Yana Meerzon

Water and Romance

Review

Thom Sokoloski, the Artistic Director of Autumn Leaf Performance, chose Kafka's journals and Max Brod's biography of him for the “water-opera” Kafka in Love. The production introduces two takes on Kafka's 1913 love affair with the German aquatic artist Gerti Wasner. It narrates the events from the viewpoint of Wasner both in 1913, on a screen, which I will be referring to as Story A and in 1936, in the water, Story B. Kirsten Johnson (on stage or, to be precise, on the edge of the swimming pool) as Wasner in 1936 is putting on an aquatic show “prohibited from being a part of the Berlin Olympics by orders of the Ministry of Propaganda and People's Enlightenment” (Kafka in Love). This multi-layered production calls, therefore, for a multi-layered review.

As a theatre director, Sokoloski is searching to enhance and revolutionize the art of the opera by using multimedia means. The company mission is therefore “to firmly establish a modern opera company that reflects a forward-thinking spirit of opera-culture, responds to the needs of contemporary opera artists and new opera creation, embraces and acknowledges diverse artistic cultures and technologies as integral to operatic innovation” (Autumn Leaf Performance).

The program lists the genre of Kafka in Love as a water-opera, which requires immediate clarification. Opera is a synthetic, highly conventionalized form of theatre art, which relates in its origins to Greek tragedy and involves several performative languages, from music to dance (Hodgson 253). “A water-opera”, then, is a modern form of classic opera involving the use of water in different capacities. It adds to the complex semiotic system of opera an extra element — swimming, which relies on its own performative style (Alter 52-57).

The multimedia nature of Kafka in Love consists of synchronized swimming, verbal narration, musical accompaniment, stage acting, and a silent black and white film featuring Avi Phillips as Kafka, Kelci Archibald as Wasner, and Zorana Sadiq as Bauer in 1913. In Story A (the film narrative), during his ten-day stay at the Hartenburgen Sanatorium in Riva, Italy, Franz Kafka falls in love with “W”, as he calls Wasner in his diaries. As the synopsis tells us, when Kafka arrived in Riva, “he was struck by Gerti. His somewhat estranged fiancee, Felice Bauer, was refusing to answer his incessant three letters a day so Franz Kafka, for the first time in his 24 years of life, had let himself fall in love” (Kafka in Love). The production overemphasises this statement suggesting a grandiose and sentimental love affair on the part of the writer, not noticing another entry in the same diary: “I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else” (Kafka, Diary). Thus, the theme of interdependence between writing and Self, inescapable for Kafka, disappears from Sokoloski's production, leaving the audience to wonder why this too plain a siuzhet, i.e. a paraphrase of Eden, is chosen to illustrate Kafka's creative tortures? What was so special about this relationship, which was mostly a figment of Kafka's imagination, not even of his fading memory about it? “I notice that I am afraid of the almost physical strain of the effort to remember, afraid of the pain beneath which the floor of the thoughtless vacuum of the mind slowly opens up, or even merely heaves up a little in preparation. All things resist being written down” (Kafka, Diary).

However, as Kafka wrote in his journal, the stay in Riva had become very important for him. “For the first time I understood a Christian girl and lived almost entirely within the sphere of her influence” (Kafka, Diary). Although the theme of Kafka's Jewishness appears twice in the production: in the opening number entitled “Lakhem,” accompanied by a solo swim and in “Lakel Acher Sabbath,” it is left unresolved. Story A addresses this question in a rather illustrative manner, striking the audience with overused and oversimplified texts and signs suggesting the difference of Kafka's relationships with the two women: Felice Bauer and Gerti Wasner who represent the two religious constructs. For example, Gerti wears a big cross symbolizing her Christianity, whereas Felice lights a menorah for Sabbath.

