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In a rehearsal last week at the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin, northeastern Germany, Fleshpiece, a shirtless performer with tattoos and purple hair, strode to the front of the main stage and delivered an impassioned monologue.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis opera house, this is our church,\u201d Fleshpiece intoned. \u201cWe continue to nail you to the present, just as Jesus was nailed to the cross.\u201d<\/p>\n
Supervising the scene was the experimental choreographer Florentina Holzinger, wearing a black baseball cap and a T-shirt printed with a picture of two nuns engaged in B.D.S.M. play.<\/p>\n
Her previous works, including \u201cOphelia\u2019s Got Talent<\/a>\u201d at the Volksb\u00fchne in Berlin and \u201cA Divine Comedy<\/a>\u201d for the R\u00fchrtriennale festival, were boundary-pushing, peripatetic shows in which nudity, profanity, onstage helicopters, onstage ejaculation and performers hanging from their teeth have shocked and awed audiences. \u201cOphelia\u2019s Got Talent\u201d jointly won Germany\u2019s Faust prize for best dance production<\/a> last year, cementing Holzinger\u2019s status as one of Europe\u2019s rising theater stars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the German-speaking world, that kind of profile brings invitations to direct opera \u2014 and Holzinger\u2019s work, which matches music with powerful, stage-filling spectacle, certainly has operatic qualities. Yet a gilded opera theater still seems an unlikely home for Holzinger, 38, whose anarchic works are collaged from new and old text and music, often with sharply contrasting styles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For her next piece, which premieres at the Mecklenburg State Theater<\/a> on Thursday, before moving to the Wiener Festwochen festival<\/a> in Vienna from June 10, Holzinger is trying something different and staging an existing opera, Paul Hindemith\u2019s one-act \u201cSancta Susanna.\u201d She has expanded the piece into an extravaganza called \u201cSANCTA,\u201d featuring a skate ramp, a climbing wall and an industrial robot arm on which a dancer performs aerial choreography. As usual for a Holzinger show, there is abundant nudity and profanity.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to make sure that we are not stuck in the corset of an opera,\u201d Holzinger said in an interview, though she added that her earlier shows weren\u2019t so different from Hindemith\u2019s hair-raising 25-minute piece. \u201cIf you can dig \u2018Sancta Susanna,\u2019\u201d she said, \u201cthen you can dig my work.\u201d<\/p>\n The opera \u2014 in which a nun called Susanna has erotic fantasies about Christ on the cross and which ends with her stripping off her habit and Christ\u2019s loincloth \u2014 is the third in a trilogy of one-act pieces in which Hindemith pushed the boundaries of his day. Written in Hindemith\u2019s early, expressionist style, the score escalates from a delicate opening to a finale with thundering brass chords as the other nuns in Susanna\u2019s convent denounce her as a Satanist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For \u201cSANCTA,\u201d the opera\u2019s three singers will be joined by some of Holzinger\u2019s regular collaborators, including roller skaters, a sword swallower and performers who hang from hooks embedded in their skin. At the end of the Hindemith piece, the show proceeds without a break into a kind of staged mass, with music from settings of the Latin liturgy by Bach, Rachmaninoff, Byrd and Gounod, plus new music by the composers Johanna Doderer and James Grabsch, whose artist name is Born in Flamez.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Holzinger, who grew up in Austria, which is predominantly Roman Catholic, said the piece was her first explicit reckoning with the church. \u201cOnly now, in reflection, do I realize how much that Catholic imprint is inherent in my upbringing,\u201d she said, adding that the church fit well with some of her shows\u2019 previous topics: \u201cwomen, sex, the devil.\u201d<\/p>\n