Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger is known for her no-holds-barred performances, where the lines between dance theatre and burlesque often get blurred. Eighteen theatregoers at Stuttgart’s state opera were so nauseated after viewing a performance that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse, and profuse amounts of fake and real blood that they needed an intervention by a doctor.
Opera’s spokesperson, Sebastian Ebling, said,
“On Saturday, we had eight, and on Sunday, we had 10 people who had to be looked after by our visitor service.”
Holzinger, 38, and her works involve an all-female cast who are scantily clad or even nude. Her earlier shows featured cringe-worthy scenes such as sword-swallowing, tattooing, masturbation, and action paintings with blood and fresh excrement.
Holzinger, in an interview earlier this year with The Guardian, said,
“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’s first foray into opera was ‘Sancta,’ which premiered at the Mecklenburg state theater in Schwerin in May. The play was based on Paul Hindemith’s 1920s expressionist opera Sancta Susanna.
Paul Hindemith’s play was itself involved in controversy and was stopped from being performed at Stuttgart’s state opera in 1921 after huge protests against its blasphemous content. The play was finally performed in 1922.
Hindemith’s original opera chronicles the story of a nun who was aroused by a story told by one of the nunnery’s older women. The young nun’s carnal desires were so aroused that they provoked her to rip the loincloth from Christ’s torso.
However, her detour with a large spider led to the realization that her act was sacrilegious, and she repents of her action. As penance, she begs the other nuns to wall her up alive.
However, what unsettled the audience in Holzinger’s version of the original musical performance was the addition of naked nuns roller-skating on a movable half-pipe at the centre of the stage, and the walls around them supplanted with crucified naked bodies. If this was not enough, the mass was conducted by a lesbian priest. The clergy from Salzburg and Innsbruck were infuriated and criticized Holzinger’s work as a “disrespectful caricature of the holy mass.”
Controversy at the Opera: Florentina Holzinger’s Bold Performance Stirs Up Stuttgart
Holzinger had earlier stated that her opera was not designed to mock the church but to explore new and unexplored territories, transferring the Victorian and prude institution on the one hand, and kinky communities and BDSM subcultures on the other.
Ebling told the Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspaper,
“We recommend that all audience members once again very carefully read the warnings so they know what to expect.”
