Eighteen opera-goers treated for severe nausea after opera of live sex, nuns and blood

11 October 2024, 12:35 | Updated: 11 October 2024, 12:45

Naked nuns, live sex and real blood. If you were expecting a civilised night at the opera, you would be forgiven for wondering if you had got the right venue...

Eighteen audience members required medical treatment after being faced with naked roller-skating nuns, real blood and a handful of explicit lesbian sex scenes during an opera performance in Stuttgart, Germany.

Sancta, a work by Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger, combines Paul Hindemith’s one act opera Sancta Susanna with elements of the Catholic liturgy to create a radical vision of the Holy Mass ritual.

For many, the opera was so alarming that they had to be treated for severe nausea, and three cases required a doctor to be called to help.

“On Saturday we had eight and on Sunday we had 10 people who had to be looked after by our visitor service,” said the opera’s spokesperson, Sebastian Ebling, after the performances that included live piercing, unsimulated sexual intercourse and both fake and real blood.

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Trailer: SANCTA | Staatsoper Stuttgart

Florentina Holzinger – the work’s creator – has made a name for herself as someone with a penchant for pushing boundaries to the extreme, with a strong emphasis on reimagining different modes of female representation.

Paul Hindemith’s opera provided the perfect vehicle for Holzinger, as the original work itself was so scandalous that it prompted Karl Grunsky, a contemporary critic, to write that the performance “signifies a desecration of our cultural institutions.” Pretty impressive, considering a typical performance of the one-act work lasts only around 30 minutes.

There have been over 25 revivals of the original opera since its Frankfurt premiere in 1922, but in Sancta, Holzinger takes the themes of Hindemith’s opera and ratchets them up to a whole new level.

“We recommend that all audience members once again very carefully read the warnings so they know what to expect,” Ebling told the Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspaper. “If you have questions, speak to the visitor service,” Ebling added. “And when in doubt during the performance, it might help to avert your gaze.”

With a strict age restriction of 18 and warnings about the graphic context, audiences should be prepared for a wild night which makes Tosca look like an episode of Father Brown.