During the culminating scene in Florentina Holzinger’s A Year Without Summer, the stage turns into an impromptu care home, some of her naked cast combing the older ones’ hair, a couple of the very elderly – because there are performers here in their 80s – in wheelchairs being swaddled in adult nappies, a gentle light emphasising their younger companions’ tenderness.
Then the poo starts. The newly clothed bottoms surge; the nappies brim over. Nurses spew the same liquid while a central fountain covers the stage in brown poo-goo; the performers try to clean up with towels, but it’s impossible; sodden tissues are tossed away, straight into the expensive seats. “Poo-mageddon!” I write in my notebook, much to Holzinger’s amusement when I tell her later. It’s spectacular, revolting, scurrilous and – to be honest – funny.
Holzinger is probably the buzziest theatre-maker working in Europe right now; every piece is – quite literally – an explosive event. Bodily functions are intrinsic to the subjects that intrigue her: gender identity, ageing, pain, sex and death. She has eaten faeces on stage. In this show, she cuts herself.
Of course she knows her work is shocking – 18 people were treated for severe nausea after seeing an earlier work, A Divine Comedy, in Stuttgart, so she started wearing a T-shirt reading “Went to the opera, vomited”, which certainly suggests a mission accomplished. But she says that isn’t the point. Not the crucial point, anyway.
“I mean, the funny thing about what you call poo-mageddon,” she says, “is that I’ve never had a scene in any of my shows where so many people come up to me afterwards and say: ‘I experienced exactly this.’ Because people who have cared for a dying person or are working in the care sector – which is, as we know, a huge sector in nowadays’ society – really know that this is the reality of a body that is starting to leak and is completely out of control.”
It is a very theatrical way of showing our fallibility, of course. “Because I think we always need to look at our finality with a wink. It’s also f—ing absurd to be alive, to have a body. There is always a certain grotesquerie to it, which we are oversaturating. But it’s also spectacular, even painterly at a certain point – this great Hieronymus Bosch painting that everyone’s a part of.”
A Year Without Summer, which is part of this year’s Rising festival, starts from the same place as Frankenstein, which the 18-year-old Mary Shelley wrote while holed up with her radical poet friends in a freezing villa on Lake Geneva in 1816. The year before, Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia and the world was covered with a cloud of ash. The sun was hidden, crops failed, people went hungry. For artists, it was a melancholy inspiration. “Caspar David Friedrich and many other painters were inspired by this doomy atmosphere,” says Holzinger. “The apocalypse is always the most beautiful thing to depict, of course.” She gives a cackling laugh.
The parallel with climate change makes the moment feel immediate. “Everyone very much relates to this idea of OK, summer is not summer any more, winter is not winter, the ecological system is completely out of control somehow, so what do we do with that?” We also had our own recent experience of shutting down. “What COVID brought is a certain precariousness. Politically, all of a sudden, things are happening that 10 years before we would never have thought could happen.”
And then there is Frankenstein’s monster, who seems to have greater metaphorical potency than ever. “Body optimisation, the prevention of ageing, is the Frankensteinian narrative of today. People always ask me about the pain and violence in our shows, but it’s just a reflection of the world, where certain kinds of violence are accepted. Like the pain of a facelift is accepted, because our society says that is productive.”
All the performers have, to use her expression, “female-read bodies”. “The dancer’s body being exhibited is always a sexual object, too. I find it very important to be aware of that. And I am becoming a bit radical just by deciding that I don’t want to be bossed around by a guy ever again. That’s why it was really important for me to set up an interconnected network of females who support each other.”
Finding the right people isn’t easy, although she scours every corner. “Many come from circus, because I’ve always been kind of obsessed with aerial work – the body in flight and suspension – which requires a big technical knowledge. People from sports. Sex workers, because for me it is important to have elaborate conversations around sexuality and the female-read body.” She once advertised on Craigslist for “extraordinary women”, which worked better than you might think. “Ultimately, I just wanted to work in an uninhibited climate and with serious and disciplined workers.”
When we meet on Zoom, Holzinger has just turned 40. She was 16, a sportswoman, when she discovered dance. “I felt, oh my god, here I can really express something about myself – and without words, to let the body speak.” Teachers told her she was too old, too tall and too muscular to start in ballet, which only made her more determined.
“So everything in the early days was very inspired by making my own definition of dance.” A definition, for example, in which the inside of the body is as crucial as the graceful exterior. “You can train your body to defecate on cue, in the same way that you can practise leg extensions.”
Art in Austria, especially in the ’70s, has long skewed to the visceral. Holzinger is often compared to the notorious Viennese actionists of the 1960s, performance artists who also worked naked. Is she aware of being part of a tradition? She looks dubious.
“There is a certain toughness there and a certain dry, black humour, which probably has something to do with what happened after the Second World War. In Germany, there was a big guilt, compensation and deconstruction of that trauma. In Austria, it was more like a carpet of silence. People have a lot of shit in their cellars that nobody talks about.” The next generation’s artists set out to shatter that silence.
“But I don’t know. Obviously, I am working internationally and the cast is super-international and nothing is Austrian about the work and I don’t have one piece of nationalism in me, so for me, the fact I am now going to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale, this is just for me a big joke, you know.”
Her pavilion in Venice is a combination of a church, an underwater theme park full of strange creatures and a working sewage plant: watery processes in a watery city, exploring ideas of purity and filth. Of course!
She is often asked how she persuades her company to cut themselves or have sex on stage. The question, she says, annoys her and offends her collaborators. First of all, she doesn’t use the word company, which suggests something “like a muted ballet corps” waiting to be told what to do.
“They are very outspoken, autonomous people. I rarely tell people what to do. Secondly, they are talking about people who have, in some instances, worked together for 20 years. Obviously, we know each other very well, which gives a certain level of trust.”
The history of Frankenstein piqued Holzinger’s interest partly because she identified with that band of merry Romantic poets holed up by Lake Geneva, writing and reading to each other. “They were, of course, a very liberal group of people, they were questioning the system they were a part of, so I guess there is a certain mirroring in that,” she says. “In the type of community that we are not only portraying, but really are. It is pretty much what you see.”
A Year Without Summer is at Arts Centre Melbourne, May 28-31, as part of the Rising festival, 2026.rising.melbourne.
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