SANCTA • STUTTGART
★★★★★☆
Photo: Matthias Baus
REVIEW SANCTA: SENSATIONAL OPERA PERFORMANCE IN STUTTGART
A protest service of half a hundred aggrieved Christian demonstrators met me outside the entrance to Stuttgart Opera, where Florentina Holzinger’s sensational opera performance Sancta was ready to begin. Characterized by explicit, unsimulated sex, blood and violence, the work has made headlines across Europe. Naturally, expectations were sky-high.
Sancta is a kick in the crotch of the Catholic mass, born out of a feminist resistance struggle that approaches the task with dramatic effects and a twinkle in the eye.
Up to 70 performers drive the performance through a series of striking stage images, each illustrating and interpreting elements of the ritual tableaux of the Mass.
Photo: Matthias Baus
All the performers are women, and all are stark naked or wearing a shoulder-length nun’s veil to emphasize the provocative nudity. Offended or excited? It’s up to you.
The expression is often piquant and looks like something you’d want to take home from Victoria’s Secret.
Photo: Matthias Baus
It’s certainly not without effect when 12 naked nuns on roller skates are having a blast in a half-pipe, while just as many are scaling a climbing wall at the back of the center, which is decorated like the Sistine Chapel.
Below the ceiling, several performers dangle from harnesses that suggest acrobatic S/M, and on closer inspection it looks like real lesbian sex is going on up there.
In the completely sold-out opera house, people from the creative class discreetly glance at each other with disbelief, but also with glowing eyes.
Photo: Matthias Baus
The Pope arrives on stage, embodied by a dwarf wheeled in a wheelchair and soon strapped to a giant robotic arm and swiveled around the stage.
In a rolled-up hospital bed, a self-harming cast member is having a piece of pork cut out of his body. The macabre sight of the scalpel cutting through the skin is filmed live in video close-ups that are projected on the big screen. The bloody chunk of skin and fat is soon after deep-fried in oil on a camping stove set up for the occasion. Go ahead and eat. This is my body!
The performance calls itself an opera performance and unfolds as a kind of extended version of German/American composer Paul Hindemith’s controversial opera Sancta Susanna from 1921.
The music is a fusion spectacle that ranges from beautiful classical choral pieces to brutal heavy rock with naked nuns on guitars, keyboards and drums.
Photo: Matthias Baus
To say the least, the spectacular opera show is in full swing. And there is an articulated meaning to the madness. Sancta examines and challenges the church’s view of the female body and sexuality, writes the boundary-pushing female director Holzinger (38) on Instagram.
After the premiere, 18 spectators had to be treated for shock and physical discomfort. Three even needed medical treatment. 100,000 people visited the opera’s website when the scandal broke. 20,000 got through to the box office. All performances sold out in record time.
Sancta has received the expected criticism and condemnation from religious circles. Several theatre critics have given Holzinger rave reviews and hailed Sancta as another groundbreaking work from the award-winning artist.
With the sound of a cheering audience in the back of your mind, GOT TO SEE THIS signs off with five stars for a wild theater experience. Even if the point is on the verge of capsizing in all its effect-seeking blasphemy.
