Viennese choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger will show her first opera at the Wiener Festwochen. Under the working title Sancta, the one-acter Sancta Susanna by Paul Hindemith will be complemented with new compositions and sacred music to form a feminist mass. After the world premiere at the Mecklenburg State Theatre (May 2024), the piece will come to the Wiener Festwochen 2024.

Florentina Holzinger is currently considered one of the most exciting theatre makers and known for her radical and spectacular performances that push all boundaries. For her production Ophelia’s Got Talent at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin, she was distinguished in several critics’ surveys, among them by Theater heute magazine as theatre director of the year and by TANZ magazine as best production of the year. Now for the first time, she is developing an opera, where her performers share the stage with vocal solists, choral singers and an orchestra.

34 productions of theatre, opera, music, dance, performance and the visual arts were on show at a total of 20 venues in Vienna from May 12 to June 21. Between the Parliament and the Donaupark, there were celebrations aplenty with cheering, hooting, applause and dancing – and no fewer than 40,495 tickets issued, resulting in an attendance figure of 88,5%. More than twice as many under-30s were counted compared with last year (+125%). Despite unfortunate cancellations (Devonté Hynes, whose Selected Classical Works had already sold out the Burgtheater, and The Child, whose leading actor Fatemeh Motamed-Arya was denied an exit visa to leave her native Iran), 40,495 tickets were issued.