The experimental choreographer Florentina Holzinger supervised last week's rehearsal at the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin, northeastern Germany.
Her previous works include 'Ophelia's Got Talent' at Berlin's Volksbühne and 'A Divine Comedy' for the Rührtriennale festival. Her works were boundary-pushing, peripatetic shows that shocked and astounded audiences with elements such as profanity, onstage ejaculation, nudity, and performers hanging from their teeth.
Holzinger is trying something new in her upcoming work by staging Paul Hindemith's one-act opera 'Sancta Susanna.'
She has expanded the piece into an extravaganza called "SANCTA," featuring a skate ramp, a climbing wall, and an industrial robot arm on which a dancer performs aerial choreography.
Her next piece will open at the Mecklenburg State Theater on Thursday before moving to the Wiener Festwochen festival in Vienna on June 10.
In an interview, Holzinger said, "I wanted to make sure that we are not stuck in the corset of an opera."
"If you can dig 'Sancta Susanna,'" she added, "then you can dig my work."
The opera is the third trilogy of one-act operas in which Hindemith pushed the limits of his day. It focuses on a nun named Susanna and her sensual delusions about Christ on the cross.
Furthermore, the piece finishes with her removing her garb and Christ's loincloth. The music, composed in the early expressionist manner of Hindemith, intensifies from a gentle beginning to a rousing brass chord finale as Susanna is condemned as a Satanist by her fellow nuns.
In 'SANCTA,' some of Holzinger's regular collaborators, including roller skaters, sword swallowers, and performers who hang from skin-implanted hooks, will join the opera's three vocalists.
After the Hindemith piece ends, the performance will transition into a kind of staged mass with new compositions by Austrian composers James Grabsch, whose artist name is Born in Flamez, and Johanna Doderer, as well as music from Bach, Rachmaninoff, Byrd, and Gounod's interpretations of the Latin liturgy.
These themes remain a shock, even in a part of Germany where a far-right political party currently leads in opinion polls.