Moreover, Gerti belongs to Kafka's reality, which is depicted in the film, while Bauer belongs to his imagination. The film involves occasional images of Bauer washing her elbows and shoulders, followed by images of Kafka dreaming of kneeling before her and embracing her waist while she keeps her hands on his shoulders in a mother-like posture (obvious allusions to the image of the Prodigal Son suggest a Freudian reading of their bond). In contrast, Kafka's relationship with Gerti is shown as sexually open. The action on the screen consists of predictable images: a young healthy couple in love is swimming, eating, and having sex on the backdrop of the daily routine of an unfriendly sanatorium. The image of a nurse pouring water on Wasner in a basin functions as the allegory of both punishment for her sins and purification. The direct reading of this juxtaposition suggests criticism of Judaism for holding young people within certain conventions and praise of Christianity for allowing freedom of expression. But this reading is not final, since it represents the referential part of the production's narrative, its Story A.

Story B suggests a slightly different interpretation. Wasner is staging her aquatic “Kafka in Love” during the Nazi regime, which supplies its own mythology and beliefs, which are markedly different from both Judaism and Christianity. Wasner's production, as she states in her opening lines, is prohibited because it involves the real figure of Kafka, who is a non-recommended author and a Jew. Story B, therefore, undermines the conclusions drawn from the Story A, imposing a topically oriented interpretation onto a universal reading. Story B ends with Gerti's suicide, which, however, does not signify the end of Kafka's life and love. By reconstructing Wasner's swimming event, Sokoloski's production enacts her memory.

In Kafka in Love, the swimming pool is used as a stage space for swimmers, whose performance can claim a dominant function in this type of narration. Swimming as a type of sport in the circumstances of a theatrical presentation acquires the qualities of a theatrical performance, where actors, sets, and objects function as signs of signs (Bogatyrev). In Sokoloski's text the quasi-semiotic nature of synchronized swimming is complicated even more by the naturalistic style of film projected simultaneously with the aquatic numbers. This places the swimming and the film in constant competition for the audience's attention, confronting it with the task of deconstructing subject matter presented on several planes and using different semiotic codes. Therefore the audience encounters two difficulties: the physical inconvenience of looking up at the screen and down at the water at the same time and the impossibility of interpreting several incoherent performative codes.

Story B is a memory narrative conveyed through synchronized swimming and music. Although it aims to be the aesthetic dominant of the production, the beautiful images of bodies in the water function only as illustrations to Story A. Thus by juxtaposing swimmers and the actor at the edge of the swimming pool, Sokoloski challenges the theatrical semiotic expectations of the public. At the same time, he violates audience's filmic expectations by juxtaposing film and synchronized swimming. Ultimately, watching Kafka in Love turns out to be an unexpected journey through a jungle of signs and texts. The acting style in the film is iconic presenting the love affair in its melodramatic bloom. The audience is primed to receive the film part, since watching silent film is a habitual experience. The reception of synchronized swimming is also automatized by the audience's familiarity with the performative conventions of circus or sports events that combine the display of athlete's physical abilities with the performative function of theatre. As Alter comments, in circus “the public must enter a pact whereby any [physical] performance will be received as a performance. Theatre has different conventions. Its basic pact, whereby, everything on stage is received as a sign, concerns the referential and not the performant function” (Alter 60). However, the mixture of the two does not work, not because the audience is unprepared for the process of deautomatization and estrangement, but because the directorial focus shifts during the action from one semiotic system to the other. Thus, if the audience applied theatrical conventions to Kafka in Love, it would focus on the action in the pool and miss the core content of the narration. If, however, the audience applied film conventions to the show, it would miss the beauty of the metaphors created by the swimmers for the mediocre film performance.

In the first case, the motion picture eclipses the swimming just as a cat suddenly appearing on stage would “outplay” the actors. The film grabs the audience's attention with easily identified naturalistic images, whereas swimming is close to stage acting, which creates a fictional world and theatre illusion. Only occasionally do the water images transcend their supportive function. For example, when we see a ship on the screen, the dancers form a swimming figure reminiscent of wheel-paddles, thus constructing a visual metaphor for Kafka's journey. In fact, only the two swimming solos, the introductory and closing ones, deserve mentioning since they indeed offer new possibilities in operatic performance, when music, movement, and verbal text not only support each other but also create an amalgamated aesthetics and serve the directorial task to stage a water-opera.

Works cited

© Yana Meerzon

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