WAVES of ENDURANCE
A Verse Unbound production in collaboration with Ewa Emini 脱胎于卡夫卡《变形记》,⽤肢体和科技揭⽰本相的当代寓⾔诗
‘Forms, faces, features. Looks which can speak volumes fall silent. Giving nothing at all and receiving nothing in return. We contact people every day but how many people are we ‘in contact’ with? How many people do we truly know and do we even know ourselves? Change is both a constant and a certainty. It may not come easy but it is part of what makes us who we are. Minute changes happen to us every day but sometimes even the biggest of changes we never even see coming. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. “What has happened to me?” he thought. It was no dream.’
(audio recording material by Thomas van Langenberg from R&D process of devised movement project UNTITLED, 9th-14th May 22, London; based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis’)

WAVES of ENDURANCE is an interdisciplinary devised physical theatre project based on Kafka's "Metamorphosis”, directed by Ewa Emini, and co-created with a group of artists from various fields in a few development stages.
When we are in the loop, the process of becoming is happening constantly, despite our will. We are making choices consciously and unconsciously, and they speak about who we are.
By interpreting Kafka’s classical text with a focus on forms, and develop movements using a sound and physical devising approach, together with applications of motion capture technology and the use of renewable energy as a medium, we create a version of Metamorphosis that is a synthesis of inspirations and themes from the text that will provoke a universal recognition, in the hope to reveal the absurdity of stressful social concepts and internal constraints we create for our own. Ewa’s direction leads artists, with or without characters, to explore the quality of human-beings and changes of all inevitable changes - changes of people, of conditions, of relationship, and our reactions towards these changes and the consequences. It speaks to mental sustainability via the Kafkaesque manmade environment by creating a mind-stream-like performance style to the realization of the complex game of recurring life experiences that seems unending.

(Sketches by Lei Zhang observing performance during R&D of UNTITLED, 24th -27th November 2022, London)

