Eighteen theatregoers at Stuttgart’s state opera required medical treatment for severe nausea over the weekend after watching a performance that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse and copious amounts of fake and real blood.
“On Saturday we had eight and on Sunday we had 10 people who had to be looked after by our visitor service,” said the opera’s spokesperson, Sebastian Ebling, about the two performances of Sancta, a work by the Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger. A doctor had been called in for treatment in three instances, he added.
Holzinger, 38, is known for freewheeling performances that blur the line between dance theatre and vaudeville. Her all-female cast typically performs partially or fully naked, and previous shows have included live sword-swallowing, tattooing, masturbation and action paintings with blood and fresh excrement.
“Good technique in dance to me is not just someone who can do a perfect tendu, but also someone who can urinate on cue,” Holzinger told the Guardian in an interview earlier this year.
Sancta, Holzinger’s first foray into opera, premiered at the Mecklenburg state theatre 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, 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.
It was originally meant to premiere at Stuttgart’s state opera in 1921, but was not put on stage until 1922 after protests against its allegedly sacrilegious content.
The version that unsettled audience members in Stuttgart this year supplanted the original musical performance with naked nuns rollerskating on a movable half-pipe at the centre of the stage, a wall of crucified naked bodies and a lesbian priest saying mass.
After Holzinger brought Sancta to her native Vienna in June, bishops from Salzburg and Innsbruck criticised it as a “disrespectful caricature of the holy mass”.
The Austrian artist has previously suggested that her opera was less designed to mock the church than explore parallels between the conservative institution on the one hand, and kink communities and BDSM subcultures on the other.
“We recommend that all audience members once again very carefully read the warnings so they know what to expect,” Ebling told the Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspaper. Visitors to the adults-only show were alerted in advance to a long list of warnings for potential triggers including incense, loud noises, explicit sexual acts and sexual violence.
“If you have questions, speak to the visitor service,” Ebling added. “And when in doubt during the performance, it might help to avert your gaze.”
Reports of medical treatment in the auditorium do not appear to have done Holzinger’s Sancta any commercial harm. All five remaining shows at the Stuttgart state opera, as well as two performances at Berlin’s Volksbühne in November, have since sold out.
