EGN NEWS DESK
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 primary 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, sporting 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 Got Talent” on the Volksbühne in Berlin and “A Divine Comedy” for the Rührtriennale competition, have been boundary-pushing, peripatetic exhibits by which nudity, profanity, onstage helicopters, onstage ejaculation and performers hanging from their enamel have shocked and awed audiences. “Ophelia’s Got Talent” collectively received Germany’s Faust prize for greatest dance manufacturing final 12 months, cementing Holzinger’s standing as one in all Europe’s rising theater stars.
In the German-speaking world, that sort of profile brings invites to direct opera — and Holzinger’s work, which matches music with highly effective, stage-filling spectacle, definitely has operatic qualities. Yet a gilded opera theater nonetheless appears an unlikely house for Holzinger, 38, whose anarchic works are collaged from new and outdated textual content and music, usually with sharply contrasting kinds.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 totally different and staging an present opera, Paul Hindemith’s one-act “Sancta Susanna.” She has expanded the piece into an extravaganza referred to as “SANCTA,” that includes a skate ramp, a climbing wall and an industrial robotic arm on which a dancer performs aerial choreography. As normal for a Holzinger present, there’s plentiful nudity and profanity.
“I wished to guarantee that we aren’t caught within the corset of an opera,” Holzinger mentioned in an interview, although she added that her earlier exhibits weren’t so totally different from Hindemith’s hair-raising 25-minute piece. “If you possibly can dig ‘Sancta Susanna,’” she mentioned, “then you possibly can dig my work.”
The opera — by which a nun referred to as Susanna has erotic fantasies about Christ on the cross and which ends together with her stripping off her behavior and Christ’s loincloth — is the third in a trilogy of one-act items by which Hindemith pushed the boundaries of his day. Written in Hindemith’s early, expressionist fashion, 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 hold from hooks embedded of their pores and skin. At the top of the Hindemith piece, the present proceeds with out a break right into a sort 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 specific reckoning with the church. “Only now, in reflection, do I notice how a lot that Catholic imprint is inherent in my upbringing,” she mentioned, including that the church match nicely with a few of her exhibits’ earlier matters: “girls, intercourse, the satan.”
These themes nonetheless have the facility to shock, particularly in part of Germany the place a far-right political party presently leads in opinion polls. Cornelia Zink, who performs Susanna, mentioned she had heard some feedback about her participation within the undertaking. “Colleagues mentioned, ‘If you have been my girlfriend, you wouldn’t be doing this,’” she mentioned.
“I feel it comes from a spot the place folks, largely males, have a deep concern of robust girls,” she added. “I feel, 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 forged and inventive group — 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,” by which the heroines are seducers or victims of male violence. “Even in up to date opera, we don’t at all times achieve creating actually fascinating feminine roles. This piece exhibits girls 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 now have trans and nonbinary folks in our troupe.”
That gaze, she mentioned, is what made the nudity on this piece particular. “I’ve spent numerous time onstage bare. But it was from a male, usually straight, voyeuristic imaginative and prescient.
“And that’s fully totally different from a feminist, inclusive imaginative and prescient of what it means to be a girl,” she added. “In this house, nobody is different.”
