Gaitkrash @ CTC
SPACE TO PLAY – GAITKRASH AND COLLABORATORS – CTC, 7TH – 11TH 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!
Bernadette Cronin
