Why do Florentina Holzinger’s visceral stage productions still have such impact? Fatma Aydemir on A Year Without Summer

What would you do if the world was to end tomorrow? The premise itself may be both timeless and timely at this moment when authoritarianism is on the rise globally. But that’s not really what causes the nail-biting excitement at the doorstep of Volksbühne theatre in Berlin. On a chilly June evening, a predominantly female and queer crowd of all ages gathers here to see, or rather experience, A Year Without Summer, the newest play by the infamous Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger. It’s the anticipation of Holzinger’s trademark body horror that unsettles and attracts us, the crowd. And the question: how much can we take?

“Europe’s hottest director”, as the Guardian described 39-year-old Holzinger last year, is not only known for her work at the Volksbühne but mesmerises and shocks audiences all over the world. Her all female-assigned cast of different ages, origins and abilities dances, bleeds, defecates and swallows swords on stage, naked.

Nudity has a solid tradition in the performance arts context, and is anything but radical. But informed by social media, our contemporary visual habits confine the naked body to porn. If the body doesn’t belong to a cisgender man, it is an object to be censored and regulated. Seeing Holzinger on stage, however, we look at it as a weapon, a tool and sometimes a joke.

A scandal arose last year, when Holzinger staged her opera Sancta in Stuttgart, with rollerskating naked nuns having lesbian sex on stage. Eighteen audience members had to be treated for severe nausea. The subsequent headlines in the international press were a badge of honour to Holzinger; she wears them printed in black letters on her white T-shirt when talking to the press: “Went to the opera, vomited.”