A brief interlude sees the showing of a work in progress by director of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Bronwyn Lace. The video work, which is based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis and forms part of a larger installation produced for The Centre’s 7th Season, sees the mirrored and manipulated image of a wax-cast pelvis as it melts away. Vocal collaborations with Bongile Lecoge-Zulu as well as dual recordings of Lace narrating the short story in English and German lend the work a distinctly immersive and intimate quality, while also mining the themes of duality, otherness, and the mutual dichotomy between human and animal present in Kafka’s writing.

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:

CONCEPT & ARTWORK BY | Bronwyn Lace in dialogue with Johannes Jaeger and the Zone Collective
SOUNDTRACK | Bronwyn Lace & Bongile Lecoge-Zulu
CINEMATOGRAPHER & EDITOR | Noah Cohen
STAGE MANAGERS | Dimakatso Motholo & Nthabiseng Malaka

The Zone, generously supported by the Art and Culture Section of Federal Ministry Republic of Austria, Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport