Taking place as part of the A Kafka Moment programme, this In Conversation is between founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea William Kentridge, artist and academic Jane Taylor, Kafka’s Ape director Phala Ookeditse Phala, and its performer Tony Bonani Miyambo.

Over the course of the conversation the four reflect on working with Kafka’s texts, the life and work of the writer, the modalities of otherness and alienation on stage, and the changing nature of Kafka’s Ape­ – from its inception as a Master of Arts performance to its subsequent staging in venues across the globe. For Phala, who was born in Botswana and lives and works in South Africa, the impetus for the adaptation of Kafka’s short story involved “making sense of otherness”, a point that has a profound rootedness in the text.

The ability of the play to act as a membrane for current affairs is also discussed, in particular it’s changing points of reference and relation to the contemporary world. Performing the play alongside moments of global upheaval, discrimination, mourning, and more has provided Miyambo with the ability to make sense of the world by “observing and purging” through his character, and using the play as a changing space for interrogation of these moments.

Finally, the duality of human and animal nature is discussed, as is the recurring reality that’s present in Kafka’s stories: that of feeling painfully foreign within, and alienated from, one’s most private and intimate space – the body.

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:

CINEMATOGRAPHER & EDITOR | Noah Cohen
LIGHTING DESIGNER | Wesley France
SOUND DESIGNER | Zain Vally
STAGE MANAGER | Dimakatso Motholo & Nthabiseng Malaka