The lab-coated cast of A Year without Summer by Florentina Holzinger. Photograph: Mayra Wallraff
Between Rising announcing its program last year and the festival opening this week, the headliner Florentina Holzinger went from being art-world-famous to internet-famous. Her Venice Biennale exhibit Seaworld Venice – a satirical theme park featuring naked women suspended in filtered urine and doing doughnuts on jetskis, and a room of human poo – made headlines worldwide and flooded social media.
This week she brings her performance art – and a lot more poo – to Melbourne, in A Year Without Summer, which is her take on a musical. It follows on from Sancta, her controversial opera featuring roller-skating nuns, crucified naked bodies and a lesbian priest performing mass; and Rising’s 2023 headliner, Tanz, which brought flying motorbikes, body piercing and blood to the ballet.
A Year Without Summer has many of the hallmarks of a Holzinger show: a massive all-female, all-nude cast drawn from the diverse worlds of theatre, dance, circus, body modification, sex work and porn; along with masturbation, dildos, body piercing, blood (real), vomit and shit (both fake – thank god).
It opens with a story: a solo performer telling us about the summer of 1816, which never arrived. A year earlier, Mount Tambora in Indonesia had erupted, blanketing the planet in clouds of volcanic ash and causing global temperatures to plummet. In the northern hemisphere, the sun disappeared and there were torrential rains, leading to crop failures and famine.
In Geneva, a group of artists and lovers including Mary Godwin and her soon-to-be-husband, Percy Shelley, holed up in a villa in miserable weather, philosophised about life and told each other scary stories. And so Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was born: a cautionary tale about medical science untempered by humanity, in which a doctor makes a man and fails to take responsibility for his creation, with catastrophic results. A tale in which the real monsters are humans.
In our era of endemic climate crisis, the performer-narrator asks the audience, what stories might we tell ourselves?
Holzinger and her band of punk theatre-makers offer a celebration of life – all of life, in its ridiculous, sublime, abject and messy complexity – wrapped in a cautionary tale disguised as a musical. Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, it pitches its tent at the intersection of medical science, nature and humanity. Unlike Shelley’s literary masterpiece, there is a massive inflatable muff, a pack of robot dogs, a full-blown sex orgy and a poo-pocalypse.
A Year Without Summer is chaotic and not always coherent. Moments of tenderness are punctured by gross-out stunts; sublime images smash into ridiculous moments. It is structured as a series of vignettes in wildly divergent styles, ranging from sung musical numbers (including an ode to benzos and antidepressants) and dance sequences to live endurance art and comic skits.
A bearded and bespectacled Sigmund Freud lectures us on the dangers of female genitalia in between nose-diving into a mound of coke and performing a pelvic exam on another performer. A singing Josef Mengele brags about inventing eugenics and “dealing with disabled people”, before Georges Cuvier regales us with tales of the “Hottentot Venus” and boasts about cutting off her genitals for science.
The cast members share their lived experiences of the medical system; one performer inserts four hooks into the face of another – captured in closeup via a live camera feed – to perform the “ultimate facelift”; and Holzinger herself births a tiny baby, a figurine stashed inside a gash in her thigh.
What emerges most clearly from this chaos is the sense of being part of an experiment. Holzinger and her lab-coated cast expose us to dystopian visions of the scientific progress on which our contemporary lives are founded – body modification, biohacking, AI-driven robotics – and invite us to reflect on how we react. What or who are the real monsters? What is truly repulsive?
But the most powerful message in A Year Without Summer is perhaps the medium itself: the community of diverse women co-authoring their own vision of what theatre can be. The art world, like medical science, has consistently failed women, queer people, people with disabilities, people of colour. A Year Without Summer creates a brief utopia – and the palpable joy and laughter among the audience attests to this experiment’s success.
A Year Without Summer is at Arts Centre Melbourne as part of Rising festival until 31 May.
