CORK THEATRE COLLECTIVE SPACE TO PLAY RESIDENCY – GAITKRASH AND COLLABORATORS APRIL 2025
ODRADEK? is the title of the work-in-progress that we shared at the end of our
week in Cork Theatre Collective this month. The Space to Play bursary offered a
brilliant opportunity to Gaitkrash (Bernadette Cronin, Regina Crowley and Mick
O’Shea) and our guest collaborators Katherine Boucher (visual artist), Joachim Beug
(Kafka scholar) and Michael Anthony-Greene (theatre and musical theatre artist and
stage manager) to explore with the tools of theatre and performance-making a
selection of writings by Prague writer Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924). This wonderful,
clear/clean and dark theatre studio space at Triskel Arts Centre in the heart of Cork
City offers Cork-based theatre artists an invaluable resource for seeding work, and
also an option to invite others in to witness and perhaps reflect back on what they
experienced.
What or who is Odradek? A mysterious, star-shaped creature that inhabits liminal
spaces like corridors and stairways, nimble, elusive and seemingly without any
discernable function, Odradek was borne out of Kafka’s imagination and features in
his short prose piece Die Sorge des Hausvaters – The Worry of the Family Man (our
translation). Other texts we chose to explore were selected from The Complete
Stories, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, The Zürau Aphorisms and The Diaries of
Franz Kafka 1910 – 1913, such as, “My two hands began a fight..” and “A Common
Confusion”. Nothing is ever stable or tangible in the worlds that Kafka creates: the
seemingly real, the surreal and the absurd coalesce in ways that speak very directly
to our contemporary world of colliding realities and clashing surfaces that leave us
groping for anchors and orientation. Our aim was to explore performance-making
tools that would give expression to something of these worlds that Kafka conjures up
in his writing, to engender an environment and an atmosphere that would allow the
words and the images to land and be perceived.
How and where to start? We began by unpacking our ‘playthings’ and laying them
out in the space, objects that suggested themselves to each of us from the set of
texts we had been reading in preparation for our week together – a pair of old
suitcases, two lengths of blue rope and a length of hemp rope, a white sheet, a
washing line, torches, bamboo sticks and a red felt hat with a feather, a miscellany of
self-made sound instruments, etc. etc… Gaitkrash also likes to stage plays, but a lot
of our work has been devised, in the manner Allison Oddey was already writing
about in the 1990s in her seminal work Devising Theatre. Each of us brings ideas,
materials and objects – found and created – to the table, working in an anti-
hierarchical mode, which can be challenging but also immensely exciting and
rewarding. As Oddey writes of devised theatre, “the primary appeal is to be able to
make a personal statement within a group context, to feel that one is part of the
making of a theatrical experience, not an interpreter of something already written.”
(Devising Theatre, p. 27) By now we have developed a shared vocabulary and a set
of tools we like to innovate with and add to with each new project, and we like to
collaborate across other art forms with fellow-artists who are likewise open to
challenging their ways of seeing and making.
It’s time now for the collaborative team to pow-wow and reflect on what we found
and shared in our week in the CTC and to think ahead to the next stage of the
project. For now, we extend our warmest thanks to Zoe, Charlotte, Laura and all
involved in the running of the CTC for supporting our work. The Space to Play
bursary has been a fabulous resource in getting this project started!
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