Sancta: What to know about the opera with explicit lesbian sex, live piercings, and naked roller-skating nuns

Photo by Matthias Baus

Sancta‘s artistic director, Viktor Schoner, stated in the show’s description that “exploring boundaries and crossing them with relish has always been a central task of art.”

“I am looking forward to working with Florentina Holzinger, her team and above all with you, Stuttgart’s legendarily experimental audience, to leave our own comfort zone and ideally expand it,” Schoner said.

The website also includes a section clarifying some of the explicit content, reading, “Of course, theater and opera merely imitate reality: when people love, suffer and die on the opera stage, it’s all just an act. The situation has been different in performance art for decades: Here the performer does not embody a character, here the body itself is the medium — and in Florentina Holzinger’s works in particular, natural nudity is a central means of expression.”