In a rehearsal final week on the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin, northeastern Germany, Fleshpiece, a shirtless performer with tattoos and purple hair, strode to the entrance of the principle stage and delivered an impassioned monologue.
“This opera home, that is our church,” Fleshpiece intoned. “We proceed to nail you to the current, simply as Jesus was nailed to the cross.”
Supervising the scene was the experimental choreographer Florentina Holzinger, carrying a black baseball cap and a T-shirt printed with an image of two nuns engaged in B.D.S.M. play.
Her earlier works, together with “Ophelia’s Received Expertise” on the Volksbühne in Berlin and “A Divine Comedy” for the Rührtriennale competition, had been boundary-pushing, peripatetic reveals through which nudity, profanity, onstage helicopters, onstage ejaculation and performers hanging from their tooth have shocked and awed audiences. “Ophelia’s Received Expertise” collectively received Germany’s Faust prize for finest dance manufacturing final 12 months, cementing Holzinger’s standing as one in all Europe’s rising theater stars.
Within the German-speaking world, that type of profile brings invites to direct opera — and Holzinger’s work, which matches music with highly effective, stage-filling spectacle, definitely has operatic qualities. But a gilded opera theater nonetheless appears an unlikely residence for Holzinger, 38, whose anarchic works are collaged from new and outdated textual content and music, usually with sharply contrasting kinds.
For her subsequent piece, which premieres on the Mecklenburg State Theater on Thursday, earlier than shifting to the Wiener Festwochen competition in Vienna from June 10, Holzinger is attempting one thing completely different and staging an current opera, Paul Hindemith’s one-act “Sancta Susanna.” She has expanded the piece into an extravaganza known as “SANCTA,” that includes a skate ramp, a climbing wall and an industrial robotic arm on which a dancer performs aerial choreography. As ordinary for a Holzinger present, there may be considerable nudity and profanity.
“I wished to make it possible for we aren’t caught within the corset of an opera,” Holzinger mentioned in an interview, although she added that her earlier reveals weren’t so completely different from Hindemith’s hair-raising 25-minute piece. “If you happen to can dig ‘Sancta Susanna,’” she mentioned, “then you may dig my work.”
The opera — through which a nun known as Susanna has erotic fantasies about Christ on the cross and which ends along with her stripping off her behavior and Christ’s loincloth — is the third in a trilogy of one-act items through which Hindemith pushed the boundaries of his day. Written in Hindemith’s early, expressionist type, the rating escalates from a fragile opening to a finale with thundering brass chords as the opposite nuns in Susanna’s convent denounce her as a Satanist.
For “SANCTA,” the opera’s three singers will likely be joined by a few of Holzinger’s common collaborators, together with curler skaters, a sword swallower and performers who dangle from hooks embedded of their pores and skin. On the finish of the Hindemith piece, the present proceeds with no break right into a type of staged mass, with music from settings of the Latin liturgy by Bach, Rachmaninoff, Byrd and Gounod, plus new music by the Austrian composers Johanna Doderer and James Grabsch, whose artist title is Born in Flamez.
Holzinger, who grew up in Austria, which is predominantly Roman Catholic, mentioned the piece was her first express reckoning with the church. “Solely now, in reflection, do I understand how a lot that Catholic imprint is inherent in my upbringing,” she mentioned, including that the church match nicely with a few of her reveals’ earlier subjects: “ladies, intercourse, the satan.”
These themes nonetheless have the facility to shock, particularly in part of Germany the place a far-right political social gathering at the moment leads in opinion polls. Cornelia Zink, who performs Susanna, mentioned she had heard some feedback about her participation within the challenge. “Colleagues mentioned, ‘If you happen to had been my girlfriend, you wouldn’t be doing this,’” she mentioned.
“I believe it comes from a spot the place individuals, largely males, have a deep concern of robust ladies,” she added. “I believe, socially, it’s scarier for a lady to be bare onstage expressing energy. A girl being suppressed and sexually abused is OK.”
The manufacturing has a largely feminine solid and artistic workforce — a rarity in opera, the place most administrators, and particularly conductors, are males. Marit Strindlund, who will lead the musicians for the manufacturing, mentioned that this gave the piece an essential edge.
“In opera, we battle with how females are represented onstage,” she mentioned, itemizing off repertory staples like “Carmen” and “La Traviata,” through which the heroines are seducers or victims of male violence. “Even in modern opera, we don’t at all times reach creating actually fascinating feminine roles. This piece reveals ladies in some ways, as human beings.”
Andrea Baker, who performs Sister Klementia, an older nun, mentioned “SANCTA” had “a feminist gaze — not a feminine gaze, as a result of we’ve got trans and nonbinary individuals in our troupe.”
That gaze, she mentioned, is what made the nudity on this piece particular. “I’ve spent numerous time onstage bare. Nevertheless it was from a male, usually straight, voyeuristic imaginative and prescient.
“And that’s fully completely different from a feminist, inclusive imaginative and prescient of what it means to be a lady,” she added. “On this house, nobody is different.”
