Florentina Holzinger: A Year without Summer

Dance & Performance: A Year without Summer

Thu 19. & Fri 20.06., 19.30h, Sat 21.06., 15h, Florentina Holzinger, Austrian premiere

Remaining tickets: On Wednesday, 18 June, at 12h, all tickets still available at that time will go on sale – online at tqw.at or directly at the TQW box office.

It is 2025. We live in a year without summer. In a jump-scare reality that feels like an apocalyptic vision of our world thrown into darkness and stripped of certainty, where survival becomes ritual and despair dances hand in hand with ecstasy.

In 1816, the original "year without summer", Mount Tambora erupts in Indonesia, ashes fill the sky, the sun disappears, crops fail, and the world hungers. That same year, 18-year-old Mary Shelley stays by Lake Geneva with other poets, where storm and darkness inspire them to tell ghost stories. Mary imagines Frankenstein, a genius of science, who forces nature to bend to his will and ends up in destruction with his monster assembled from corpses’ parts.

Florentina Holzinger and her cast explore the stories we tell about our environment, bodies, health, decay and identities: The 21st century pursuit of longevity, medical promises to the perils of unchecked technological growth in a world shaped by AI, robotics, and bioengineering. "A Year without Summer" appropriates this attempt to improve nature to the point of perversion and plays off the promise of eternal life against the certainty of death. But what happens when the creation becomes the monster? When creation becomes (like) us?

A Tanzquartier Wien event in cooperation with Volkstheater Wien.