At Theatertreffen Festival, Bodies Do the Talking

New York Times

15-05-2025

In this year's Theatertreffen, the annual Berlin festival showcasing the best theater from the German-speaking world, two of the 10 selected works — narrowed down from 600 by a jury — are choreography-led productions where bodies, rather than mouths, do most of the talking.
The first of these, 'Sancta,' is the brainchild of the Austrian choreographer, director and performance artist Florentina Holzinger. Like all her shows — including 'Tanz,' which played earlier this year at NYU Skriball in New York — it is comes with trigger warnings, this time for blood, needles, 'self-injurious acts' and sexual violence.
Holzinger, who will represent Austria at next year's Venice Biennale, is known for traversing dance, theater and visual art, and 'Sancta' is her first foray into classical music. She has reworked Paul Hindemith's scandalous 1922 one-act opera 'Sancta Susanna,' about a nun tormented by forbidden desire, to critique the patriarchal structures of the Roman Catholic church. When 'Sancta' played in Stuttgart, Germany, last year, the opera house there said some nauseated audience members needed medical attention, and in Vienna, Austrian bishops denounced the show as a 'disrespectful caricature.'
At the Volksbühne in Berlin, 'Sancta' opens with a rendition of Hindemith's score by three wild-eyed singers in habits before morphing into a provocative variety show. Naked performers kiss, grope, and grind against a towering metal crucifix. Roller-skating nuns glide along a halfpipe and karate kick suspended metal sheets. In one stomach-churning scene, a strip of skin is sliced from a performer's chest, fried and fed to another cast member in a techno-scored tableau evoking the Last Supper.
If Holzinger's intent is to shock, she succeeds — but her efforts also backfire. The relentless barrage of subversive scenes means that, over the show's nearly three-hour run time, it's easy to become desensitized. Its most powerful moments lean into topical humor, rather than excess: When a performer with dwarfism walks onstage dressed in papal robes and dryly declares, 'It's official,' she elicits big laughs from the audience. (It was the day of Pope Leo XIV's election.) Later, the performer proclaims herself the first lesbian pope, to more enthusiastic laughter.
Though the cast of female, trans and nonbinary performers finished the show drenched in blood, its members all embraced joyfully, bonded by collectively pushing their bodies to the brink. The applause was rapturous: While few would be willing to perform this ferocious sisterhood's tasks, in Berlin, at least, they seem to appreciate watching them.
There is also a supportive onstage community in Theatertreffen's other choreographer-led work, albeit of a very different kind. That piece, called 'Kontakthof — Echoes of '78,' revisits the German choreographer Pina Bausch's 'Kontakthof,' a landmark work of contemporary dance. Nine members of Bausch's cast — now in their 70s, with some nearing 80 — have reunited to perform the roles they created in the late 1970s. They share the stage with ghostly, gray-scale projections from the original show, depicting their younger selves and some absent fellow performers, a few of whom have passed away.
Set in a community hall, the original 'Kontakthof' explored dating rituals, longing and power dynamics between the sexes. The male and female performers struggle for dominance, including in a scene where they shout the names of body parts at one another with increasing aggression and struggle in a kind of choreographic tug of war.
Many of the original sequences are faithfully reworked in 'Kontakthof — Echoes of '78,' yet the Australian dancer and choreographer Meryl Tankard, who was a member of Bausch's company, has reframed some and condensed others. The new show is a love letter to the company and its artistic achievements, but also a bittersweet depiction of the unavoidable losses that come with aging.
Dressed in sharp suits and elegant evening gowns, the performers haunt the stage like phantoms. Surrounded by empty chairs, they sway alone in ballroom holds, their partners conspicuously absent. Later, they scream, slam doors and run in circles while laughing maniacally, tormented by their inability to move on.
Negative memories surface, including in a chilling scene in which Tankard mirrors a film of her younger body being manipulated by a group of men. Her older form recoils, flinching from touches that took place almost 50 years ago, in a powerful depiction of physical trauma.
There is celebration, too: Smiling flirtatiously, the cast walks resolutely together in processional lines — a Bausch signature — performing a cycle of repeating hand gestures, arm raises and subtle shifts in posture, set to popular German songs of the 1930s. To more rapid jazz, wild, whipping motions bubble up in the performers' limbs. Their gestures are now rougher around the edges than in the projections from the 1970s, and the performers seem to be digging deep into their muscle memories to recall the choreography.
Charming, witty duets also reveal a chemistry that comes from years of working together. A skippy, coquettish exchange between Tankard and Josephine Anne Endicott, a fellow Australian, is a highlight, as is a later scene where Endicott cheekily mocks another performer's hip swivels, which are no match for the projections. When the scrim on which those are beamed is lifted at the end of the second act, and the cast sits at the front of the stage to speak about their daily lives, wishes and regrets, we gain a deeper insight into the personalities that shaped Bausch's revered repertoire.
Bausch led Tanztheater Wuppertal from 1973 until her death in 2009, and it must be tough for the company's current performers, many of whom never met Bausch, to live up to the figures of that time. But 'Kontakthof — Echoes of '78' shows that honoring the past, while not being constrained by it, can make old works newly relevant. There is room for both melancholic reflection and transgressive provocation on contemporary stages, and the moving body is a powerful tool to express both.