The short-form work Odradek, performed by Ameera Patel, Bongile Lecoge-Zulu, and Clare Loveday, uses the shrewd and carnivalesque optics of the Pepper’s Ghost. In Odradek, costuming, projection, and live music and performance are used to tell the tale of the strange, lingering creature in Franz Kafka’s short story, The Cares of a Family Man. Narration takes place literally and abstractly, using voice, projection, and responsive music to pull at the etymological threads of the name “Odradek”, while the creature itself performs atop a stack of books, bristling in a tangle of strings and papers, here one minute, and gone the next.

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 | Ameera Patel, Bongile Lecoge-Zulu & Clare Loveday
ADAPTED FROM | The Cares of a Family Man by Franz Kafka
ADAPTED BY | Frances Slabolepszy & Ameera Patel
STAGE MANAGERS | Dimakatso Motholo & Nthabiseng Malaka