Kafka: The Trial

The Italian choreographer and designer Mauro Bigonzetti’s Kafka: The Trial brings to the stage the dark world tormenting Josef K.

The ballet treats Franz Kafka’s feted novel, revealing the absurdity and cruelty of the bureaucratic apparatus the protagonist grapples with to no avail. Bigonzetti masterfully combines dance, music and imaginative scenery, created by Carlo Cerri. Owing to its black-and-white visual concept and video projections, the production evokes the film noir aesthetics, thus paying tribute to Orson Welles’s seminal cinematic adaptation.

Bigonzetti is well-known to Prague audiences, who have had the opportunity to see his abstract piece Vertigo (2016) and the feature-length narrative ballet Sheherazade (2025).

Kafka: The Trial unwinds to music by Antonio Maria Bononcini, Dietrich Buxtehude, Henryk Górecki, Claudio Monteverdi and other composers, adroitly underlying the hero’s overwhelming loneliness, anxiety and desperation.

• Approximate running time: 1 hour 25 minutes, no intermission

Premiere: June 13, 2019

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