The eagerly awaited first opera production by star Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger has sold out its first several performances.
Holzinger is directing "Sancta," an opera that combines Paul Hindemith's 1921 one-act opera "Sancta Susanna" with new compositions and sacred works at the Mecklenburg State Theatre in the eastern German city of Schwerin.
Tickets for the premiere on Thursday have sold out, while only standing room tickets for the following three days remain available, the theatre said on Monday.
Holzinger, 38, has been causing a stir in the theatre world for years with her works, in which she stages female bodies in a radical, visually stunning and extremely revealing way.
In "Tanz," ("Dance") which premiered in Vienna in 2019, the choreographer broke with traditional notions of classical ballet. With "Ophelia's Got Talent," first performed at the Volksbühne in Berlin in 2022, Holzinger brought a subject from classical theatre into the modern era of casting shows.
The play "Sancta" is described as a feminist mass. Following its premiere in Schwerin, the production will be shown at the Wiener Festwochen theatre festival in Vienna from June 10 to 15, and in Stuttgart and Berlin in the autumn.
Hindemith's "Sancta Susanna" was rejected by many of his contemporaries as deeply blasphemous. In the one-act opera, a nun is brutally punished for her sexual self-determination.
"An opera in which the female libido is central is of course interesting. And then it's also about the suppression of physicality in a church context," said Holzinger at the start of rehearsals.
The Sistine Chapel becomes a climbing wall, the opera becomes a rock musical, God becomes a robot, the Holy Mass becomes a spectacle, according to the theatre's promotional material for the opera.
