»A year without summer« | Florentina Holzinger: Sex and shit in musical form

Florentina Holzinger is back with a new production at Berlin's Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Holzinger's acclaimed performances are the hottest thing on European theater stages. If anyone is attracting a new, young audience to the theaters, it's her. Everyone must see at least once what she presents to the audience. She's never short of a scandal: sex and blood, loud and garish, that's her directorial strategy.

"A Year Without Summer" also subverts all expectations from its very first scene: A performer steps onto the stage – fully clothed. Soon, a dozen other women join them, all fully clothed. Everyone, whether a die-hard fan or a theatergoer with a virginal eye, knows that anyone who manages to snag a ticket for a Holzinger evening – difficult enough! – will also be able to gaze at naked bodies for two hours.

This time, things get down to business gently. First, we're introduced to the constructed framework. It recalls the year 1816, the eponymous "Year Without a Summer," when a volcanic eruption darkened the skies. Mary Shelley, just 18 years old, spent the cold midyear months on Lake Geneva. There, people sought companionship in inhospitable times. Horror stories kept them entertained. This, or so the myth goes, gave rise to the idea for Shelley's novel about Doctor Frankenstein and the monster he created, this "modern Prometheus."

And now, as the setting for this evening dictates, let's imagine the year 2025 becomes one without a summer. Are we even capable of community-building measures like those undertaken by Shelley and others? What horror stories entertain us? What does Frankenstein's monster look like two centuries later?

The performers gather on stage, dance, and cuddle up to one another. It's not long before the familiar sight of naked bodies on stage appears again. Everything is as usual on the planet Holzinger. Then there's licking and fingering, thrusting and rubbing, empathetic searching for partners, or avid observation. There's no rush. The scene drags on, and soon you think you've really seen everything.

Even Frankenstein-esque horror soon sets in. Holzinger has given her new revue the form of a musical. It's all completely ironic, of course. But the audience still has to endure it. There's lots of singing and dancing, and the genre-typical smiles are also present. Ultimately, she's adopting the principle she had already decided to use for her last full-length production, "Sancta."

And what else? An oversized, air-filled doll, modeled after Gustave Courbet's model for his famous painting "The Origin of the World," takes the stage. The performers burst out of their stride and back onto the stage. Stories from their own lives are told. Near-death, medication, and illness are the themes. Joseph Mengele engages in a theatrical contest with the naturalist Georges Cuvier, one of the pioneers of racial theory. A slime fight is shown. Blood is a must, in close-up, of course. A performer is pierced live in the brows and cheeks and is then lifted into the air by these piercings. And there's a touch of cuteness, too: a group of robot dogs perform a little dance.

The climax of the spectacle, however, begins in the hospital. The elderly actresses receive their medical treatment here. The diapers they are given fill up quickly. Artificial shit, a long-standing ingredient in Holzinger's work, is used extensively here. This time, judging by the smell, it was bread. While just a moment ago everything fit into the diaper, the shit soon pours everywhere and out of every ass. The toilet bowls literally overflow. Those who can do it can enjoy the spectacle of such performances. The fountain-like outpourings are more than just a little infantile.

In a memorable scene, we meet Sigmund Freud, the old white man who is theatrically dispatched by Holzinger and her crew. Outdoing the Nazi doctor Mengele in his grotesque portrayal, he is presented to us as a laughable misogynist. The word "penis envy" only needs to be spoken once on stage, and the audience is guaranteed to laugh.

Holzinger's works are a continuous exploration of trauma, pain, and repression, the struggle with the unconscious, and the battle of the sexes. But she doesn't want her productions, which she understands as feminist art, to be associated with Freud. Her feminism needs no theoretical foundation, she seems to be telling us. And so she repeatedly presents us with new strippings of the soul, reveals wounds, and yet wants to believe in something that Freud didn't simply consider possible: healing. Healing through self-empowerment is offered to us; it seems like a beautiful lie, familiar to us from the theater of Mary Shelley's century.

Anyone who has seen Florentina Holzinger's recent major works might have been curious to see what would happen next. Naked bodies, open wounds, ever more stage devices, ever more shrill tones. How long should and can this continue? Is Holzinger, perhaps the most popular theater director of the moment, a victim of her own role, trapped by expectations and counter-expectations?

With "A Year Without Summer," despite all the continuity in her choice of means, she finds a different approach. The pace is noticeably slowed, which doesn't diminish the tension; on the contrary, it increases it. The insanely overwhelming dramaturgy of the last productions, in which every spectacular number had to be followed by a crescendo, is gone. Holzinger once again demonstrates what she truly excels at: bringing entire, large-scale images to the stage, arranging scenes.

With Florentina Holzinger, the impression has often been created that punk is back in the theater. No fear of bad taste, nasty words, or naked bodies. But appearances can be deceptive. Behind the punk attitude lies a lot of harmony-seeking hippieism. Even before that, she collected money for tree branches on stage or sang queer masses. Her theater is always a mixture of circus, porn cinema, and Girl Scout camp.

This time, her criticism is directed at Doctor Frankenstein's latest monster. Certainly not without reason. Then, she sings the harmonious praises of the unity of life and death. In the end, she always finds peace with everything. Empowerment as consciousness-raising is enough for her. "Death is a mistake," Heiner Müller once postulated, but he, too, is just an old white man.

Next performances: May 24, 25, and June 7. www.volksbuehne.berlin