About the work
Sancta is an opera-performance by Florentina Holzinger, premiered on 30 May 2024 at the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater in Schwerin and subsequently shown at the Wiener Festwochen, the Staatsoper Stuttgart and the Volksbühne Berlin, among others. In it the choreographer and performance artist combines Paul Hindemith's scandal-shrouded one-act opera "Sancta Susanna" (1922) with a staged Mass and radical live performance to form a feminist total work of art about female desire, religious discipline and bodily self-determination.
Plot
The starting point is Hindemith's "Sancta Susanna", in which a nun is punished for her awakening sexuality. Holzinger expands the one-acter into a staged Mass: sacred music by Bach, Rachmaninoff and Gounod, newly arranged and supplemented with new compositions (including by Johanna Doderer), meets metal, noise and the bodily, boundary-crossing performance typical of Holzinger. The magic, miracles and rites of the church are appropriated, their relation to sacrifice and violence laid bare — and the disciplining of female desire is countered with a pleasurable, liberating alternative.
Cultural significance
Sancta became the most talked-about music-theatre event of its season: because of drastic, partly bloody imagery, several houses imposed age limits and trigger warnings, and at the Staatsoper Stuttgart audience incidents made national headlines. As the celebrated performance artist's first opera staging, Sancta stands as an emblem of the opera house opening up toward performance, body art and feminist radicalism.