Breakfast for Dinner
Secondhand Women
- Tuesday May 16 / 18:00, Erpet Smíchov
The members of the theatre group Secondhand Women celebrate their 20th anniversary at the event called Breakfast for Dinner. They will meet at the slowly melting butter along with friends, gynecologists, artists, experts in sex and weather forecast. The dialogue at the table will crunch in teeth like ice crushed ice in the involuntary heat of the sauna. The conversation will sometimes dawdle like a drop of honey sliding down the side of the jar “currants summer 2002”. SHW palpate topics of “changes” that concern all of us. They process the “changes” that concern only them openly and slightly provokingly. Breakfast for Dinner is not a theatre performance, but communication and sharing feelings and opinions on the topic. The event in its guided form will last for two hours but conversations or the subsequent collective silence can last until the early red sky in Smíchov.
Secondhand Women is an international democratic theatre group established in 2003 by five independent women – performers: Petra Moře Lustigová, Daniela Voráčková, Halka Třešňáková, Stefania Thors, and Helene Kvint. All of them rely on humor and the need to get to the root of things. They survive poverty as well as luxury, broken nails, and even high voltage accidents. They come from three countries: the Czech Republic, Iceland, and Denmark.
They respect each other’s different creative experiences, skills, and opinions. In their eyes these are not characteristics of competition but rather an advantage. Their collective creativity brings both surprising and suspenseful moments not only for the spectator but also for them. They view the risk associated with this way of working as a challenge.
Up until the final phase, when they must all be on stage at once, they work without a director. There is no man in their group, although their relationship towards men is more than warm! This “women’s” atmosphere thus excludes any conflicts regarding a man or a director – something that, in the theatre environment, is often toxic for art.
They openly deal with gender topics that are usually not talked about. They work with the aspects that are “taboo” as regards women’s lives. Their inspiration comes primarily from their own life experiences but also from the stories of other women. They speak about their personal, even intimate, feelings, making minor things serious and injecting humor into the serious ones.
