At a rehearsal final week on the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin, northeast Germany, Fleshpiece, a shirtless performer with tattoos and purple hair, walked to the entrance of the primary stage and delivered an impassioned monologue.
“This opera, that is our church,” Fleshpiece intoned. “We proceed to evangelise you within the current, simply as Jesus was nailed to the cross.”
Overseeing the scene was experimental choreographer Florentina Holzinger, carrying a black baseball cap and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photograph of two nuns participating in BDSM play.
His earlier works, together with “Ophelia has talent”on the Volksbühne in Berlin and“A Divine Comedy”For the Rührtriennale competition, these had been peripatetic, boundary-pushing exhibits through which nudity, swearing, helicopters on stage, ejaculation on stage and performers hanging from their tooth shocked and impressed the viewers. “Ophelia’s Acquired Expertise” collectively gained the German award Faust Award for best dance production final yr, cementing Holzinger’s standing as one in all Europe’s rising theater stars.
Within the German-speaking world, this sort of profile brings invites to direct opera – and Holzinger’s work, which mixes music with highly effective, full-stage spectacle, definitely has operatic qualities. But a gilded opera home nonetheless appears an unlikely house for Holzinger, 38, whose anarchic works are collages of outdated and new texts and music, usually in sharply contrasting kinds.
On your subsequent piece, which premiere at the Mecklenburg State Theater Thursday, earlier than change to the Wiener Festwochen festival in Vienna beginning June 10, Holzinger is attempting one thing totally different and staging an present opera, Paul Hindemith’s one-act “Sancta Susanna.” She expanded the piece into an extravaganza known as “SANCTA,” that includes a skateboard ramp, a climbing wall and an industrial robotic arm on which a dancer performs aerial choreography. As normal in a Holzinger present, there may be nudity and profanity aplenty.
“I wished to ensure we weren’t caught in an opera corset,” Holzinger stated in an interview, although he added that his earlier exhibits weren’t all that totally different from Hindemith’s hair-raising 25-minute piece. “Should you can take pleasure in ‘Sancta Susanna,’” she stated, “then you possibly can take pleasure in my work.”
The opera – through which a nun known as Susanna has erotic fantasies about Christ on the cross and which ends together with her taking off Christ’s behavior and loincloth – is the third in a trilogy of one-act performs through which Hindemith pushed the bounds of his time. . . Written in Hindemith’s early expressionist fashion, the rating strikes from a fragile opening to a finale with thunderous brass chords, as the opposite nuns at Susanna’s convent denounce her as a Satanist.
In “SANCTA,” the opera’s three singers shall be joined by a few of Holzinger’s common collaborators, together with skaters, a sword swallower and performers hanging from hooks embedded within the pores and skin. On the finish of Hindemith’s piece, the present continues with out interruption in a form of staged mass, with music from Latin liturgy scenes by Bach, Rachmaninoff, Byrd and Gounod, in addition to new music by Austrian composers Johanna Doderer and James Grabsch, whose inventive title is Born in Flamez.
Holzinger, who grew up in predominantly Roman Catholic Austria, stated the play was his first express reckoning with the Church. “Solely now, upon reflection, do I notice how a lot this Catholic imprint is inherent in my upbringing,” she stated, including that the church suits nicely with a few of the earlier themes of her applications: “ladies, intercourse, the satan.”
These points nonetheless have the facility to shock, particularly in part of Germany the place a far-right political occasion at the moment leads in opinion polls. Cornelia Zink, who performs Susanna, stated she had heard some feedback about her participation within the undertaking. “Colleagues stated, ‘Should you had been my girlfriend, you would not be doing this,’” she stated.
“I feel it comes from a spot the place individuals, particularly males, have a deep concern of sturdy ladies,” she added. “I feel, socially, it is scarier for a girl to be bare on stage expressing energy. A girl being suppressed and sexually assaulted is okay.”
The manufacturing contains a principally feminine forged and inventive staff – a rarity in opera, the place nearly all of administrators, and particularly conductors, are males. Marit Strindlund, who will lead the manufacturing’s musicians, stated this gave the play an vital distinction.
“In opera, we’ve got issue realizing how ladies are represented on stage,” she stated, itemizing songs from the repertoire similar to “Carmen” and “La Traviata,” through which the heroines are seductresses or victims of male violence. “Even in up to date opera, we will not all the time create actually fascinating feminine roles. This play exhibits ladies in some ways, as human beings.”
Andrea Baker, who performs Sister Klementia, an older nun, stated “SANCTA” has “a feminist look – not a feminine look, as a result of we’ve got trans and non-binary individuals in our troupe.”
That look, she stated, is what makes the nudity on this piece particular. “I spent lots of time bare on stage. Nevertheless it was from a male, usually heterosexual, voyeuristic perspective.
“And that’s fully totally different from a feminist and inclusive imaginative and prescient of what it means to be a lady,” she added. “On this house, nobody is different.”
