By ZOIA MÜNCHOW*

Considerations on the play, directed by Fabiana Serroni – currently showing in São Paulo.

Fernanda Torres stated that “Zé Celso sowed culture with a capital C” (TORRES, 2023). She was right. This statement was made in the context of the seventh day of José Celso Martinez Corrêa’s death and sought to mark the radical nature of the artist’s creation throughout his 86 years of life. At the time of Zé Celso’s death, the theater class was wondering about the fate of Teat(r)o Oficina. Less than two years have passed and a lot has happened at Oficina, which continues to sow “culture with a capital C”; the play Kafka: Fairy Tales for Dialectical Brains is proof of that.

The play, from the title onwards, chooses an audience: Dialectical Heads. The word dialectic comes from Greek and its etymological meaning refers to reasoning, argument, the ability to converse. Fabiana Serroni's theater is for minds with the ability to ask and answer, minds capable of entering into a conversation. Minds that play the game of dialectic in its infinite movement. It is in the mind of the audience that the dialectic movement of the stories brought to the stage takes place. Fabiana Serroni's theater does not make us think like the reflection of a fable from which a lesson is learned at the end. We find ourselves in a very different process, in the current production of thought itself, thought in action.

It is in the body of our mind that the connections between the scenes are made concrete. Lina Bo Bardi Street takes a detour in our head and body, becoming part of the architecture of Teat(r)o Oficina. It is in us, the acting audience, that everything happens. We enter as human beings and leave in a state of becoming animal, vegetable, mineral. It is from the law, from society, from scoundrelism, that Fabiana Serroni's Kafka makes us flee. Minorities are on stage. Fabiana Serroni's Kafka, to summarize with a Deleuzian expression, is a minor Kafka (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2003). It is not the representation that matters, becoming is what is desired.

The affirmation of the difference in Kafka: Stories for Dialectical Heads It is formulated as a minority contagion of the law (of the phallus, of the human, of culture, of man, of society, of politics, of morality); it is a cartography made of the lines of flight of the weeds that spread indifferently to the gardener's designs. An invitation to abandon the law of man, the only one taken as legitimately universal, to let the representation of the human par excellence collapse.

Carmelo Bene's theater, according to Gilles Deleuze, is a critical theater, because it operates by subtraction and amputation (DELEUZE, 2010, p. 28). Fabiana Serroni operates by amputation and substitution: she amputates man to reveal his omnipresence in culture and replaces him with the figure of the other – the foreigner, the indigenous, the feminine, the animal. In place of Pedro Vermelho, a monkey who is the central character in Report for a gym (Cf. PRECIADO, 2022), in the Oficina production we have a monkey. This amputation and replacement makes Kafka himself stutter. In different words, at the intersection of Jaceguai and Lina Bo Bardi streets, Kafka enters into becoming.

What makes a Peruvian peasant of indigenous ancestry want to enter the law? Why does he ask to enter the law? How does the law work in the community? And in a society of scoundrels, how does it work? Why does an indigenous person of the Fulni-ô ethnic group want to become an Indian? As stated in the synopsis of the play: “Amidst narratives of colonization and resistance, Kafka resurfaces in Brazil, echoing indigenous and immigrant voices, reaffirming his relevance in times of dehumanization and civilizing clashes” (Synopsis […], 2025).

We disagree with the idea that we live in times of dehumanization; the play shows us that humanization is the problem. We live in times of humanization, and humanism is a plague that makes us believe in imposed hierarchies as the dominant standard. The problem is not the monkey's animality, but rather her process of humanization: she is drunk, raped, manipulated and made manipulative. She is dressed in the white of human civilization – they humanize her.

Throughout the play, the dialectic that our heads as the acting audience enter into puts us in contact with the chaotic forces of our intestinal dimensions in their inhuman disarray. It is the Artaudian fart beautifully interpreted by Camila Mota in To put an end to God's judgment that, in some way, returns (CORRÊA, 2015). Fabiana Serroni's Kafka, in his deep research into the infinite within, farts the infinite outside. It is, once again, in chaos that we find ourselves.

The laws of chaos escape human laws. There are no answers in Kafka's fairy tales from Teat(r)o Oficina. There are problems, questions, issues, concerns. What we will feel at the end of the play will not be tranquility – its concerns accompany us as problems that are ours in this here and now that we call Brazil.

Through the monkey's back eye we will see, just like Tiresias, who, without seeing, saw. The possibility of seeing without looking is the effect of experience with percepts, beings of sensation that make us dive into a compositional plane full of aesthetic figures drawn in the direction, dramaturgy, acting, costumes, lighting, music, body, in the Workshop. Artists who, in their collective action, produced – and are producing – culture with a “capital C”.

Watch the play and tell me if I'm wrong!

*Zoia Munchow He is a PhD candidate in philosophy at USP and a professor at the Federal Institute of Mato Grosso do Sul (IFMS).

Reference

Kafka: Fairy Tales for Dialectical Brains
Sao Paulo. Uzyna Uzona Workshop Theater, 2025
Directed by: Fabiana Serroni.
Dramaturgy and conception: Santiago Willis da Silva e Guerra and Fabiana Serroni.
Art direction: Graciela Rodriguez.
Musical direction: Adriano Salhab.
Cast: Adriano Salhab, Ana Clara Domiciano, Bruli, Carol Pinzan, Dan Salas, Gustavo Dainezi, Leandro Soussa, Lufe Bollini, Marcio Ventura, Maurilio Domiciano, Mila Sequera, Paula Bicalho, Sandra Vilchez, Stella Prata and Aury Porto.

REFERENCES

CORREA, José Celso Martinez (Direction) To Put an End to God's Judgment. Directed by: José Celso Martinez Corrêa. With Camila Mota, Marcelo Drummond, Pascoal da Conceição and others. New York: Uzyna Uzona Theater, 2015.

DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Felix. Kafka. For a minor literature. Assirio & Alvim, 2003.

DELEUZE, Gilles. About theater: a manifesto of the less/the exhausted. São Paulo: Zahar, 2010.

Synopsis of Kafka: Fairy Tales for Dialectical Brains. Free adaptation of the work of Franz Kafka. Synopsis. Available at: https://bileto.sympla.com.br/event/103778/d/306269/s/2090903

TORRES, Fernanda. Fernanda Torres pays tribute to Zé Celso. [Reel – Facebook]. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/reel/668596655083119.

PRECIADO, Paul B. I am the monster who speaks to you: Report to an academy of psychoanalysts 2022.