For two nights in November, the Volksbühne will become a convent. Nuns will roller skate, blood and body shall incarnate spirit, and presiding over it all, a kind of mother superior to the theatre of spectacle that she and her collaborators have instantiated, will be Florentina Holzinger. Holzinger, whose name is spoken in reverential tones by Berlin theatregoers both in and out of the know, is giving the city a sizzling taste of Sancta, the follow-up to her smash hit Ophelia’s Got Talent.
In this piece, Holzinger transubstantiates the physical risk taking, the extraordinary bodily conditioning and the powerful image-making that have made her dance theatre so thrilling into the world of opera, staging Paul Hindemith’s controversial one-act opera of 1922, Sancta Susanna, and then a mass. In between its run in Stuttgart (where the show gained viral notoriety after eighteen theatregoers were treated for severe nausea) and its arrival in Berlin, Holzinger spoke with The Berliner about the diptych’s development, the state of the Catholic Church, and those nuns getting hang time on the holy grail of the halfpipe.
How did you first encounter Paul Hindemith’s original piece, Sancta Susanna?
It was during Covid that the opera in Schwerin approached me and asked me if I was interested in doing something. Opera has not really been so much on my radar. I’m not an operagoer or any of that. I had just stumbled over some opera in my research for other productions. I really was looking for operas with almost exclusively female choirs or singing parts. And that brought me very fast to this genre, the nun opera. There are a couple of them – Suor Angelica and many more – but among those I stumbled into was Sancta Susanna. I watched it several times, actually, because it’s 25 minutes long. I guess what attracted me in the first place was that it is so camp. And there is this narration that is somehow very explicit, but also quite grotesque. It deals with the classic sujet of suppressed sexuality through religion and the Church, and it leads to the complete excess of it all.
Musically it is extraordinary, a constant crescendo leading into madness on all levels. In the end Susanna rubs her body in ecstasy against the crucified Christ figure and requests her own immurement to save herself from her awakened sensuality. The whole convent gathers around her onstage and calls her Satana, Satana. So she turns from Susanna into Satana in just 20 minutes. And I thought, wow, this is amazing – the music, the narrative and the topics that it brings up from beginning. I didn’t know Hindemith before. People’s opinions about his music definitely vary; he represented the Neue Sachlichkeit in classical music at the beginning of the last century. I really fell in love with his piece throughout the process.
I realise that growing up in Austria meant growing up under the cross pretty much all of the time
You just finished a run in Stuttgart. What was it like to bring Sancta there?
It’s quite remarkable. This was quite historical because that’s actually where, when Hindemith and [August] Stramm wrote it, it was supposed to premiere – in Stuttgart, 100 years ago. And this did not happen back then because the Catholic Church sabotaged it. There was a big boycott and that led to the premiere getting cancelled, and in the end it happened in Frankfurt. So this was the first time that this piece came back to Stuttgart and was actually done. And that was quite cool to think about it in this scope of a century.
Can I ask why the nuns are skating?
So the first part is the Hindemith, and then the second part is kind of what we call the mass, where we are pretty accurately following the liturgy of a Catholic mass – musically but also theatrically. I was assembling the cast according to how my ideal convent would look like and what this convent would somehow do. And it was clear for me that I wanted to take this whole sphere into the urban [space]. I watched a lot of videos of priests who skate and skate parks in churches and it was clear that [with] our convent, our nuns, their spiritual practice is manifold. So it’s not just praying and singing and reading, but it’s of course also dancing, and it’s also athletic things.
It’s also climbing – we have a big climbing wall, which is this metaphor for transcendence and also represents our altar. It’s the place where we make a lot of references to the crucified Jesus figure. So there’s climbing, but also there’s skating. I was looking for [something] that is not as mundane as just walking on feet, but like this floating, gliding together with the big dresses. It made a lot of sense to have the skating nuns. And also, of course, there’s the half pipe that we have on the stage, so that’s really the ‘Holy Grail’. That’s our holy grail.
How do you think about your engagement with the Catholic Church here – personal, art historical, political, especially in the context of some of Pope Francis’ more reactionary statements about the role of women?
I mean, everything. I guess that was the reason why I previously always had hesitation dealing with it – because it’s like the box of Pandora, the Catholic Church and what it opens. We all know that the Church has a long history of problems. Of course, all of these horrendous abuse scandals. I grew up with in Austria in the 90s, and to me the Church represented undigested abuse scandals and phoney Marian apparitions and miracles. There were a lot of people in my generation who went to Catholic schools and brought home lots of stories, illustrating the double nature of the church – the preached reality versus the lived one.
We tried to distil what religion really aims to do for people.
I was not in Catholic school myself, but had to sing the prayer first thing in the morning, and there is a crucifix in every classroom. You don’t question any of those things. But in hindsight, I realise that growing up in Austria meant growing up under the cross pretty much all of the time – no matter which religion you were, or if any religion at all. It was not my aim at all to bash anybody’s religion with the show. Religion can be great and very helpful to people if applied without dogma. We actually tried to revalidate the ideas and values at the base of Christian faith. History teaches us that religion more often than not gets abused for power – I mean, many wars were fought in the name of the cross.
I guess a good Christian is also critical of many aspects of the institution. The abuse scandals are just one aspect, the dealings around homosexuality and women’s rights over their bodies are another. The Church still gets used by conservative forces to install regressive acts and suppress the emancipated body. It represents a highly patriarchal structure like no other, and of course we are commenting on this. In the process I tried to talk with Catholic priests about the future. But they couldn’t give me answers. They told me before the Church truly welcomes homosexuality and before the Church becomes a place where women can hold the same positions as men, the Church will not exist anymore. That’s what I was told.
The mass at the end of this piece is joyous and utopian – you spoke about an “ideal convent”. How do you see this utopia arriving in the contemporary context of so much reactionary politics?
This theatre experience is ideal. We really did a very, very, very deep dive into religion and the Church. I mean, it’s an endless pit. you can spend a whole lifetime analysing its history. We tried to distil what religion really aims to do for people – to make them feel better about the suffering that they experience. To handle the thought of one’s own finality, of death. To exercise compassion and love and care. When religion gets institutionalised, that’s where the trouble begins and dogma and misuse seep in. With Sancta, we try to turn the Church into a church for us – one that could potentially work.
So, what lies beyond the walls of the convent? Are you working already on a new piece?
I’m working on a musical for the Volksbühne. I call it a musical a little bit carefully, because we still have to write it and there’s not so much time to do that. There are actually several projects in the pipeline, and I don’t really know which one comes first and which one comes last, but the musical is most likely going to happen. And it’s supposed to premiere, I think, in May at the Volksbühne. It was our last project that we intended to do for René Pollesch – before we all didn’t know what was going to be happening at the Volksbühne. So we were like, okay, let’s just turn it into Broadway before everything falls to pieces. And I want to deal with this topic of ageing. So there is a little bit of Dorian Gray, and there is a little bit of Frankenstein. And there is a lot of survival training. But I cannot say more than this yet.
- Volksbühne, Linienstr. 227, Mitte, Sancta (Nov 15-16), German and English surtitles, details.
