No Creature of Habit? Gregor's Dancing Dis/Abilities in Arthur Pita's Adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

Abstract: Ballet adaptations of modernist literary works have been thriving in the last twenty years in Western Europe, generating a new understanding of the place of the body in modernist literature as well as its continuing relevance in the twenty-first century. Arthur Pita's 2011 adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915) is a prime example. By translating Gregor's predicament to the moving human body, the ballet brings into strong relief the corporeal creativity and performance that are as much a part of Gregor's transformation as horror and social exclusion are. Pita's choreographic reading prompts us to think not only about the ways in which contemporary ballet straddles abstraction and narration, but also about the resonance of Kafka's text to the study of disability. It shows how dance takes a prime position in the articulation of the renegotiation between bodies and their environments both in these two texts and beyond.