There’s a lot of poo in A Year Without Summer. Audiences can’t get enough

In the climactic scene in Florentina Holzinger’s film A Year Without a Summerthe stage transforms into an impromptu nursing home, some of the naked cast combing the elderly’s hair, a few very old people (because there are performers here in their 80s) wrapped in adult diapers in wheelchairs, a soft light highlighting the tenderness of their young companions.

Then the pooping begins. Newly worn bottoms billow; diapers overflow. A central fountain covers the stage with brown poop as nurses vomit the same liquid; artists try to clean up with towels, but it is impossible; Wet wipes are thrown directly onto expensive seats. “Poo-mageddon!” I write in my notebook; Holzinger will be very amused when I tell him this later. It’s gorgeous, it’s disgusting, it’s disgusting, and honestly, it’s funny.

Holzinger is probably the most vibrant theater producer currently working in Europe; each piece is – literally – an explosive event. Bodily functions are specific to the topics that interest her: gender identity, aging, pain, sex, and death. He ate feces on stage. He cuts himself in this show.

Of course, he knows his work is shocking; After seeing an earlier study, 18 people were treated for severe nausea. A Divine ComedyHe’s in Stuttgart, so he starts wearing a T-shirt that says, “I went to the opera, I threw up,” which definitely indicates a mission has been accomplished. But he says that’s not the point. This is not the most important point anyway.

“I mean, the funny thing about what you call poop-mageddon,” he says, “is that I’ve never seen a scene in any of my shows where so many people come up to me afterwards and say, ‘I went through exactly that.’ Because people who care for a dying person or work in the care industry, which we know is a huge industry in today’s society, they really know that this is the reality of a body that starts to leak and gets completely out of control.”

Of course, this is a very theatrical way of showing our fallibility. “Because I think we always have to look with a wink at our end goal. To be alive, to have a body, is ridiculous. There’s always a certain grotesqueness to it, and we overindulge that. But it’s also magnificent, even painterly at a certain point; this magnificent Hieronymus Bosch painting that everyone is a part of.”

A Year Without a SummerThe festival, which is part of this year’s Rising festival, starts from the same place. FrankensteinEighteen-year-old Mary Shelley wrote it while hiding with her radical poet friends in a freezing villa on Lake Geneva in 1816. A year ago, Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia and covered the world with a cloud of ash. The sun was hidden, crops failed, people went hungry. For artists, this was a source of melancholy inspiration. “Caspar David Friedrich and many other painters were inspired by this gloomy atmosphere,” says Holzinger. “The apocalypse is always the most beautiful thing to describe, of course.” He laughs loudly.

The parallel with climate change makes the moment feel immediate. “Okay, summer is no longer summer, winter is no longer winter, the ecological system has somehow gotten completely out of control, so what do we do with it?” Everyone agrees with the idea. We also had the recent experience of being shut down. “What COVID has brought is a certain instability. Politically speaking, things are suddenly happening that we never thought would happen 10 years ago.”

And then there’s Frankenstein’s monster, which seems to have more metaphorical power than ever before. “Body optimization, anti-aging, is the Frankensteinian narrative of today. People always ask me about the pain and violence in our shows, but that’s just a reflection of the world where certain types of violence are accepted. Just like the pain of a facelift is accepted because our society says it’s productive.”

All of the artists have, in their own words, “bodies that women read”. “The dancer’s body on display is also always a sexual object. I find it very important to be aware of this. And I radicalize a bit by deciding that I don’t want a man to boss me around again. That’s why it was so important for me to build a cohesive network of women who support each other.”

Despite searching every corner, finding the right people is not easy. “A lot of it comes from the circus, because I’ve always been kind of obsessed with aerial work (flying and suspended bodies), which requires a lot of technical knowledge. People from sports. Sex workers, because for me it’s important to have detailed conversations about sexuality and the body that women read about.” He once advertised on Craigslist for “exceptional women,” and it worked better than you might think. “After all, I just wanted to work in a barrier-free environment with serious and disciplined employees.”

Holzinger had just turned 40 when we met on Zoom. He was a 16-year-old athlete when he discovered dance. “Oh my God, I felt like I could really express something about myself here, and let my body speak without words.” His teachers told him he was too old, too tall and muscular to take up ballet, which made him even more determined.

“So everything in the early days was very inspired by me creating my own definition of dance.” For example, a definition in which the interior of the body is as important as the elegant exterior. “Just like you do leg extension exercises, you can train your body to defecate on demand.”

Art in Austria had long been visceral, especially in the 70s. Holzinger is often compared to the infamous Viennese activists of the 1960s, also performance artists who worked in the nude. Is he aware that he is part of a tradition? It looks suspicious.

“There’s a certain harshness and dry, dark humor there, and that probably has to do with what happened after the Second World War. In Germany, there was a lot of guilt, compensation and deconstruction of that trauma. In Austria, it was more like a tapestry of silence. There’s a lot of shit in people’s cellars that no one talks about.” Artists of the new generation set out to break this silence.

“But I don’t know. Frankly, I work internationally and the cast is super international and nothing about this work is Austrian and I don’t have a single nationalism in me, so for me to now represent Austria at the Venice Biennale, it’s a big joke to me, you know.”

His pavilion in Venice is a combination of a church, an underwater theme park full of strange creatures, and a working sewage plant: the watery processes in a watery city explore ideas of purity and filth. Certainly!

He is often asked how he convinced his company to cut him or have sex on stage. He says this question bothers him and irritates his collaborators. First of all, he doesn’t use the word company, which implies something “like a silent ballet troupe” waiting to be told what to do.

“They are very outspoken, autonomous people. I rarely tell people what to do. Secondly, in some cases they are talking about people who have been working together for 20 years. Obviously we know each other very well, which provides a certain level of trust.”

history Frankenstein Holzinger was intrigued because he identified himself with a group of cheerful Romantic poets who hid on the shores of Lake Geneva, writing and reading to each other. “Of course they were a very liberal group of people, they were questioning the system they were a part of, I think there’s a certain resonance in that,” he says. “It’s the type of community that not only portrays, but actually is. That’s pretty much what you see.”

A Year Without a Summer As part of the Rising festival, at Melbourne Arts Center on 28-31 May, 2026.rising.melbourne.

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