Dates
| 20.10.2026 / 19:30 |
Information
The “crying girl” stereotype often evokes hypersensitivity or emotional overload, yet crying can also be an act of power, vulnerability, radical honesty, or release after an emotional peak. Crying Girls embodies this through women in their late thirties who are reliving their girlhood in bodies subject to decay, while referencing the uncompromising spirit of Thelma and Louise.
The work was developed by Eva Priečková and Zuzana Žabková as a continuation of their long-term collaboration on a trilogy exploring the female body, vulnerability, decay, and transformation (Bodies in Trouble, 2018; Weak Women, 2023). While previous works dealt with “fossils bodies” and exhaustion, Crying Girls asks what might grow from them—sublimity, levitation, and tangible mysticism.
In their work they try to gently curse the constant pressure to produce and overwork. This time they call on the wet, soft places of the marshes to guide them — the litanies of frogs, the laughter of hyenas. They betray the tension in the jaw for drooping cheeks and half-open mouths that refuse to be silenced, letting voices ring out through various little songs, voices that never surfaced from the wetlands again.
It is a lament, pop music, parasympathetic activation, and the constant moistening of the oral cavity.
50 minutes / Slovak and English / suitable for children ages 12 and up
Eva Priečková and Zuzana Žabková are friends, collaborators and artistic mischiefs since 2011. They met in an academic environment where they challenged obedience, control and discipline over bodies and mind. They are curious in various forms of dance explorations and deviations through somatic practices, critical theories, poetry, eastern european backgrounds, experiential anatomy, consensual touch work and long durational, non hierarchical working methods. In 2018 they created a dance piece called Bodies in trouble – ode to exhaustion, burnout and aging in a profession of “independent” dance artists. Through the support of experimental female musicians from unnoticed artistic peripheries. In 2023 they premiered Weak Women antidote towards heroism and strengths, stoic emotionality and solid ground under their feet. They like to see and feel dance art and dance practices weaved into a daily network of connection, within communities and world in its horror and ongoing struggle. In their practice, this hard – core reality is in the conversation with human right of pleasure, joy, imagination, awe and softness.
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Created and performed by: Eva Priečková, Zuzana Žabková
Special thanks to: Ján Skaličan, Klaudia Klembarová, and co.labs Brno, Telocvičňa—Residency Center for Dance, Bratislava