Review: A Year Without Summer at The Arts Centre

Review by Greg Gorton

Florentina Holzinger is perhaps the most impressive performing arts creator of the modern era, and 2023’s Tanz still sits as the greatest thing I have ever seen on stage. A sort of spiritual successor to that show is this year's A Year Without Summer, pushing the extremes of stage performance, finding new ways to explore meaning, and offering more explicit methods of discussing the vital issues that inform Holzinger’s works.

The historical “Year Without Summer” was 1916. Global temperatures suddenly dropped by a whole half a degree and crops around the world died. Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, had just erupted, and the ash cloud was so great that it reached Europe. There was famine across the globe, exacerbated by already existing global conflict.

1916, during that especially cold winter, was also the year a group of poets were trapped in a chalet, and the now famous story of Mary Shelley’s creation began. A story about a man who thought he understood medicine, and the monster he made from a group of people he cared little about. A man more obsessed with his individual ideas than the world dying around him.

Frankenstein.

This show then is about that core concept of Frankenstein through the feminist lens. It explores how scientific men view women and their bodies as monsters, treating these bodies as less-than-human, and in doing so ignore the messy and beautiful that comes with the female experience.

A Year without Summer is performed on stage by a diverse group of women of great number. There is a true diversity here, an important thing to note, because a key theme is that by looking at women as “a monster”, there is a loss of individual identity. For each performer to stand out due to background, skills, and even simply physical appearance, we are reminded that even treating sexism as “the same for every woman” is a grave mistake.

Among these performers are singers, dancers, musicians, skaters, gymnasts, body artists, medical professionals, and videographers. Off-stage there are robotics exports, digital artists, and playwrights. In a touching moment, there is even time given to the brilliant Trixie Cordua, who recorded a powerful piece on dying weeks before herself passing last year. 

The stage is made of a single room with a frontal glass wall, a trampoline on either side, and a large bare stage on which most of the performance is set. Oh, and a giant inflatable body, complete with a vulva from which artists will often emerge and return. There are surtitles for both dialogue and musical numbers, as well as translation of those pieces not in English.

Yes, this is also a show with musical numbers.

The production itself is best described as a free-form story of the modern history of medical science’s exploration of the female form. While we are introduced to Freud, Mengele, and Cuvier, there are more generic performances that explore birth, aging, the treatment of disability, the concept of “hysteria”, and even the sexism inherent in modern technology. Each scene is confronting in message, and highlighted by also being confronting in aesthetics.

Like Tanz, the show is presented by naked performers, and contains moments of live medical procedures, death-defying stunts, and body-horror with incredible technical effects. There are references to many of the great “female horror movies” of our time, including “The Substance”, and “Teeth”. While I would say the “gross factor” has increased since Tanz, there are also other improvements that should be worth mentioning. The first, is the greater willingness to take time exploring a scene, building tension, and allowing the audience to sit and dwell in a moment. A good example is the opening scene, which builds from a quiet dance into an intensely graphic sexual orgy. This singular scene runs for longer than many one-act plays, and the slow but steady increase in tension made it a difficult scene to escape our attention. Even the preparation of the climax was slowly created and the dramatic irony offered up, the crowd knowing what was on the horizon, was such a brilliant metaphor of how we perceive the ends of our lives that, in the slapstick silliness of the finale, Holzinger has placed us in a position to experience the beautiful relief that is the utopian death.

There is more comedy in this show than in Tanz, and the inclusion of comedy musical moments, and the live band in general, also add this special extra layer to it all. Born in Flamez and Stefan Schneider both composed and performed most of the music, while also being performers on stage at various times. Kevin Sock’s lighting design emphasised moments of comedy, horror, and pathos brilliantly. More modern additions like the robots from Roboverse and digital animation created by Zoe Bassi and Max Heesen bring this show and its themes into the immediacy of today, and even the fears of a near-future that has ignored the lessons of the past.

A Year Without Summer is a confronting piece that explores the pathetically neglectful and intentionally traumatic way that the female body has been treated by modern science, but also how that has failed to hinder the beauty that this same body offers up through birth, sex, ordinary function, and its final path to death. Damning in its critique, I still see this production as one filled with a defiant optimism. While you do need some type of firm constitution to survive through it, I could not recommend any Rising show more fully than A Year Without Summer.

Image Supplied