Visual live music performance

Kafka Insomnia

A visual live music performance about one sleepless night of Franz Kafka

September 9, 2026

Next event

@HOUSE OF HISTORIES

TICKETS →Event

November 10, 2026

Next event

KAUNAS CITY CHAMBER THEATRE | “Iš Arti” Contemporary Music Festival

TICKETS →Event

November 12, 2026

Next event

RASEINIAI CULTURE CENTRE | “IŠ ARTI” THEATRE FESTIVAL | RASEINIAI

TICKETS →Event

Age

12+

Duration

120 min

Premiere

2020-08-20

October 2. A sleepless night. The third in a row. I fall asleep quickly, but an hour later I wake up as if I had put my head into a hole that isn’t there. From then on, all night until five, I seem to be asleep, yet at the same time vivid dreams keep me from sleeping. Formally I sleep beside myself, while I myself have to wrestle with dreams.

Franz Kafka · Diaries, 1910–1923

Kafka Insomnia – an actor in a hat by a door, a figure in a circle of light on the wall

Donatas Stankevičius

About the work

A visual live-music performance for teenagers and adults that tells the dreamlike yet realistic story of one sleepless night of the Czech writer Franz Kafka. Dreaming while awake – is it a creative method, a way of life, a symptom of illness, or the very condition of the genius of Kafka’s literary world?

Born of insomnia, the dream that breaks into tangible reality makes Kafka’s work conditional: full of unexpected images, a stretched sense of time and early signs of the absurd, existentialism and even surrealism, which go hand in hand with the consistent descriptions typical of the realist school.

Through dramatic acting, live electroacoustic music, video projections, contemporary object theatre and sound manipulation, the creators delve into the paranoid and spellbinding atmosphere of the legendary Czech author’s works, the symptoms of insomnia, and visual and auditory hallucinations.

We have put together a very strong and diverse team. Although we have worked together before, this is the first time with such open material and in such an experimental environment. In Kafka’s world everything stands still: no one is destined to move from the point where they are, and yet there is more life in that point than we can grasp. It is a literature that, on stage, calls for organising time relatively, puts image and atmosphere first, and suggests new ways of montage. In it, humour and horror, action and stagnation, sound and silence flirt menacingly. To search for those silences and sounds I would, of course, have invited Andrius myself, so I am glad he did it first. The process is not a traditional one. We allow ourselves to start from associations rather than the text, from intuition rather than narrative. I believe this performance will appeal both to traditional theatre audiences and to younger viewers who are no longer captivated by long monologues and palace intrigues.

Director Žilvinas Vingelis

Team