2025 – a year without summer. The world seems detached, shrouded in darkness and devoid of all certainty. A reality in which daily survival becomes a ritual, despair and ecstasy dance hand in hand.

The year 1816 originally went down in history as the “Year Without a Summer.” After the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the sky was filled with ash, the sun disappeared, the harvests failed—and the world starved. Eighteen-year-old Mary spent the cold summer months with other poets on Lake Geneva, where storms and darkness inspired her to write ghost stories. Mary invented Dr. Frankenstein, a scientific genius who forced nature to submit to his will and ended up destroying everything in his path with his monster, assembled from body parts.

Florentina Holzinger and her ensemble explore the stories we tell about our bodies, health and identity, our decay and our environment: the pursuit of immortality in the 21st century, medical promises of rejuvenation, and the dangers of uncontrolled technological growth in a world shaped by AI, robotics, and bioengineering. A Year Without Summer tells of the enhancement of nature to the point of perversion and is an attempt to pit the promise of eternal life against certain death.

But what happens when creation gives birth to a monster?