For centuries, women have been portrayed as beautiful, lyrical, perfect beings, with their behavior expected to align with this ideal. This narrative was created and controlled by men. Among these women was the soprano and composer Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677). She sang sentimental and often banal texts about unhappy love—“beautiful, lyrical, perfect.” The words were written by her father or by other men. Although Strozzi was active, creative, and educated, she was denied true artistic independence. Can her career, then, be considered successful? Or did her work simply become a stage for the projection of male fantasies—fantasies that concealed, and still conceal, any visibility of female failure, imperfection, or deviation from the “beautiful, lyrical, perfect”? And today, can we move beyond these fantasies of the female body and voice to act by different rules, in the name of a future that belongs to all of us? Can we embrace failure and imperfection as essential parts of our existence and as tools for changing perception?
Second Practice is a solo dance concert, a female comic show. It’s an encounter in the distorted mirror of contemporary dance and Baroque music, drawing attention to what lingers in the shadows, what distracts, unsettles, provokes uncertainty, stirs polyphonic desires, and disrupts what is only just beginning to emerge in the creative process of dance and its staging. Second Practice is a search for reconciliation with the fatigue, hopelessness, and failure of the jobbing dancer and mother.
Martina Hajdyla Lacová is an independent artist in the field of contemporary dance. She studied dance at the J. L. Bell Conservatory in Banská Bystrica and dance pedagogy at HAMU in Prague. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the open platform ME-SA, where she combines her choreographic work with collaborations with guest choreographers from both the Czech and international dance scenes. As a dancer and performer, she has worked with renowned dance companies, including the Norwegian company Karen Foss Quiet Works, the Swiss group DA MOTUS!, and the Slovak DEBRIS Company between 2009 and 2017. In addition, Martina has collaborated with internationally recognized choreographers and creators, including Adrienn Hód (HU), Anna Kalblad (SE), David Zambrano (BE), Jiří Havelka (CZ), Renan Martins (BR), Peter Šavel (BE/SK), Rasmus Ölme (SE), Andrej Petrovič (SK), Helene Weinzierl (AT), Ji-Eun Lee (KR), and Maya M. Carroll (IL/DE). She has received several awards for her performance work, including the Czech Centers Award in 2023 for her outstanding performance in SOFT SPOT. Her solo project L/One of the Seven was nominated for the prestigious Thalia Award in 2016, and in 2015 she was named Dancer of the Year for her performance in SuperNaturals.
As a choreographer, she has created a number of dance and interdisciplinary works, including Ke zdi / Fickle Angle (Cirkus TeTy), Momentum – An Authentic or Athletic Work (ME-SA), Voyerky (Cirkus TeTy), Assemblage (ME-SA), SQUAT (Divadlo Štúdio tanca Banská Bystrica), Metamorphic (Prague Chamber Ballet), SuperNaturals (ME-SA), and SoloS Part III (ME-SA). Her production 3×20 WOMEN at Divadlo Štúdio tanca received the prestigious DOSKY Award in 2019 for outstanding contribution to Slovak dance theatre.
Renata Piotrowska-Auffret is a choreographer who works with experimental dance, performative art, and theatre. She reflects on the contemporary world, drawing inspiration from intimate experiences, both real and fictional. She is interested in the perversity of relationships between historical and contemporary body politics, between the public and the private, as well as between text and movement. In 2014, she began the Private Pieces series, in which she exposes the politics of the female body oscillating between private and public spheres. Works in this series include Death: Exercises and Variations (2014), The Pure Gold Is Seeping Out of Me (2017), Flatland of Limp Muscles (2019), and Uteri Migrantes (2022).
Speaking about her work, she says: “I am an artist, I am a woman, I am a mother – so the polarization of the body directly affects me. I always have a personal and autobiographical need to create the work.” In 2020, she created the performances Danse Macabre (JK Theatre, Opole, Poland) and As Long as We Dance (Studio Hrdinů, Prague, Czech Republic). Piotrowska-Auffret completed the master choreographic program ex.e.r.ce. in Montpellier and the Theatre Academy in Białystok. She is a member of the Warsaw choreographic platform Centrum w Ruchu.
Duration: 90 min.
Concept and choreography: Renata Piotrowska-Auffret /PL/
Creation and performance: Martina Hajdyla Lacová
Music & sound design: Simon Aufrett /FR/
Costume and set design collaboration: Natálie Rajnišová
Visual dramaturgy & lighting design: Joanna Leśnierowska /PL/
Visual photography: Terezie Fojtová
Production: Adéla Lipavská
Technical support: Sebastián Vích, Jan Čief, Jiří Hajdyla
PR manager: Jolana Danková
Financial manager: Daniela Řeháková
Creative producer: Jiří Hajdyla
Project partners: Hellerau – European Center for the Arts, Štúdio Tanca Banská Bystrica, Nová Síť / Art-in-res, 4 + 4 Days in Motion, Co.labs, Venuše ve Švehlovce, Moving Station, Nowy Teatr Warsaw.
The project is realized with financial support from the Ministry of Culture, the City of Prague, the City of Brno, the State Fund for Culture, the National Recovery Plan, and the European Union.
