Lucia Ruprecht

Lucia Ruprecht came to Kafka via her interest in early twentieth-century cultures of gesture. In her book Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century (OUP 2019), she argues that Kafka’s new and proliferating gestures, based as they are on an unexplainable yet unerring necessity, exude what she calls ‘immanent grace’: an inner logic that suggests a forward-looking directedness towards the as yet unknown. This places them in the vicinity of the unfamiliar grace of contemporaneous dancer-choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky. For Kafka’s Transformative Communities, she is the academic lead of Arthur Pita’s choreographic adaptation of ‘A Hunger Artist’.