You walk in a dark hall. The fog curtains hang down, shifting a little in the air, dividing the space into a maze. Two projector puts fracture images on the fabric, such as a half -missed dream pieces.
You take a seat, slip on a pair of headphones, and is taken to your flat for breakfast in the morning. A knock on the door. Two officers enter and take you into custody. When you ask what are the allegations, one of them laughs: “Next, you would like to see an arrest warrant.”
it is I, JosephBased on a multimedia presentation tests By Franz Kafka. The piece of Emarsiv theater is part of the Kafka@101 program of Goetram Hyderabad, partnership with Kaivalya plays, Rangbhumi Space and Hyderabad Children Theater Festival.
Kafka’s novel Joseph is arrested without clarification without a bank clerk. Their test is rapidly revealed in absurd conditions; The process itself becomes a story. The book gave birth to the word “Kafcask”, which described something marked by the complexity of irrational, bad dreams.
Since its publication a century ago, tests Philip Glass has repeatedly adapted to the stage and screen from Opera of Philip Glass to Orson Wales. I, Joseph Takes another path. As director Gaurav Singh Nizer has said: “This is a story that has often been seen again, but we wanted to contact it in different ways.”
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Headphone gives every member of the theater presentation to every member of the audience photo credits: Special arrangements
There is no live actor in it, but pre-obtained voiceover with AI-Janit scenes. Nizzer explains, “My colleague Varun Anand adapted the story to the person before the third person’s story. So now that you put on the headset, you are going to Joseph. Everything is happening to you, the letters are speaking to you.
I present the scattering of chairs in the auditorium. I ask him which one I should choose, he smiles and says, “You can choose any seat in the theater, but you still will not get the full picture.” He advises me, “Wherever you feel, sit there and what will you take from it that you take from him.”
I get a chair and raise wireless headphones. They all have an LED light on their edges, red for English and green for German. The rest of the spectators filed slowly. We separate from the mist, which makes small cubals. As we listen to voice actors, the rains on the roof add a local collision element to the soundscape.
A parade of AI-rented images washes on us, broken, disintegrated, fragmented by layers that interfere. A blood-red fist. An officer in the silhouette. A assembled jury. What I am seeing is not really what my neighbor is watching. I have a perspective but it’s not Perspective. The waves of haze from the air-conditioning vent breath, such as the dead 20th century breath, whose concerns have spread to our own. Sometimes the total is dark, only burnt by a shining headphone, or sometimes there are suspended blocks of the text, which provide insubstantles.
The sounds coming with the voiceover contain a little bit on the streets of Delhi, as well as a clock tire, a telephone’s yamar, or a slightly with a typewriter’s peck. A torture view is vivid with the sound of a whip on a meat. The headphone “uses benrali audio, which is the audio that you can see in your ear to the right to right”. Despite this, Joseph himself is not a word, it remains soundless for the whole time. Nizer says, “It is important to give people a place to make their meaning. Now it may be for the audience to think what they want to say, or react. Sometimes it is also what people say, what they wanted to say something to them”. I tell them, “You can fill that silence.”
After the show, I ask Nizer what he attracted to this adaptation. He admits that, he “read a little tests“In college, but” could not understand it, so it was kept away “. Later, he found his way for Kafka through the absurd theater.” Samuel Backet, Eionco, they all code Kafka as the pioneer of absurd writing movement.
Headphone theater
He is optimistic for the future of the “Headphone Theater”, “as you will sit on your own chair, you can still have a very personal experience, which I think since the epidemic, we have seen many people that, many people are homebody”.
A scene from ‘I, Joseph’ presentation. Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
For the new show, he is interested in searching for a type of documentary theater, “Newspaper reports, real interview recording, how do you take non-drainage lessons and make it dramatic?” “I won’t be too much disturbance to go to Shakespeare” they say, “I think the world really requires new ways to see these new things, and by combining multimedia it is allowing us to enter the world, which is difficult to communicate using traditional dramatic equipment”. He calls it a “post-drainage” experiment and says “We are constantly surprised what all of it allow us to do that may not be a traditional performance”.
As I leave the hall, I think one of the lines mentioned by the judge, “Your denying is a proof of your crime”. Once absurd, it accepts the horrific form of truth in our time.
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Published – August 28, 2025 12:06 pm IST
