Kafka Tanzt, The Bridge 1924-2024
September 21 & 22
Second Playing Space, Timms Centre
8 PM | 2:30 PM

The dance formation Kafka Tanzt consists of the dancer and choreographer Žiga Jereb and the reciter Charlotte Aigner. The art project dares to experiment: What happens to our bodies when we fully engage with Kafka's language and text? How do his texts speak out of us, and how do they move us? Inspired by Kafka's appreciation for reciting his texts, we want to bring his language closer to people in a unique, tangible way through free speech and, thus, communicative movement. In this way, a new approach to literature may open up for the individual through the universal and essentially archaic form of expression of dance. The language becomes a sensual experience of body, movement, and sound through improvised encounters with the text. The focus is not on interpreting the texts; we try to find answers to what speaks to us directly.

Dancer and Choreographer: Žiga Jereb
Reciter: Charlotte Aigner

Images by Klaus Dacho

Žiga Jereb, born in 1980 in Slovenia, lives in Vienna and has trained as a dancer at the Conservatory of Dance and Music in Ljubljana (1993-1999) and at the Vienna State Opera Ballet School (1999-2001). He worked in different ensembles in Austria and Germany from 2001 to 2012 before becoming a freelance choreographer and teacher in 2012. In addition to these activities, he is currently working as a Daseinsanalytic psychotherapist in training under supervision. He has completed a master's degree in dance research at the Anton Bruckner Private University Linz and teaches dance at the Max Reinhardt Seminar.

Charlotte Aigner, born in 1966 in Germany, lives in Vienna. She has been on the Austrian Franz Kafka Society board since 2014 and is a Daseinsanalyst in private practice. She contributed to the content concept for redesigning the memorial rooms in Franz Kafka's death house in Kierling/Klosterneuburg near Vienna. In various publications, she deals with art philosophy and recitation, with spoken text, and dance. Since 2013, she has been reciting Kafka texts freely on numerous stages and, together with Žiga Jereb (and initially also with Daniela Gruninger †), has formed the formation Kafka tanzt since 2014, which has performed, among others. At the Literature Days in Graal-Müritz (Baltic Sea), at the Kulturbrücke Festival in Fratres (CZ) at the Metro Kino Vienna, on the occasion of the Art Visuals & Poetry Festival, at the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg and at the symposium Freedom, Art and Politics in the Austrian Parliament as well as at the Kafka Festival in Vietnam and several times at the Franz Kafka Study and Memorial Room in Kierling and at the Abbey Library Klosterneuburg.