V wie Verwandlung

BOOM BUG! Kafka’s classic transformed through choreography.

In Kafka’s short story Die Verwandlung, the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa finds himself transformed one morning into a ‘monstrous vermin’. His back is armour-like and hard, his many thin legs are in constant motion, and his voice has become a squeaky, incomprehensible animal cry. Instead of fulfilling his professional and family obligations, he is completely unproductive. The room in which he is cared for in a makeshift manner first becomes the den in which he lives, then the prison from which he is no longer allowed to leave, and finally the grave.

Yet this metamorphosis into an animal is far more than a tragic and grotesque tale of suffering: it enables an escape from the shackles of the family, defies the economics of the working world, and raises the question of how we live together. Beyond blood ties, it points to forms of kinship that are not confined to the boundaries of human society: to a ‘becoming-kin’ with other species, as the biologist and feminist theorist Donna Haraway has observed and advocated. With all the dogs, mice, monkeys and beetles that Kafka’s stories are teeming with, the insects, spiders, plants and fungi in our environment with which we share more than we generally assume, and the machines and technologies with which we are manifoldly interconnected and intertwined.

For the choreographer Doris Uhlich, who is known for her physically intense works with various ensembles and was awarded the Austrian Art Prize for the Performing Arts in 2024, transforming oneself does not mean re-enchanting the world. It means turning towards the environment by exposing oneself to it: by blending in, becoming alienated, changing, deviating from the norm and perhaps even refusing to function. The English word ‘bug’ refers both to the insect and to the error, the malfunction. Together with the performers, Doris Uhlich sets out in search of expanded forms of movement and language.