Take me to church: Florentina Holzinger's Sancta

On the roller-skating nun opera that's become one of European theatre's hottest tickets.

I just got back from Berlin where I attended Theatertreffen, the annual showcase of the 10 ‘most remarkable’ productions from the last year in the German-speaking scene and where I managed to snag a ticket for the show which has been generating headlines worldwide for its ability to make audiences feel queasy. My round-up of the work I saw will be in this week’s issue of The Stage, which also contains my interview with Carolina Bianchi, whose show Cadela Forca Trilogy – Chapter II: The Brotherhood opened in Brussels last week.

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Sancta by Florentina Holzinger. Photograph: © Nicole Marianna Wytyczak

When it premiered last year, Sancta, the new show by Austrian choreographer and performer Florentina Holzinger, generated some incredible headlines. Newspapers – including the Daily Mail, of course – worked themselves into a froth over ‘explicit lesbian sex acts’ and the fact that the show had left some audience members feeling nauseated. In a way, you couldn’t ask for better publicity – Sancta remains an insanely hot ticket, with this current run of performances at the Volksbühne selling out in seconds – but it also attracted the ire of the right, and the makers have been on the receiving end of threats.

This hasn’t stopped it becoming a phenomenon. On the night I go to see it there are quite a few people hovering outside the theatre in the hope of snagging tickets as well as a few women in nuns’ habits to welcome us inside. There’s a palpable sense of excitement in the air. There’s even a merch table. There’s also a detailed list of trigger warnings by the door. No one can say they weren’t told.

If you boil Sancta down to its most extreme elements – the show includes scenes of scarification and the ingestion of flesh – then sure, it sounds shocking, and arguably it is shocking, but it's so much richer and more moving than that, a profoundly joyous experience.

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Sancta draws on Paul Hindemith's one-act opera Sancta Susanna, about a nun who struggles to suppress her desires. It was supposed to premiere in 1921 at the Stuttgart Opera House, but they got cold feet and cancelled the show. Holzinger uses Hindemith’s opera as a jumping-off point for a deeper dive into the knotty relationship between the Catholic Church, pain, shame and the body.

Given everything else that happens later in Sancta it’s easy to forget that the first thing we see is an enormous robot arm arcing across the stage Sistine chapel fashion, a mechanical anomaly in this most fleshy of performances. The stage design by Nikola Knežević features a huge climbing wall - Holzinger described it as an altar in this interview with the Berliner – and a brick chamber into which an unfortunate nun has been bricked up for failing to keep her passions in check. As the choir sings Hindemith’s music, naked women in harnesses start to scale the climbing wall, occasionally spreading their arms like Christ. A giant neon cross descends from above and they climb that too, before engaging in the vigorous cunnilingus which got the Daily Mail so hot and bothered.

The opera is short and we get it almost in its entirety, the lighting throughout a kind of soupy streetlamp orange, giving the whole stage a crepuscular and, ever so slightly, soporific quality. Just as you’re starting to wonder where it will go next, the brick structure erupts, the interred nun breaks free with an eardrum-piercing shriek – and all hell breaks loose.