Staging and intertextualizing Franz Kafka’s “in the penal colony”

ABSTRACT

In 2022, I adapted for the stage Franz Kafka’s 1914 short story “In the Penal Colony” and intertextualized the text with devised narratives about the body in pain. I theorize both the staged performance and this reflexive essay as a method of embodied intertextual resistance within literary performance practice to unearth the relationships between performance and writing, body and machine, and the page and the stage. I highlight three moments of intertextual vignettes within the production to highlight the role of literary performance in healing both ourselves and the world around us.

KEYWORDS:

• Intertextuality
• Franz Kafka
• performance of literature
• devising
• anxious methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.