The true path runs on a cord stretched not high but just above the ground. It seems more meant to be tripped over than walked on.
Franz Kafka
Three years after their first joint production, The little mermaid by Judith Herzberg, the Roovers and music theatre collective WALPURGIS join forces again, this time together with director Peter van Kraaij. The immediate reason is their shared fascination for the music of Hungarian composer György Kurtág, the strong impact of the novels of South African writer and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee and the clear link to the work of Czech writer Franz Kafka.
Not only through his well-known literary work but also in his letters and diaries, Kafka remains an inspiring writer and person. The astute, relentless observations of everyday life, which he wrote down in his diaries and letters, shed a bright light on the dark side of human existence.
It is this universe where doubt lives, sorrow, uncertainty and fear, that Hungarian composer György Kurtág rendered in his Kafka Fragments for voice and violin.
For him, comfort and beauty cannot be sought in 'pure harmony', but lurk somewhere in between, in quarter tones and dissonances.
J.M. Coetzee's work also leads to Kafka's work. In the novel Animal Life, senior writer Elisabeth Costello delivers her controversial lecture at the university 'on the subject of animals'. She compares herself to Kafka's Red Peter: a monkey 'raised to man' telling his life story to a learned company, seemingly close to humans and at the same time so far away from them.
'I deliberately don't say freedom. I don't mean that great sense of freedom on all sides. As for me, I don't demand freedom, not then and not now. As an aside, with freedom, man too often deceives himself.'
from: Report for an academy By Franz Kafka, 1917
Reviews
‘Where is home and how do I get there lasts an hour. An hour in which every musical note and word has a high specific weight. The Roovers and Walpurgis confine themselves to what really matters, and in times of whipped up fun, that can already be a relief. (...)
The story is brilliantly put together and seamlessly edited together. Here, director Peter van Kraaij's care is palpable. A fascinating dialectic emerges between the parts. (...)
At Where is home and how do I get there the makers pose extremely modestly as bearers of thought. That leads to an hour of rare intensity.'
Geert Sels, De Standaard
'Life is searching for yourself. Just like art. Walpurgis and De Roovers turn the search into a hushed performance in which notes and words share the same musicality. (...)
The creation is a secure orchestration of violin tones, spoken and sung words, of glances at each other and the audience. Intense, exciting, marked by alertness. (...)
Where is home and how do they get there? Where is peace and how do they get there? Home and rest, they are both equally palpable in this splendid confrontation of Kurtág, Coetzee, Kafka; strongly staged by Peter van Kraaij on behalf of Walpurgis and De Roovers.'
Els Van Steenberghe, De Morgen
