Went to see The Metamorphosis a dance-theatre adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novella at the Royal Opera House. I haven’t read it so I can’t compare but was really impressed. The story is of a man who wakes to find he has turned into an insect. It was frustrating to see the breakdown of communication when a new language was introduced, that of the insect. That of assumed difference. The despair and isolation of the transformation from man to insect was mirrored through the music and dance, which was both beautiful and disconcerting.
Was particularly struck by the dream scene where the sister and brother (the man going through metamorphosis) dance in separate rooms. Different moves same dance. There seemed to be a duality, a coming of age. Through the girls ballet there was a representation of the struggle of puberty. Through the man’s contemporary dance there was a representation of his realisation of the situation, a surrendering. The man finally accepts the non-acceptance surrounding him and leaves.
This text is by Aldous Huxley (1954) from his essay The doors of perception [1] which I am forever returning to:
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. (HUXLEY 1994, p.3)
[1] HUXLEY, A. 1994. The doors of Perception, London: Flamingo.
