The Trial is a 100 minute ballet devised by Jiri Bubenicek, a Czech choreographer. The piece is theatrical, ingenious, and confusing. No one except inhabitants of the Czech Republic speak their language and, so, the artists in that nation have invented clever ways of making theatrical works that don't require spoken words -- of course, opera has this benefit, but the Czechs are also masters of shadow play, puppet theater, black light spectacles, and lurid animated films in which visual effects are paramount. Ballet, similarly, is created for the eye and doesn't require subtitles. If a Czech wishes to reach an international audience, he or she will likely make work that communicates via pantomime or caricatured gesture, performance configured for understanding without words. Bubenicek operates within this métier. However, he also aspires to retain and display much of the material in Kafka's unfinished novel. Kafka, by contrast, is notoriously chatty -- his characters harangue one another, fruitlessly ranting for pages on end. Furthermore, the very concept of Kafka's Trial is linguistic -- someone purports to pronounce judgment, evidence is adduced, and arguments are made. All of this fundamentally verbal activity, registered in Kafka's studiously neutral and bureaucratic German, is invisible to the eye -- hence, much of Bubenicek's Trial is inscrutable. A person attending this show would be well-advised to have in hand a plot summary of Kafka's novel -- without that crib, the spectacle is full of sound and fury, but, often, seems to signify nothing or close to nothing.
The Trial begins with a reference to another signature work by Kafka, The Metamorphosis. The man who we come to know as Josef K awakes in bed in a tangle of limbs -- there are two other men under the covers with him and between them they raise six legs that wiggle in the air in a futile way. K is not only doomed by the juridical proceedings but begins the show as a scuttling Ungeziefer, some kind of cockroach or other vermin. The stage is largely black with an expressionist wall and door embedded in a barn-size floating set. Sometimes the set opens so that figures can roll out of it -- K's lawyer in his bathrobe and underpants slides casually out of the wall in an avalanche of dislodged books and legal documents. Small windows open in the floating set and sometimes white-painted faces appear in them, taunting and accusing K. Even before K is introduced, there is a kind of prologue -- a bulbous, gelatinous-looking something hangs on a huge hook. Men wearing tin-foil cone hats and tin-foil capes dart about, seemingly worshiping this misshapen suspended idol. Weird screams come from off-stage. Central to the work's presentation is off-screen yowling of Mieskuaru Huutajat, billed at the Finnish men's "screaming chorus." We don't ever see them but often they intone words and phrases ominously and, then, shout en masse at the hapless protagonist. I suppose much of this is quite witty. Indeed, in one scene, the dancers all cavort wildly, whirling around Josef K as if some kind of climax is imminent-- but, then, stage manager shuffles on-stage, raises his hand to put an end to the dancing, and grunts: "This scene was left unfinished". Other stage hands appear and manhandle the set off to the side of the stage and the ballet corps is dismissed -- they tramp off the stage in a disheveled, disorderly way. Everything goes black for twenty seconds and, then, the show re-boots.
Kafka's books contain surprising amounts of sex. Every woman encountered in Kafka's Trial or The Castle seeks to compromise K by seducing him. These sexual encounters provide Bubenicek with lots of juicy material -- he choreographs lascivious pas de deux waltzes and polkas for K and the various vamps that he encounters (one of them is a sleek lass in black who wears a natty red hot chili on her head as a hat). There's a lurid scene in which an executioner in bondage and discipline gear flogs a couple of lackeys -- lots of muscular buttocks are visible in this episode. Bubenicek throws in scenes from Kafka's short story "The Judgment", a tale in which the poor hero brings his girlfriend home to meet the family -- but, unfortunately, the family is dominated by the hero's old Dad, a sickly fellow who either shrinks into mummified insignificance or towers over his cowering son pronouncing hellish imprecations on him and, then, seizing the boy's girlfriend for his own use. All of this is shown quite literally, with lots of groping and grabbing, while choruses of figures dressed in white checkerboard patterns or wearing 19th century frock coats prance about. In some scenes, the upper half of the huge stage is a lattice of hanging books. The painter, Titorelli, has several half-naked models and, of course, they also employ their wiles to seduce K, further distracting him from the defense of his case, a defense that is difficult to make since K is not at all sure as to the accusation that has prompted his trial. An enormous God's eyeball is rolled out on stage, pushed around, and, then, becomes a platform on which dancers climb. In the end, a mob of lanky brutes wearing dresses and top hats drags K to the forefront of the huge stage where they take turns stabbing him. There's a sort of epilogue: a tiny slit opens far in the rear of the stage and we can see a cozy alcove or nook where the lawyer is reclining among huge heaps of books, an exit sign glowing in a companionable way over his head. On the soundtrack, we hear a plaintive Yiddish (I think) folk song.
The ballet is impressively mounted. Much of dancing bears the imprint of Pina Bausch (and her Tanztheater Wuppertal) -- that is, quotidian gestures and movements are stylized, repeated again and again, and slowly subsumed into a kind of abstract regimented writhing. The figures in the ballet have a spidery look, like insect-like personages in engravings by Callot or Ensor. The whole show is redolent of the sort of natty, grotesque, puppet-like gestures that we find in Alfred Kubin's work or the stories of ETA Hoffmann. Although the ballet is about utter perdition, the dancers hop about merrily like automatons or wind-up toys or black crickets: they cut dashing figures against the darkness but we know they are doomed. In fact, we know that the arrogant little dancers aren't even fully real. This show, which I didn't fully understand, requires an army of dancers. There are six Judges alone, all of them suitably gaunt and hideous with huge patriarchal beards. The score is a wild, expressionist mix of atonal music by Schnittke and Hans Eisler, folk songs, and, of course, much grim and noisy shouting by the Finnish men's ensemble. It's difficult music and, to my ears, the Swedish National Orchestra had mastered the score and performed it with aplomb. I saw this production at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, Sweden on June 11, 2019. The dancers were members of the Royal Opera House ballet company and, as far as I could ascertain, all performed brilliantly.
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