The year is 1816. Volcanic explosion, widespread famine, torrential rains and a disappeared sun. Amid this turmoil is a group of British expat writers, confined within the walls of a Genevan villa, creating monster stories to pass time. 

This is the backdrop of Rising headliner Florentina Holzinger’s experimental performance art piece A Year Without Summer. Fresh off the heels of her viral 2026 Venice Biennale exhibit Seaworld Venice that explored corporeal agency and rising sea levels through an underwater dystopia, Holzinger’s latest work is a psychedelic dream, confronting mortality, monstrosity and the chaotic mess of humanity. 

In times of crisis, we turn to art. We tell stories to create connections. We tell stories to find clarity. The show opens with a performer-narrator inviting us out of the fog and plunging us into the horrific depths of the sunless summer. “We tell stories to fill space”, they say. 

What struck me most was how meta the entire performance is. Entering the theatre space, the audience walks into the hazy, ashen aftermath of the Mount Tambora eruption. Like the writers, we are trapped within a confined space. However, instead of the pristine sublime world of the 18th-century European pastoral, we are thrown into a surrealist nightmare. Mary Shelley might have created a fictional cautionary tale about unhampered medical experimentation. Holzinger presents a vignette of the real monsters we have created across history. 

From Freud’s psychoanalytic experimentation on young women to Nazi eugenicist Joseph Mengele’s experimentation on eradicating genetically passed disability to Jean Cavier’s race theories. Holzinger held a confronting mirror to the horrors humanity created in its pursuit of scientific advancement, immortality and genetic supremacy. 

A big element of this show is its discussion on binary opposition. There is no life without death, there is no beauty without the abject. A Year Without Summer is unflinching in its depiction of pure human mess and disgust. We witness an unnerving live stitch-removing operation, biohacking, peeling skin, and a “poopocalyse” of shit-storm explosion that devours the entire stage. But underlying it all, the show presents immaculately beautiful choreography, stellar vocals and live instrumentation paired with an intuitively curated soundscape (by Stefan Schneider and Olivia Oyama) that kept the pulse of the show pumping. We are confronted with the grotesque at every turn, but incongruously, the staging is visually stunning with its innovative use of space. 

A Year Without Summer is a boundary-breaking mash-up of clashing performance styles, from circus, pole-dance, musical theatre, comedy, dance, punk rock, sex work, childbirth, plastic surgery and so on. All thrown together to explore human creativity and artistic expression. In such a fragmented show, it is easy for the performance to become scattered. However, the contrasting styles, threads and forms weave together surprisingly well under the impeccable directions and choreography of Holzinger. The general structure follows the life-cycle of a human––from sex to birth to growth to ageing and finally to death and regeneration, the transitions flowing seamlessly. Holzinger has a knack for making things that don’t seem to fit together somehow fit together.

While climate change in 1816 is used as an impetus, the work is clearly drawing similarities between the world then and our contemporary world now. One stark scene was the introduction of the AI-controlled robotic dogs cast against unnerving green lighting. This is the first time in the show that the stage has had a noticeable absence of humanity. The effect sent disturbing chills into the human-robotic relationship on stage and the replaceability of humanity that felt very pressing in today’s society. This is a theme I wish had been explored more in the show, especially towards the end. The clinical cleanliness of artificiality versus the chaotic mess of mortal humans. 

For me, the most powerful element of the performance was the use of its own art form to reflexively critique itself. A Year Without Summer relishes in its own performativity and pokes holes at the concept of theatre as an art form. It also gives a naval-gazing x-ray into the restrictions theatre and art have imposed across history. Mary Shelley birthed Frankenstein in 1818, but had to publish it anonymously to avoid prejudice against female authors. Similarly, across the arts, science, political and educational sectors, institutions have often refused to represent and include women, Disabled communities, queer communities and people of colour. Theatre and art become an avenue for the historically silenced and marginalised to reclaim their voice, which is something A Year Without Summer achieves. 

A Year Without Summer is a miasma of human stench and grotesque monstrosity that ultimately celebrates the very essence of being alive. Humanity can be repulsive but also beautiful. We need to see both to appreciate each.