Kafka in the time of the Corona virus!

It already seems like a mockery in full Kafkesko style.

And instead no. It is the reality. This is what happened to us and what is going to happen to you who are finally sitting again, finally together again in the same space, at the same time and in front of the same story shared with us actors and  musicians.

The story could only be a love story. Fragile and cruel, impossible and eternal as only Kafka can imagine and experience it.

These letters to Milena are a continuous game of hiding and revealing oneself by vague allusions. Except that Milena is too intelligent, persevering and sensitive to play along.

Here the two lovers push themselves to reveal themselves, to get naked as it had never happened to both of them.

All in a time, which is full of dark omens and radical and nefarious changes. The Europe that trembles under their feet turns black, everything falters: the order of things; the knowledge acquired up to that point; and finally their love too.

Kafka - irreducible to life - is the only one whose letters we read; we can only imagine Milena's answers, intuit them and it would be interesting to invent them from scratch.

I chose to follow a chronological order, yes, but in reverse: that is, from the end to the beginning of their story.

A time that is therefore configured simultaneously as a fable and as an omen over which history hangs, pregnant with destruction.

The truth emerges only between the lines and at the end of their correspondence. It emerges almost from exhaustion. By reversing time, we proceed backwards towards an obscure origin which in Kafka's letters borders and is always confused with the literary invention that envelops life and the tenuous bond between people in mystery.

The background of these letters is a rugged and sublime natural landscape like the circle of sharp rocks that surrounds Merano, where Kafka was on vacation.

A wooden tongue separates the spectators, as if it were a bridge thrown over the abyss or a raft on which to drift in life. The only island of certainty, the music, suspended like a mirage, on the stage.

In this time of covid, in which everything needs to be rethought: from the relationship with the public and with the stories that we have to bring to the stage: this painful story of an epistolary love seems to me a good omen to radically rethink our way of being inside. the stories we tell.

And you, do you write love letters?

I thank the Jewish Museum and the Goethe-Zentrum of Bologna with whom I have been collaborating for years for asking me to participate in this new adventure by sharing the stage with the musicians of the Teatro del Baraccano. This sharing of spaces and intentions has been what I have been passionate about for years, especially when, as in this case, it is used to tell a story. The music chosen by the director Giambattista Giocoli of the Teatro del Baraccano for Kafka is by Hindemith and Janacek, works very much in line with the fragility of this story.

German Rosary

"A book must be the ax to break the sea of ice that is within us"

Ein Buch muß by Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns

Franz Kafka