On paper, everything about Berlin Volksbühne-based performance-maker Florentina Holzinger’s latest button-pushing work, Rising Festival headliner A Year Without Summer, should appeal to the queerly gothic-leaning corners of my soul.
Billed as a musical romp, this viscerally driven patchwork skin of a show pulls together a carny’s circus of sorts, critiquing and ultimately casting off the shackles women are expected to wear. A Year Without Summer’s fleshy pieces make sense when the pitch transports us back to 1816.
There was mysterious magic afoot that fateful year. The summer’s sun was robbed by the eruption of Mount Tambora, curling its ashen tendrils around the world from the Indonesian Island of Sumbawa and wreaking havoc with the sky herself.
It was under the shadow of this maelstrom that a 19-year-old Mary Shelley, cloistered in the rain-lashed Villa Diodati with her lover and louche pals, set to writing a macabre ghost story one dark and stormy nightä.
Holzinger bows down to the Promethean spirit of Shelley’s mighty matriarchal power, in harnessing the fire of the gods to unwrite death via the horrific tragedy of Frankenstein’s monster. An impressively diverse coven of many backgrounds, bodies, ages and abilities dance in the darkness that consumes the Arts Centre’s Playhouse theatre.
It’s as if we are all drawn back to the primordial swamp, the air crackling with the ecstatic spark of creation itself as we settle into our seats. Some of us are handed plastic ponchos. There will be blood and poo, sex and death.
Basically, a good time was promised.
A Year Without Summer – quick links
A Year Without Summer: setting the scene
Alas, it was not delivered, or at least not coherently. The signs that all is not well are immediate, as Holzinger herself delivers an unenthusiastic opening monologue that vaguely sets the scene, suggesting that we must stick close to feel the warmth in this storm.
The Playhouse stage, billowing with dry ice, is mostly empty, barring a vast glass-walled box to the rear. This edifice is flanked by twin trampolines and crowned with cruise ship-like railings. On either wing, towering screens stand sentinel like vast smartphones, framing the stage. As Big Brother, they relay messages, with Turner-like visions of smoke and swirling steam pierced by occasional explanatory text and footage recorded live on stage by various performers.
If director and choreographer Holzinger’s opening contribution is underwhelming, her second offering is far more arresting. A golem-like glass figure is cut from her bleeding torso in a videoed close-up, a tiny homunculus presented as if a new monster is born.
If you didn’t quite catch it, the corporeal concept is soon dwarfed by a naked, limbless torso inflated to epically obvious proportions. The cast takes turns at being birthed by this bouncy castle-like giant, emerging from the shrouds of her pubic hair as she gently bobs and flails.
And if that’s on the nose, then strap in (or on) for the mass orgy that follows, as en masse nudity leads to full and prolonged penetration, with accompanying ecstatic moans. While there’s never any sense that the performers are being exploited, your mileage may vary on how consensual these extended close-ups are for you personally.
Surely meant as both provocation and ferocious reclamation of the female body and sexuality, after a while, this pornographic interlude begins to feel like a puerile indulgence that lingers on well past its welcome – an inherent problem with great swathes of A Year Without Summer.
A Year Without Summer: opera singers & aerial artists
Stretching an hour’s worth of material to an inordinate two-and-a-quarter without interval, A Year Without Summer serves up a whole lot and nothing very much at once.
Holzinger and her assembled sisters include opera singers and aerial artists, with a band led by musical co-director Born in Flamez, who also contributes to the performance’s sonorous score.
Plastic surgery goes under the needle, as Xana Novais is hoisted aloft by her perilously stretched cheeks on much smaller meat hooks than those deployed in Holzinger’s previous Rising work, Tanz. It’s a fleeting but impactful satirical stab.
As is the uninvited presence of Freud, as Annina Machaz inhabits the notorious psychoanalist here, depicted as an insidiously pervy spirit (probably fair). Huffing great heaps of blow, he bloviates about the whole unworthy of a woman being nothing more than the absence of a penis.
Medical intervention, particularly regarding our elders, is conveyed through a dancing sea of hospital beds, with the cast donning little but white coats. Their care turns to nausea when (thankfully not the real deal) bodily fluids eventually run riot.
Technology is vaguely lashed via the presence of those all-seeing eye screens on either side of the stage and the uncanny valley menace of a pack of stamping robot-dogs – the sort designed for warfare, while masquerading as family pets. Shelley’s abandoned antihero will also appear on stilts, further stretching the lightweight work’s tenuous connection to the Frankenstein text.
A Year Without Summer: big ideas
Tanja Erhart, a consistently giving performer with great presence, delivers the show’s hero moment, shouldering the unenviable task of playing a Swastika-wearing Josef Mengele, the malignant butcher of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It’s all too painful to witness her on crutches in this brutal image, knowing that as both an artist and a person with disability, alongside multiple of her fellow cast members, she would have been little more than an experiment in that monster’s malevolent clutches.
Sadly, Holzinger can’t help but labour this genuinely affecting sequence.
A Year Without Summer: disappointment
Herein lies the disappointment of A Year Without Summer. For all its grand theoretical canvas, with the starker physical one soon-to-be-smeared in leg-break threatening fake faeces, these disparate but intriguing ideas become bogged down, a frustrating scattering of a sketch show that’s equally overblown and undercooked, too little of it connecting to a too-amorphous whole.
Ultimately, it’s a Tambora-level bust, throwing out fascinating shreds, far too few of which feel fully fleshed out. In the end, A Year Without Summer isn’t worthy of invoking our monstrous mother Mary Shelley’s name, and that’s the greatest sin of all.
A Year Without Summer is at Arts Centre Melbourne as part of Rising Festival until 31 May.
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