Florentina Holzinger is one of the most talked-about choreographers of the moment.
Her work walks a razor’s edge—garnering both accolades and controversy wherever it goes. In her sixth appearance at DE SINGEL, she once again pushes boundaries—those of ballet, pop culture, and high art, as well as those of the body and the audience. Her transgressive style is meant to hurt a little, she says. And that includes blood, nudity, and physical exhaustion. A Year Without Summer is set in 1816, the coldest summer in European history. While Mary Shelley was writing her Frankenstein, she imagined a genius who bends nature to his will. Holzinger translates that idea to the present: an apocalyptic reflection on artificial life and climate change. The bodies on stage become test subjects for extreme weather conditions—pushed beyond the limits of perversion. No one brings destructive ideas to the stage as ruthlessly and compellingly as she does.