The Hindu: Kaivalya Plays brings multimedia experience to the world of theatre
Neha Kirpal covers the group's latest experimental theatre production I, Josef presented in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut New Delhi
I, Josef is now available for touring across India and globally.
If you represent a school, university, cultural organization, arts venue or an organization interested in bringing I, Josef to your audiences, please get in touch with Gaurav (+91 9818925599) or contact@kaivalyaplays.org
No scheduled dates at the moment.
Heavy footsteps, an abrupt shout, muffled voices, rustling papers, a gavel’s clack, the city's hum, eerie silences, a ringing phone, sharp whispers, a cacophony of machinery, a jarring telephone ring, frantic scribbling, clang of a metal gate, a helpless scream... An unresolved fate.
I, JOSEF is an immersive binaural audio and multimedia installation that invites the audience to step into the shoes of Franz Kafka’s most well-known character, who is inexplicably arrested and put on trial for an unspecified crime.
This adaptation of Kafka’s Der Prozess (The Trial) is re-imagined through a unique first-person perspective that transports the listener into K’s unfathomable world through binaural audio, offering a three-dimensional immersive sonic and visual experience. Audiences are invited to enter a dark room and put on state-of-the-art headphones, placing them at the heart of the narrative and entangling them in the labyrinthine mind of Josef K as if the action were unfolding in their own consciousness.
🗓️ Dates, Time and Location / Click Here to See
🎟️ Tickets and Registration: Free entry with prior registration on bit.ly/ijosef67 (Kaivalya Plays website). Only 30 audience members in every slot – please arrive 10 mins before your slot time. Unclaimed slots may be given out to walk-in registrations.
🗣️ Language: Available in English and German, audience members can switch between the two.
⏱️ Duration: 45 minutes (approx.)
📍 Location: Siddhartha Hall at Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi, 3 Kasturba Gandhi Marg.
Presented by Kaivalya Plays in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi to celebrate #100YearsKafka, this headphone theatre production is a thought-provoking theatrical experiment and unique auditory odyssey into Kafka’s world that confronts absurdity, dread, guilt, isolation, powerlessness, and the human condition at large.
Creative Team
Directed and designed by Gaurav Singh Nijjer
Script and adaptation by Varoon P. Anand
Voiceovers by Paul Heeren, Matthias Dünnwald, Marta Kübler, Kriti Pant, Varoon P. Anand, Gaurav Singh Nijjer and others
Production assistance by Aaraadhye Natarajan and Anoop Gupta
Backstage and installation assistance
Premiere, New Delhi: Riddhijit Chattopadhyay, Kanva Chaudhary, Aaaradhye Natarajan, Shivani and Kamlesh
Next Act Festival, New Delhi: Riddhijit Chattopadhyay, Kanva Chaudhary, Aaaradhye Natarajan, Shivani, Kamlesh, Anoop Gupta and Saumya Upadhyay
We would like to thank Aarushi Khanna, Anja Riedeberger, Farah Batool, Abhyudai Dhawan and the staff of the Goethe-Institut New Delhi for their support in realizing this project.
The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany with a worldwide presence. With 151 institutes in 98 countries, it promotes the German language abroad, fosters international cultural cooperation and conveys comprehensive information about Germany. For over seventy years, the Goethe-Institut has enabled international cultural exchange, improved access to the German language and supported the unimpeded development of culture and science.
Kaivalya Plays is a performing arts and production company led by Varoon P. Anand as its Artistic Director and Gaurav Singh Nijjer as its General Manager. Since 2012, they have worked consistently, been very noisy, and built transcultural associations across India and the world. Their artistic work includes original, devised theatre performance which are multilingual, interactive and hybrid, use technology and media on stage as well as are built using techniques of improvisational, documentary and physical theatre. Their training and educational programs span drama and performance, design, production, arts management and applied improvisation to areas like mental health, language learning, business skills and others. They’ve undertaken arts research projects such as the Safety in the Performing Arts in India (www.arts-safety.org) supported by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), amongst others. They have received multiple artistic commissions and grants, such as EU MediaFutures Artist for Media grant, Goethe Institut’s Refunction and Gender Bender grants, amongst others. Their recent artistic work includes ABSURDO (2023), Mining Hate (2023), Ollantay (2022), Lifeline 99 99 (2021), Luz Negra (2020) How To Disappear Completely and Never be Found (2020), Unravel (2019), amongst others. Most recently, they received the Creativity Pioneers Fund 2023 from the Moleskine Foundation.
For more information, visit www.kaivalyaplays.org