Press Quotes:

The World Stage Festival ends with a splash, so to speak, with Thom Sokoloski's provocative "water-opera" Kafka in Love. Sokoloski is artistic director of Autumn Leaf Performance which specializes in innovative productions of eccentric material. This water-opera takes place in the Hart House swimming pool and is a cunning mix of taped music, synchronized swimming and film. The music, both vocal and instrumental is all found, and runs the gamut from Sephardic chants to contemporary composers. The central figure is German aquatic star and anti-Nazi Gerti Wasner. The film depicts the 1913 romantic entanglement she had with Franz Kafka in a sanatorium in Italy, while the illegal swimming performance is called "Kafka in Love" which is Gerti's ode to that long-ago love affair. It was banned because Kafka was a Jew.

To say the production is ambitious is an understatement. In fact, there is so much going on that it is hard to know where to look as the film and swimming are taking place simultaneously. For example, the six performers from UofT's synchronized swimming club float out trays with objects on cushions, which we later see in the film as Kafka's bowler hat, his notebook, and his pen and paper. Kudos to actress Kirsten Johnson as the adult Gerti, choreographer Debbie Sands, and to the actors in the film - particularly Avi Phillips and Kelci Archibald. It is certainly an absorbing evening. "Kafka in Love" continues at the Hart House pool until May 4.

Paula Citron, CLASSICAL 96.3 FM (April 28, 2003)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Autumn Leaf Performance's production of Kafka In Love can swim rings around just about any other production in town. Set in the Hart House pool, with the audience watching the action from above, the "water opera" is creator/director Thom Sokoloski"s riff on the barely recorded brief 1913 relationship between author Franz Kafka and Gerti Wasner at a sanatorium where they both underwent hydrotherapy. The third side of this romantic triangle is Felice Bauer, Kafka's fiancée. Wasner became an aquatic artist in the 20s and 30s, and in the piece – a play-within-a-play – she presents the 1936 premiere of her show about the relationship. It's been banned by the Nazis, for she's Christian and Kafka – sneered at by Germany's leaders as a verminous bug, a reference to his novella Metamorphosis – is Jewish.

The hour-long show is filled with wonderful images, live and on film. Wasner (Kirsten Johnson) directs six synchronized swimmers – performing Debbie Sands's aquatic choreography and wearing bold-coloured, couturier-style swimsuits by Patricia Edwards – who symbolically act out and celebrate episodes of the romance. The film segments – with Avi Phillips as Kafka, Kelci Archibald as Wasner and Zorana Sadiq as Bauer – have the cool feel of period black-and-white movies. Sokoloski expertly integrates the multimedia aspects of the dreamlike, ritualistic piece, which include text, soundscape and rippling images on and below the water. A fascinating concept, splendidly executed.

Jon Kaplan, NOW Magazine (May 1-7, 2003) NNNN

+++++++++++++++++++++++

If Harbourfront's du Maurier World Stage Festival were to become an event that ran all year every year, it could eventually change the way we look at our city. That's because in nearly every edition, the theatre festival organizers offer a piece of theatre that is site-specific - a theatrical work that turns our world on its ear by moving theatre out of the theatre and setting it in a location that makes us re-examine not only our notion of the theatre, but our notion of the world as well.

As often as not, those site-specific works have been the brainchildren of Thom Sokoloski and his Autumn Leaf Performance company. So, in its way, it is fitting that the final opening in what well could be the final edition of the World Stage Festival that Sokoloski steps up to the plate with another of his inventive offerings. This time around, the site is the Hart House Pool. By moving his story outside the confines of the theatre, Sokoloski is able not only to tackle a story that would be all but impossible to tell in a theatre, but to create images of great, if fleeting, beauty.

John Coulbourn, The Toronto Sun (April 28, 2003)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Picture this. You are in the spectator's gallery of the pool at the University of Toronto's Hart House. The room is almost in darkness and humid form the temperature of the water beneath you. Lights play upon the and underneath the glassy surface of the green-tinted waters. The eerie domed ceiling and pristine white walls are primed to present the recorded images from the life of Franz Kafka. A lone figure appears at the end of the pool. Her echoing voice squeezes into every corner of the silent space. Suddenly, a swimmer glides into the unruffled waters.

Welcome to Kafka In Love, an art work that combines narrative, music, moving pictures, symbolism and the strange beauty of synchronized swimming to present a fictionalized account of a 10-day period in the life of Kafka, when he fell in love with the 18-year-old Gerti Wasner at a sanatorium in Riva, Italy. In the imaginative vision of Thom Sokoloski, creator of Kafka In Love, Gerti has created, 12 years later, an "aquatic art" depiction of her affair, supposedly banned from presentation at the Cultural Festival of the 1936 Olympics by the National Socialists.

All art has as its fundamental power the possibility of the new, the potential we grant to every work of art to do or say something never before said or done. It is awesome power, seldom fully realized, but something of form was present in Kafka In Love. The sheer audacity and novelty of presenting an art work in the haunting confines of Hart House pool, using swimmers instead of actors, and combining images of film, sound, and synchro had an appeal all its own.

Robert Harris, The Globe and Mail (April 29, 2003)