IT IS SOMETIMES SAID that Catholics are the best perverts. For those of us who grew up in Catholic environments—in my case, Bavaria—even if raised “anti-religious,” you still fight against the internalized influence of the church’s politics of morality and guilt all your life. As the Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger and I discussed over lunch a week after I saw her latest piece, SANCTA, 2024, in Vienna, it is something that might end up in your own artistic practice. In this new work, which premiered May 30 at the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin, Germany, before traveling to the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna in early June, she has made Catholicism her direct subject for the first time.
Holzinger is a trained choreographer and had already made a name for herself in the European dance and performance scene before René Pollesch brought her to the Berlin Volksbühne in 2021. On the big stage, with larger production budgets, Holzinger quickly gained a real following for her opulent choreography and spectacular sets incorporating helicopters, cars, and motorcycles. The art world was equally enthusiastic: At the invitation of art institutions throughout Europe, Holzinger and her core team of collaborators have developed shorter one-off performances that she calls Études. For example, in Étude for Disappearing Berlin, first staged at Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillon in May 2022, the group performs car stunts in parking lots; Harbour Étude, commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall in Norway and performed this August, took place in the city’s harbor basin.
Holzinger’s theater pieces do not follow a classical dramatic structure with plot and dialogue. Rather, they are sequences of scenes on specific themes that translate her research material—texts, films, images, songs, and stories—into a mixture of intense physical work, body modification, movement, dance, tableaux vivants, drama, and comedy. She often works with performers with special “talents,” such as a sword swallower or stunt motorcyclist, and the diverse cast of female-presenting and nonbinary performers are usually naked onstage. In TANZ, 2019, Holzinger analyzes the pain and bodily discipline of professional ballet dancers. A Divine Comedy, 2021, loosely follows Dante Alighieri’s narrative, with the dancers proceeding through various circles of hell.
Central to Holzinger’s work is the idea of testing and exceeding the physical limits of the body—especially the female-presenting body. She and her co-performers guide the audience through a wide range of emotions, and at the end of the show send them back out into the fresh air feeling liberated––or queasy. But how is this classical catharsis achieved? After seeing SANCTA—which works its way through the double standards, the pompousness, the brutality, and the bloody traces of the Catholic Church—I realized how much of what happens dramaturgically in Holzinger’s works can be compared to the spectacle of a mass—albeit one without a single cis male taking part.
A collaboration with the Mecklenburg State Theater and the Stuttgart State Opera, in cooperation with international co-producers, conducted here by Marit Strindlund, SANCTA is based on Paul Hindemith’s 1922 one-act opera Sancta Susanna, sung by three professional opera singers and a choir in nuns’ costumes. The opera’s plot seems predestined for Holzinger’s project: The nun Susanna feels a wave of carnal lust coming over her as she prays in the chapel. This is a problem, as her colleague Klementia knows: Years earlier, another nun at the convent, Beata, climbed the holy cross completely naked in order to snuggle up to the statue of Christ. As punishment for her sinful desires, she was walled up alive. Susanna, too, demands to be walled up as penance for her lust. The other nuns gather around her and insist that she confess; she refuses, ripping off her clothes, and they denounce her as possessed by Satan.
Central to Holzinger’s work is the idea of testing and exceeding the physical limits of the body—especially the female-presenting body.
Holzinger’s staging of the twenty-five-minute opera is rather faithful to the original plot until the end, when her own mass begins: In her version, naked dancers begin to perform sexual acts behind and above Klementia as she attempts to dissuade Susanna from sharing Beata’s cruel fate. Several performers scale up a climbing wall at the back of the stage. They contort and twist, producing a tableau vivant strongly reminiscent of Rubens’s Fall of the Damned (ca. 1620). The arrival of Satan—or the liberation of the woman—is announced with a loud growl from inside a brick box, as Beata, played by the Chinese musician otay:onii, tears down the walls. From here, the piece moves loosely through biblical passages from the Old and New Testaments, from the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib to the Last Supper, to expose the misogyny of the book.
