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From the Jury report:

"Few have the budget and resources at Holzinger's disposal, but equally few create work as uncompromising and rebellious as hers. Sancta is without doubt one of the most arresting stage works the jury saw this season. Credit, too, to Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, whose coproduction seeks to transcend the boundaries between genres and does not shy away from pushing artistic limits."

Based on Paul Hindemith’s 1922 short work Sancta Susanna – in which a nun confronts the violent punishment of sexual self-determination – Florentina Holzinger’s 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 – abortion, homosexuality, sex work, pleasure – SANCTA stages sexual 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, penetration, transformation; show magicians propose their take on the Bible’s miracles; the Sistine Chapel turns into a climbing wall, God into robot, opera into rock musical. Mass turns into spectacle and, in Florentina Holzinger’s words, real magic needs to happen. Spiderlike and dark, loud and excessive, funny and redemptory, SANCTA is the trigger warning for mass.