BERLIN (AP) — A performance inside a Catholic cathedral in Germany earlier this month that featured raw, plucked chickens wrapped in diapers onstage — and the country's president and the local archbishop in the audience — has prompted the church and municipal leaders to apologize that the show “hurt religious feelings."
The show, "Westphalia Side Story,” was part of a May 15 celebration to mark the 1,250th anniversary of Westphalia, a region in northwestern Germany.
Video footage shows one woman and two shirtless men singing “Fleisch ist Fleisch” (“Meat is meat”) — apparently spoofing Austrian band Opus' 1984 pop song “Live is Life” — with scythes and dancing with the dead chickens on a stage in front of Paderborn Cathedral's altar.
Performance company bodytalk said in a statement Friday that the show featured work-in-progress excerpts from “Westphalia Side Story" — which references the American musical "West Side Story."
The finished show, which will premiere in September, is supposed to be part of the 1,250th anniversary’s cultural programming.
“It was not meant to be a spoof at all,” bodytalk cofounder Rolf Baumgart said in an email to The Associated Press. “As Westphalia is a rural dominated region with a turbulent history our research was focused on that.”
The spectacle also prompted an online petition — signed by more than 22,000 people by Friday afternoon — that asks Paderborn Archbishop Udo Bentz for a personal apology, as well as penance. The signers also want him to reconsecrate the cathedral after it was “desecrated by this performance.”
In a statement posted online to the cathedral's website more than a week after the performance, the Regional Association of Westphalia-Lippe and the church's leadership said that the content of the performance wasn't known to the organizers or the venue.
The cathedral, the statement said, is often host to cultural events and has begun an internal review. They also promised to more carefully vet proposed events in the future.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier's office didn't immediately return a request for comment on Friday.
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Philipp Jenne contributed to this report from Vienna.