Based on Paul Hindemith’s 1922 libretto Sancta Susanna – in which a nun confronts the violent punishment of sexual self-determination – SANCTA bridges Bach and Rachmaninoff with metal, noise and contemporary compositions to reclaim the gore of Catholic mass and address the violent history of the Church. Countering the religious discipline and punishment of (female*) sexuality, SANCTA stages physical sensations and practices as a pathway to not-only-religious ecstasy. In a quest for magic and transcendence, body artists twist the religious topoi of scarification, and transformation; show magicians propose their take on the Bible’s miracles; the Sistine Chapel turns into a climbing wall, opera into rock musical, God into robot. Mass turns into an ecstatic celebration of community and self-determination and, in Holzinger’s words, real magic needs to happen. Spiderlike and dark, loud and excessive, funny and redemptory, SANCTA is the trigger warning for mass.

In the waning "Age of Aquarius", focus shifts from tech to humanitarian concerns, and the narratives of Ophelia’s heiresses have inevitably resurfaced to float like a carpet of algae above the depths. Iconographically, water has been associated with womanhood – and death. The narratives of Ophelia's ancestors - Leda, Melusine, Undine, nymphs, nereids, and sirens - have left a distinctive mark on contemporary imaginaries. They like to lure us into the water dragging us to the lower depths. Water is the element of assimilation and adaptation, a symbol of the boundless capacity to expand, of an eternal unity with the outside world. An oceanic landscape arises, full of allusions, and cultural and historical references of water creatures. Fluctuation, reflection, reproduction, healing, and violence: Florentina Holzinger explores these water-bound themes as metaphors for identity, survival, and transformation in the face of looming crises, probing future adaptations and new life forms.

For this show, Florentina Holzinger has brought together an intergenerational female identified cast to bundle forces in an exploration of the human negotiation of life and death. The reflections of an 80-year-old dancer on her life and career spanning the last century and the planning and rehearsing of her funeral are the midway upon the journey of this divine comedy.  Assisted by two dance teachers she sends the performers through settings of casting, dance class and training exploring the sujet of the mediaeval "Totentanz", revived by German expressionist dancers in the 20s. Inspired by this visual art and dance themes, the performers go on a journey to explore tensions within their own reality in relation to gender, ageing, sexuality and death. A possible spirituality of the 21st century: In an operatic celebration of life and death music and dance join forces as art practices aimed to transcend.

TANZ completes her trilogy – Recovery and Apollon were the first two parts – about the body as a spectacle, and its disciplining. A ballet class under the direction of Beatrice Cordua, the first ballerina to dance Le Sacre de Printemps naked (John Neumeier’s Le Sacre, 1972), provides the framework for TANZ. The performers undergo rigorous training in “action ballet”, the so-called “sylphic studies”. In joint rituals, they learn to master their bodies and minds, and they acquire supernatural powers, such as flying. A quest for perfection in an ephemeral world, during which the gross is transformed into the sublime. In an operatic setting, brutal parodies of sensationalist images emerge, as seen in ballet, comedy and pornography. With a cast of women between the ages of thirty and eighty, all of whom have different backgrounds in dance, TANZ raises the question of the legacy of dance. How can the cult of beauty inherent in this tradition be reconciled?