Loud cries of extreme discomfort are echoing around a former warehouse on the outskirts of the German city of Schwerin as six women, all clad in black, edge towards the limits of their pain. “Oh,” one woman wails as she squirms on her plastic chair, “this one is so hard.”
Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger is famous for working with performers who can endure more pain than most: the all-female casts of her shows regularly include sword-swallowers, pole-dancers, Japanese bondage artists and “hair hangers” – who are able to suspend their entire bodyweights from their ponytails.
On this occasion, however, the body parts being pushed to excruciating limits are vocal cords. This is a rehearsal of Sancta, Holzinger’s first ever opera, and her troupe is trying – and mostly failing – to hit the highest note of the Kyrie Eleison, the first sung prayer of the traditional Catholic mass (its title translates as “Lord, have mercy”).
Today, Sancta opens in Vienna, where it forms the centrepiece of the five-week Wiener Festwochen festival. Although it’s based on German expressionist composer Paul Hindemith’s one-act opera Sancta Susanna, and features three professional opera singers and a full classical orchestra, the show nonetheless contains all the hallmarks that have made Holzinger the buzziest ticket in contemporary European theatre and dance.
Audiences now know what to expect from the 38-year-old’s sold-out shows. The dancers will always be female, almost completely unclothed (to blind spectators to their state of undress because “nakedness is extremely boring”) and the stage will be slippery with bodily fluids by the end of the performance. Her ambition, Holzinger says on a video call, is not just to choreograph her dancers’ bodies, “but the insides of their bodies too”. She explains: “Good technique in dance to me is not just someone who can do a perfect tendu, but also someone who can urinate on cue.”
In Tanz, the show with which she burst on to the scene in 2019, a performer was hoisted into the air on meat hooks pushed into her skin. In 2021’s A Divine Comedy, her first at Berlin’s influential Volksbühne theatre, one performer masturbated herself to an explosive orgasm while others made a live-action painting with blood and fresh excrement.
Ophelia’s Got Talent – which theatre and dance critics from Germany, Austria and Switzerland crowned as their production of the year in 2023 – made those works seem like a warm-up. A series of water-and-death-themed tableaux presented in the format of a casting show, Ophelia’s Got Talent involved a woman’s cheek being pierced with an enormous fishing hook, a sword-swallower performing an upper endoscopy, live tattooing of audience members, an actor with dwarfism giving birth to a pile of bloodied entrails, and a horde of dancers humping a helicopter suspended from the ceiling until it ejaculated a mass of translucent goo into a swimming pool below.
At the performance I watched in February, Holzinger was in the thick of the clothing-free action: tap-dancing, diving into water tanks to free escape artists, kicking up her heels in front of 800 spectators and doing a celebratory belly-slide across the gunk-drenched stage during the curtain-call. Stepping out on to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz after two and a half hours of relentless splatter-action, not many things were clear to me, but it did feel certain that Holzinger could not go any further than this.
Yet here is Sancta. Hindemith’s original opera tells the story of a young nun who, aroused by a tale told by one of the nunnery’s older women, steps on to the altar naked and rips the loincloth from Christ’s torso. An encounter with a large spider leads her to repent her action – and beg the other nuns to wall her up alive. Performing Sancta Susanna on its own would have taken about 25 minutes, but once Holzinger started thinking about its themes of celibacy and lust, she found it hard to stop. It turned into what she calls “our own version of mass”.
“Sex is definitely a big theme for us,” she says. “This is an opera about the breaking forth of the repressed female libido, so we decided to have a lot of fun.” Some details are still sketchy when I join the rehearsals, but there is talk of a cast of 17 dancers, a 24-voice choir, a heavy metal band and a magician from Sweden. Most of the performers on stage will play rollerskating nuns. In keeping with Holzinger’s previous shows, the music bridges high and low culture, drawing from Bach, Rachmaninov and Gounod – as well as Cole Porter, in the form of Blow, Gabriel, Blow.
The demands placed on Holzinger’s set designers and stage managers are headache-inducing: there will be a movable half-pipe at the centre of the stage and a bouldering wall with a waterfall at the back; a giant bell with a human clapper will hang from the ceiling; a robot arm will lift an aerial pole artist; a (tiny) piece of human flesh will be cut out and fried on a hob; and there will be full-on, unsimulated female-on-female sexual intercourse.
Signalling that the skaters were nuns might have been tricky, given Holzinger’s aversion to garments. “Are we nuns in this scene?” one performer asks during the rehearsal. “Are we naked?” Holzinger, zipping across the stage on inline skates and wearing a Cookie Monster fleece, replies: “Half-half.” The crop-top habits are being delivered next week, a stage manager explains.
Exactly how much all this is going to cost, her producers won’t let on. But with its elaborate technical requirements and a 12-13 week rehearsal period (twice that of ordinary operas), Sancta needs considerable institutional support. Mecklenburg state theatre, the Schwerin venue where the work premiered, is sharing the costs with where it goes next: the Vienna festival, Stuttgart’s state opera, Berlin’s Volksbühne, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, Amsterdam’s Julidans festival and Theater Rotterdam.
“Directors don’t get this kind of funding in the UK,” says Veronica Thompson, a London-based American cabaret performer recruited for her hair-hanging skill. “And if they did, they would not have the freedom to fail. To get weird and interesting on such an epic scale is an absolute treat.”
Whether weird is automatically interesting can be subject to debate. As rave reviews, touring invitations and offers of financial support have rained down on Holzinger in recent years, some critics have also bemoaned a lack of substance beneath the visual shocks. Did she have it in her to put on a proper drama, asked Die Zeit in 2022, rather than just a “cornucopia of stunts aiming to become the talk of the town”?
Holzinger concedes that the thing that first attracted her to Hindemith’s opera may sound trivial, or at least unusual. “I have to be honest,” she says, “but we got very excited when we discovered that Sancta Susanna is the only opera you can find on xHamster.” That is a porn site.
Researching her show, however, Holzinger’s interest in the rituals of the church deepened. Born to a lawyer and a pharmacist in Vienna, Holzinger was baptised and confirmed as a child, but formally left the Catholic church as a young adult “to avoid paying tax”. Preparing for Sancta, however, she started attending mass again and discovered it to be “an extremely postmodern experience”.
She elaborates: “It’s postmodern in the sense that Catholicism relies on the kind of rituals that people in theatre can only dream of. At its heart, mass is about conveying illusions and describing transformations: bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ. And by giving consent to let these transformation take place, they become real.”
Instead of mocking or criticising the church, Sancta became an exploration of kinship between a conservative institution and the seemingly ungodly subcultures of BDSM or kink communities. Above all, Sancta and the traditional Catholic mass share a belief that joy and pain are intimately connected, and those who suffer will find redemption.
If pole-dancing, trapeze acts and live sex can make people think about these parallels, Holzinger says, then that makes them legitimate dramatic tools. “We want to seduce our audience into thoughtfulness,” she says. “Entertainment is an extremely good way to jog their brains.”