took place on stage took the breath away and made the stomach “dance” in frenzied rhythms: Live sex, piercings, large amounts of blood (real and fake), naked nuns skating around a mobile pole in the middle of the stage, a wall with naked crucified bodies and a gay priest officiating.
“On Saturday we had eight and on Sunday 10 people who needed treatment,” said the opera’s representative, Sebastian Ebling. Three spectators even needed immediate medical attention.
However, before going to see the play, they were informed that the show contains sexual acts, sexual violence and, among other things, loud noises. “If you have questions, talk to guest services,” Ebling said. “And when you’re having doubts during the show, maybe it helps to look away.”
Despite the uproar, the scheduled performances at both the Stuttgart State Opera and Berlin’s Volksbühne in November are sold out.
Who is Florentina Holzinger?
The 38-year-old Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger is known for her performances that move on the blurred boundaries of dance theater and vaudeville. The women cast in the troupe usually perform nude, get tattoos, masturbate, swallow swords or paint with blood and excrement.
“Good dance technique to me is not just someone who can do a perfect tendu, but also someone who can urinate at the right time,” Holzinger told the Guardian in an interview earlier this year.
The original Sancta and the reactions
Sancta, Holzinger’s first foray into opera, premiered at the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin in May and is based on Paul Hindemith’s 1920s expressionist opera Sancta Susanna, which has its own history of controversy.
Hindemith’s original opera tells the story of a young nun who, stimulated by a story told to her by one of the older women of the convent, climbs naked to the altar and tears the robe from the body of Christ. An encounter with a large spider leads her to repent of her deed and beg the other nuns to hang her alive.
It was originally intended to premiere at the Stuttgart State Opera in 1921, but was not staged until 1922 after protests over its alleged sacrilegious content.
After Holzinger brought Sancta to her hometown of Vienna in June, bishops from Salzburg and Innsbruck criticized it as an “irreverent caricature of the liturgy.”
The Austrian artist had argued that her opera was not intended so much to mock the church as to explore the parallels between the conservative institution on the one hand and kink communities and BDSM subcultures on the other.
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