Kookl@, Keeper of Secrets

A doll is always a bridge between reality and imagination, no matter what we may think. At times it even seems that human culture itself was invented not by people, but by wooden and porcelain beings.

Coppélia. A jointed dream of a watchmaker; she dances so that the audience forgets where the wood ends and the living flesh begins. She has a weakness for mazurkas.Olympia from The Tales of Hoffmann. Sings on a single spring, until she’s wound up too tightly. Her greatest danger: you may fall in love before noticing the key in her back.Grin’s living doll, who escaped from a shop window into an automobile. Fond of wax and all kinds of machinery, servant to the kingdom of things.Catherine. Cosette’s doll from Les Misérables. She never speaks, but listens better than any priest. She knows every French rainfall of the nineteenth century.Galatea. Once a statue. Her finest virtue is that she understands: animation always comes at the cost of marble calm.Pinocchio. A boy made of wooden rings, convinced that to be human is better than to be timber. (Spoiler: the question remains open.)Edward Gordon Craig’s marionettes. Actors without a voice, but with perfect diction. Their sharpest weapon is the shadow.Tairov’s dolls. Stage props that suddenly begin to argue with the actors. Sometimes they win.Karabas-Barabas’s figurines. A collective portrait of creative slavery: they never get a vacation, but they’re always in the repertoire.Meyerhold’s bi-ba-bo puppet. Perched on the fingers like a glove, as though the fingers themselves were a stage. Its mask is frozen, but only in appearance.The dolls of Japanese Bunraku. Three-person souls: one moves the legs, another the arms, the third the heart. The perfect model of marriage.The Nutcracker’s jaw, chained to Christmas music.

And you know, all these dolls come alive - once you put on Coppelius’s glasses.Or (and now is the right time) when you watch the new production of the Jerusalem Ballet "Kookl@". About Kafka’s wandering doll, the traveler who lives in letters and speaks only in the voices of those who imagine her.

Kafka’s doll is a fragile and strange image, almost unprovable, yet all the more alive. The story, told by Max Brod and Dora Diamant, sounds like a parable: in the final months of his life, Franz Kafka met a little girl in the park who was weeping for her lost doll. To comfort her, he invented a tale: the doll had not vanished, but set off on a journey. From that day on, the girl received letters from the “doll,” written in Kafka’s own hand - about faraway countries, new names, adventures. And in every letter, the doll promised to return.

The Jerusalem Ballet has dared to transform this legend into a performance. "Kookl@" brings the doll to the stage, granting her life in movement - no longer imaginary, but real. The ballet picks up Kafka’s unfinished lines and unfurls them into choreographic flow. The doll wanders across the stage as she once wandered the world in letters: through continents and cultures, through dances where myths mingle with dreams. Each act - a new letter. Each step - a change of name. Each pas de deux - a promise to return.Thus the ballet turns a brief episode from a dying writer’s life into a metaphor of art’s endless journey.

Dorit Talpaz’s illustration, inspired by Kafka’s drawings

In Prague, beside the Spanish Synagogue, stands an immovable bronze monument to Franz Kafka by sculptor Jaroslav Róna. A little figure, resembling Kafka himself, jauntily rides atop an empty suit - almost as if proclaiming the absurdity of the trial brought against him. In the Old-New Synagogue, where young Franz once celebrated his bar mitzvah, you can still see the chair of Rabbi Loew, the man credited with bringing into being a clay colossus bearing the word shem on its forehead. The remains of the Golem, legend insists, still lie hidden in the synagogue’s attic.

The Golem is a kind of doll too, or rather, the doll’s dark counterpart. He too was fashioned by human hands, animated by artificial means. Yet instead of a key or a hinge, what rests inside his chest is a word. A Prague giant of clay, born in the same city where Kafka would later live - not a dancer, but a vessel of someone else’s will, someone else’s script. 

In the new ballet "Kookl@," objects, characters, and eras seep into one another: Coppélia may turn out to be the Golem’s shadow, and Kafka himself the puppet of his own doll. The syntax of movement is like the rhythm of sleep: waves that sometimes choke, sometimes stretch too long to be read to the end. Certain scenes appear meaningless - until you realize that this is the meaning.

The essence of the doll lies in her ability to pretend she is human. The essence of the ballet-goer lies in knowing full well that Coppélia is danced by a living ballerina - yet still believing in the jointed laughter and wooden elbows creaking to the mazurka. Hoffmann was the first to guess it: dolls are human doubles, only more honest. They never hide their need for a spring instead of love.

A doll is not just any puppet. After all, the Golem too, legend says, could slip out of control.(And if we’re being honest - aren’t we all puppets of our own imagination?)

The secret of the doll in theatre and literature is simple and merciless: it allows the audience to love the artificial more deeply than the real. For the artificial does not age, does not falter, does not fall ill, does not die—unless the string snaps or the porcelain cracks. In ballet, the doll is always a little more than a role. It is the artist’s metaphor: behind the polished movements lies the labor of a mechanism; behind the flawless smile lies what remains behind the curtain. And when the doll comes alive on stage, the spectator believes he too has come alive.

In the end, every doll - porcelain, wooden, or clay - has her own Kafka, or her own Rabbi Loew. Someone will write her letters, someone will place the word shem in her mouth, someone will compose a ballet. And the doll - whether made of fabric, wood, or rehearsal sweat - will keep her silent secret: she always knew she would live.

Ballet steps spill across the floor like spilled milk. Dolls tread puddles of pas-de-bourrée; the Golem smears a clay trace across the boards; Olympia spins until she loses her bearings - and in that moment it becomes clear that the stage is round, and there is no way out of it, only turning, turning, turning.

At the back of the stage stands Kafka. He holds a doll under his arm, yet the doll is larger than he is. They both stare into the void, and the void stares back. And then, the wall behind them begins to dance.

At the end, when the curtains fall, the dolls do not leave. They sit down on the floor, remove their faces, and lay them beside them like gloves. Catherine’s face is soft, the Golem’s heavy, Olympia’s blank. Kafka would have said these are the faces of a letter that has not yet been sent.

And at that moment, it seems we are all dolls. Some of us have already been lost in a park; others still have letters being written in our name.

The world premiere of Kookl@ will take place on September 17 at 8:00 PM at the Jerusalem Theatre. Tickets available here.