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KAFKA-

 

Creation for Hessisches Staatsballett  (WIESBADEN)

Premiere 24 May 2023

HESSISCHES STAATSTHEATER WIESBADEN

 

Strange things happen at a petrol station at night. Especially when you get stranded there. Then the subterranean feeling that there is no escape from this Place may creep in. In Kafka, Antonio de Rosa & Mattia Russo (Kor`sia) take you on a journey to the edge of consciousness. The Kafkaesque lurks between the petrol pump and the neon light. So very different from what you might think …

Franz Kafka is on everyone’s lips. In the 100th year of his death, countless art projects such as theater plays and films are dedicated to the great writer, most of which are based on the reinterpretation of a certain text from contemporary perspective. The Hessisches Staatsballett chooses a different starting point: How can we interpret Kafka as an author and his work through dance? The two Italian choreographers Antonio de Rosa and Mattia Russo, who have long been based in Madrid with their own dance company Kor’sia, were invited by the Hessisches Staatsballett to explore this question with the commissioned piece Kafka. In this piece, the playful, theatrical and surreal aesthetic of the two choreographers encounters the world of the enigmatic writer.

In de Rosa’s and Russo’s interpretation, the world in Kafka’s texts is presented as a closed cosmos. There is no escape. The characters in it are prisoners, who have made themselves comfortable in their prison.

The style is coined by the banality of absurdity and the passiveness of those involved, who neither rebel nor try to change their situation. At the same time, this closed cosmos has a system: it functions like an administrative structure whose processes are beyond human intervention. The much-invoked term „Kafkaesque“ is used to describe an opaque and latently uncanny situation which gives expression to the systemic hopelessness and human powerlessness. A term which is eventually often used like a label. However, it always describes a very special atmosphere. This atmospheric quality is essential in Kafka. De Rosa and Russo found with their team a translation of the Kafkaesque into the contemporary scenario of a petrol station at night; a place as labyrinthine as the castle in Kafka’s novel fragment of the same title: a suspenseful scenario on the border between civilization and nature, inside and outside, this world and the hereafter.

This dance piece is not an analysis of a specific work by Kafka, rather in respect of the reference to various aspects of his multi-layered oeuvre, including the author himself. The approach here is the motif of failure. This is read in the context of the „failures“ in Kafka’s life, whose daily life was characterized by conflicts with his family, his problematic relationships with women (including his potential homosexuality, which was assumed by various sources) and the conventions of the Jewish faith, as well as a social reality that he experienced as opaque.

Kafka takes these various influences of the author’s life as a foundation to cut a path through his work. The scenography is thereby built with sneakers and street clothes, flashlights, wheelbarrows, animalized people or humanized animals and other creatures, in which the traces of Kafka’s 1915 work The Metamorphosis can be seen. It also describes an artistic confrontation between the present and its dramatically orientated, media-effective and explosive aesthetic – which is also reflected in de Rosa and Russo’s action-packed movement language – and the rather laconic and fairly linear narrative style that characterises Kafka’s texts. The choreography, as well as the music melange from classical piano music to electronic beats, provide a deliberate counterpoint of a more conservative interpretation of Kafka.

This also creates a bridge to the present time in terms of content. The conflicts that Kafka describes in his works are still relevant. His failure is also the failure of the modern individual in a technologized, globalized and increasingly dehumanized reality. Kafka’s quote “I am the end or the beginning” in the context of his categorisation in the literary tradition takes on a prophetic note against this background. Yet the fact that Kafka’s work made it to the present time is ultimately thanks to an equally Kafkaesque situation: Max Brod’s refusal to honour his best friend’s wish in his testamentary will and burn his works. Even in death, Kafka finds no salvation. And neither do we.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ARTISTIC TEAM:

Choreography Mattia Russo & Antonio de Rosa
Set design Amber Vandenhoeck
Light design Steffen Hilbricht / Kor`sia
Costume design Luca Guarini
Costume assistance Dea Beijleri
Composition and production stage music Alejandro Gonzalez da Rocha
Rehearsal director Uwe Fischer
Dramaturgy Agnès López-Río, Lucas Herrmann
Dramaturgy assistance Ching-Wen Peng

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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