Three years after their first collaboration on Judith Herzberg’s The litte mermaid, De Roovers and WALPURGIS decided to work together once more. This time director Peter van Kraaij joins the artistic team. Starting point for this new production was their fascination for the music by the Hungarian composer György Kurtag, the powerfull novels by the South African writer and recent Nobel Prize Nominee John Maxwell Coetzee and the clear links towards the works of Franz Kafka.

Not only his well known literary oeuvre but also his letters and diaries turn Kafka into an inspiring writer and man. His sharp and merciless observations of every day life, he noted in his diaries and letters, definately put the darker sides of human nature in a different perspective.

It is this universe of doubt, sadness, uncertainty and anxiety, the Hungarian composer György Kurtag captured into sound in his ‘Kafka Fragments’ for soprano and violin. For Kurtag beauty and comfort cannot be found in ‘pure harmony’ but is hidden somewhere in between quarter tones and dissonance.

Also the works of J.M. Coetzee refer to Kafka’s oeuvre. In his novel The lives of animals, the elderly writer Elizabeth Costello presents a lecture on the subject of ‘animals’. She compares herself to Kafka’s Red Peter, a monkey that taught himself to become a human being, telling his story to an academy of learned people. This creature seems to be closely related to man, but is a the same time so different from men.