The actress who stars in a controversial new opera as Jesus Christ has described the thrill she gets from performing dangerous stunts and taking to the stage naked.
Annina Machaz plays an unconventional version of the Messiah – characterised as a homeless drug addict – and takes a secondary role as a naked Adam in ‘Sancta’.
The almost three-hour show about a suppressed nun discovering her sexuality includes unsimulated lesbian sex scenes, sword swallowing, real blood, piercings, and gruesome injuries being inflicted live on stage.
The performance was so graphic that it left 18 audience members requiring medical treatment for nausea and shock over the first two performances in the German city of Stuttgart.
Machaz is at the center of the chaotic show, which was put on by maverick Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger, and has also starred in the director’s previous shocking productions.
‘What I find exciting about theatre is the possibility of transformation,’ she told Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger last year.
The daring performer takes part in some of the show’s riskiest stunts, at one point dangling high above the stage completely naked.
In a biblical reenactment, she is handed an apple by an actress playing Eve, and reaches out to actors below her in an allusion to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Man fresco.
In preparation for Holzinger’s outlandish shows, Machaz and her fellow performers undertake rigorous stunt training.
She says the the thrill she gets from performing the risky tricks, which in one case saw her set herself on fire, are what theatre is all about.
The scandalous show, which is loosely based on a 1921 opera which was cancelled for being too blasphemous, has received serious backlash during its run this year
It was met with outcry from Church figures in Austria when it was performed at the Vienna Festival in June, with one bishop saying the work went beyond the boundaries of artistic expression by ‘seriously offending believers’ religious feelings and convictions.’
Themes of Sancta include female sexual, physical and social oppression and a ‘dissecting’ of Catholicism and religion, with Holzinger labelling it ‘our own version of Mass’. In one particularly irreligious scene, Machaz, dressed as Jesus, spanks the behind of a semi-naked nun.
Aspects of the opera which have been blasted as blasphemous by critics include a the loin cloth being ripped off Christ on the cross and one of the actresses copulating with the statue.
At one point, roller-skating semi-naked nuns wow the audience by performing tricks in a half-pipe on stage.
In another bizarre scene, a female Pope, played by an actress with dwarfism, is lifted in the air and spun around by a robotic arm.
And in a particularly disturbing sequence, bodies are strung up on the wall to mimic Christ on the cross, before vats of fake blood start pouring down over them.