It is impossible to neatly summarize exactly what happens next onstage. Liturgical compositions by Bach and Rachmaninoff are interspersed with new music by Born in Flamez, Johanna Doderer, and Stefan Schneider, among others. A large robotic arm representing an altar boy or the hand of God whirls candles, chalices, and, eventually, the “world’s first lesbian pope” (Saioa Alvarez Ruiz) through the air. Nuns, naked from the waist down, roller-skate in a half-pipe, attempting to overcome gravity to enter heaven. Bodies are used as clappers in a church bell weighing several tons. The audience is invited to confess their sins in exchange for vodka. At one point, the Holy Spirit, played by the professional magician Malin Nilsson, performs the Bible’s first magic trick: An audience member is brought onstage. With some rattling and shaking, a (plastic) rib is removed from his side, and Eve (Luz de Luna Duran) appears, trapped in a cage. The cast members discuss what they should call this thing and decide to name it “woman.” As the Holy Spirit describes, however, this Eve has no desire to submit to men. In a touching scene, the performers list individual reasons why they deserve to be canonized: Because they have had sex with more than sixty people in a year. Because they have been raped, beaten, and discriminated against and have detached and emancipated themselves. Because they can be mother and father in one person. Because they are standing here onstage.
A haywire, Swiss German–speaking Jesus (Annina Machaz) searching for followers for her cult repeatedly provides us relief from these traumatic stories and dark images by telling jokes to the audience and showing off her cuddly toy lamb. As is often the case with Holzinger’s plays, such moments of slapstick are followed by something grislier: A vulva-shaped piece of skin is cut out of performer Xana Novais’s side so that the incredulous Thomas can penetrate the fresh wound with her finger, just as the saint does to Christ’s in Caravaggio’s 1603 painting The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. As the scene unfolds onstage, it is simultaneously broadcast live on two large screens at each end, so all the bloody details can be seen up close (this is usually the point when people faint in the audience; when I saw SANCTA, the first violinist did so). The piece of skin is later roasted on the electric grill and consumed at the Last Supper.
Holzinger’s staging of SANCTA’s forty-plus cast members might call to mind scenes of excessive sexuality and violence in 1970s films like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975) and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain (1973). But unlike these directors, who use (or abuse) performers’ bodies, treating them as pawns of a kind through which they may realize their own respective auteurist visions, Holzinger is a participant in a highly collaborative process. The moments when she and her co-performers push physical boundaries with their bodies are carefully prepared and rehearsed. Instead of dancers trained to perfection, Holzinger’s performers appear as individual artists who test what their diverse bodies are capable of.
Among the most impressive feats in all of her pieces is how Holzinger manages to make the multitude of naked, queer bodies onstage radiate empowerment rather than objectification and vulnerability. This is partly due to the sheer number of performers, who often move and talk at the front edge of the stage with total composure, evading mere voyeurism by routinely breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly. Watching SANCTA, I was reminded of a painting by Otto van Veen in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, The Persian Women, 1597–99, showing the act referred to in ancient Greece as anasyrma: a woman lifting her skirt and displaying her vulva as a ritual to ward off evil through shock. In van Veen’s painting, a large group of women in the foreground expose their (hairless) vulvas to the horror and shame of a group of arriving soldiers. The scene is derived from a story in Plutarch’s “On the Virtues of Women,” in which a group of Persian soldiers on the verge of defeat flee toward their home city, tired and ready to surrender. Their wives force them back onto the field with their lifted skirts and the words “Whither are you rushing so fast, you biggest cowards in the whole world? Surely you cannot, in your flight, slink in here whence you came forth.” Humiliated, the men turn back and defeat their enemies. Holzinger’s choreography proposes a new reading of such discriminatory images inscribed in cultural history, proposing collective exposure as a show of strength, an aggressive defense against patriarchy—possible at least within the protected space of the performance. There is one more reference for Holzinger’s bloody spectacle that can’t be ignored, Viennese Actionism—which is why I find the all too gruesome shockers the least interesting aspect of her work. Though Actionist (mostly male) body art set itself in opposition to the Catholic Church, its emphasis on the ritual purification of the sinful body through sacrifice and pain is ultimately a continuation of Catholic pageantry. Despite all its transgression, Holzinger’s feminist and self-reflective comment on Europe’s postwar Catholic culture manages to avoid raising a moral finger—mainly because the stories and images remain close to the performers. She perhaps rightly complained in the audience discussion, “Our trigger warnings before each play become longer and longer while iconographic works and the Bible have none.” By activating the violent images at the base of European culture, Holzinger’s theater assembles a bruised collective body.
Nadja Abt is an artist, writer, and editor based in Berlin and Vienna.
