A direct staging of the short story, A Hunger Artist, the performance sees actor Michael Mazibuko playing the role of the narrator, while musician Dan Selsick accompanies the narrative with short, playful moments on the trombone. With nothing but a stool to sit on and an empty stage behind him (as well as a brief projection of an animated charcoal drawing by William Kentridge), Mazibuko recites, with striking empathy, the tale of Kafka’s fasting showman. Over the course of the performance, Selsick’s trombone morphs into something of a character itself, while also serving the very practical function of breaking up the staged story, disrupting the act of reading, and lending a sense of physical activity to the stage. Death, isolation, futility, and human relationships are some of the central themes of the work and, like many of Kafka’s stories, this is a tale that continues to find resonance in the world, particularly in the midst of a global health pandemic when many of the aforementioned themes are all too familiar.

A Kafka Moment is a mini-season of select works that were created or performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, and prompted by the writings of Franz Kafka.

Taking place at The Centre in April 2021 and leveraged off of an invitation of Kafka's Ape by the University of Toronto, Canada and the University of Western Cape, the mini-season was spread across two evenings, each featuring a unique programme of performances, staged for a limited live audience and live-streamed for free on The Centre’s YouTube channel.

Performers included Ameera Patel, Clare Loveday, Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu, Jane Taylor, Antony Coleman, Sue Pam-Grant, Kevin Smith, Michael Mazibuko, Dan Selsick and Tony Bonani Miyambo.

Using the comical, grotesque, existential, and frighteningly prophetic writings of Kafka as a springboard, the performances that make up A Kafka Moment are at once experimental and macabre, playful and surreal. At the core of each programme is an attempt at puzzling out the nature of the short-form on stage – the activity of reading aloud, the embodiment of the short story in the performer, or the testing of new ideas through hybrid analogue and digital forms.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PERFORMERS | Michael Mazibuko & Dan Selsick
DIRECTOR | William Kentridge
WRITER | Franz Kafka
STAGE MANAGERS | Dimakatso Motholo & Nthabiseng Malaka