«One morning, when Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed into an enormous insect. Lying in bed on his armor-hard back, he had only to lift his head a little to see his brown, domed belly, divided into curved furrows; on top of his belly the blanket could barely hold up, on the point of slipping to the floor. Before his eyes his legs flailed, many more than before, but with a desolating thinness». This is the incipit of The Metamorphosis, perhaps the best-known text by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), written in 1912 and published in 1915.
“Strangers in the night” by Jos Baker, Linus Jansner, Carlo Massari, photo Monia Pavoni, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
The story, interpreted as an allegory of the alienation of modern man within society, describes in a surreal way the solitary days of the protagonist in the room in which he has been confined since his transformation into a giant cockroach and the isolation mechanisms put in place by his family to reject him. In addition to the theme of incomprehension and incommunicability, frequent passages of the text are dedicated to a detailed examination of the surprising motor modalities and qualities that Gregor, after an initial difficulty in coordination, discovers he has in his new body. Both of these aspects are at the heart of Strangers in the night, a piece created by the choreographer and founder of the C&C Company Carlo Massari together with the performers Jos Baker and Linus Jansner, which was staged last weekend at Teatro delle Passioni in Modena. The show debuted in August 2024 at the Oriente Occidente Festival in Rovereto and was conceived by the group as a tribute to the Bohemian writer on the occasion of the centenary of his death. As is its distinctive feature, here the Company, founded in 2011, hybridizes dance and physical theater to indulge in an ironic, tragic and poetic writing that involves the audience in a progressive explosion of madness, accompanied by the original music of Andreas Moulin, written specifically for the show.
“Strangers in the night” by Jos Baker, Linus Jansner, Carlo Massari, photo Monia Pavoni, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
The scene opens with a performer sitting and waiting for the audience to take their places in the seats of the stalls. Behind him, a banquet table covered with a white tablecloth and two other white chairs. In a gradual transition between the anticipation of the show and the dozing off of the real situation in favor of the scenic illusion as the lights in the room go out, he begins to question the spectators still busy with their preparations, warning them that this is not the beginning. Nervously, he informs them of his reluctance to take on the role of actor and of his discomfort at seeing everyone’s eyes focused on him, a condition so inhibiting that it makes him incapable of waiting for the beginning (together with the audience), but only of pretending to wait. Instead, that, obviously, is really the beginning, which introduces one of the central themes of the play, suggested by the reading of Kafka, namely the thin line that separates reality and fiction in our life as in the artistic experience. A metatheatrical soliloquy on the need to hide by wearing the masks that society imposes on us and on the resulting fragmentation of the self ends in a monologue taken from the dramatic classic par excellence, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the meantime, from under the table near which the actor has moved, other hands and feet begin to emerge from the tablecloth in a flash, adhering to or approaching his gestures, so fast in appearing and disappearing that for a few moments they instill in the audience the doubt of being double-sighted.
“Strangers in the night” by Jos Baker, Linus Jansner, Carlo Massari, photo Monia Pavoni, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
The table, therefore, in addition to referring to the sofa under which in the story Gregor-cockroach takes refuge when his sister goes to his room to bring him leftovers from the garbage to feed himself, can be compared to a magician’s box from which prodigious events spring, underlined by trills from the soundtrack. But it also functions as a miniature theater within a theater, since the edges of the tablecloth that reach the floor act as stage wings from which objects and bodies suddenly materialize in an atmosphere of “magical realism”, which triggers a multifaceted estrangement on multiple levels. The first character on stage is now doubled in his movements by an alter ego -shadow who has finally emerged from his hiding place, but who is so fluid in carving out the space behind him so as to coincide exactly with his silhouette that he appears even more evanescent. The joint movements of the two compose a choreography full of virtuosity, where postures and steps taken from classical dance, contemporary dance and breakdance flow seamlessly into each other in a surprising interpenetration between bodies. What appears on stage is therefore an astonishing dancing creature, on the one hand mindful of Gregor’s enhanced motor skills and new limits in his state of insect, on the other a magical pantomime of a shadow dissident with respect to the supposed physical body to which it belongs. Meanwhile the third performer, having gained the stage after having warmly applauded the initial monologue among the audience, tidies up the table like a stage servant interpreted to the letter.
“Strangers in the night” by Jos Baker, Linus Jansner, Carlo Massari, photo Monia Pavoni, courtesy ERT-Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione
What follows is a sort of bizarre psychoanalytic session in which the interrogator presses an actor in a crisis of authenticity who declares that he is on stage for the sole fact of having nowhere else to go, reminding him that he is in front of an audience waiting for entertainment. And then, an exponential increase in surreality, with the close succession of an anguished manhunt in the fog of smoke bombs, a sung Requiem and a dinner set with nothing in which the guests clink non-existent dishes, finally throwing them to the ground with a clatter to demonstrate their fictitious nature as a metaphor. And again, the disoriented actor who collides with a transparent fourth wall that is insurmountable for him (but how does it differ, after all, from the external impositions that depersonalize the individual in real life?), confessing that he is frustrated at not being able to stop acting and express his feelings with sincerity. He has nothing left, he complains of being hungry, but everything comes to an unexpected final catharsis when he manages (really) to eat the banana that appears on stage (perhaps the one of the monkey in the cage that everyone is looking at and to which he had compared himself in his speech?) while from an old radio come the liberating notes of Strangers in the night sung by Frank Sinatra. As in Kafka’s story, there is no rational explanation for what happens on stage with perfect consequentiality and there is no solution to the numerous existential and metatheatrical questions raised. If the distinction between concrete action and pantomime is tenuous and the conciliation between individual aspirations and the constraints of life remains impossible, the definitive alienation is averted by the poetic black humor of the play and the beauty of the synchronized movements of the bodies.
Info:
www.modena.emiliaromagnateatro.com
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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