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*1984
Playwright and dramaturge. She was born at the Baltic coast to a Czech-Chilean family, graduated from theatre dramaturgy at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno. In 2011–2015, she worked as a dramaturge and the residential author of the HaDivadlo in Brno. She is the author of plays The House of Seven Cockroaches (book 2010), A Secret Message from the Planet of Mothers (performed at the Ein StückTschechien festival in Berlin in 2014 and Portland State University in the USA), Smokers and Saviors, Dealers of Physical Love, Bikini Blues, (Václav Havel Is Not at Home – Solo for the First Lady) – translated into French, staged as a scenic sketch at the 1st festival of Czech Theatre in France (Fais un saut à Prague), adaptations (Jane Eyre/Thorn Field, Eve, Eve!/Gazdina roba, Hedda Gabler – The Teory of Adulthood, The House of Bernarda Alba, Pride and Prejudice). She is engaged in projects of theatre in social action, distinctive women’s stories, women’s topics and destroying social stereotypes.
Anna Saavedra received the Evald Schorm Award for the third (2010, The House of Seven Cockroaches) and first place (2011, Smokers and Saviors) in the competition for the theatre school students. In 2013, her short story Ley lines was acknowledged in the international literary competition Narraton V4 tournée. In 2017, she received the Theatre Critics’ Award in the category of The Best Czech Play Staged for the First Time 2016 for her play (Václav Havel Is Not at Home – Solo for the First Lady).
Smokers and saviours
Cast: 4 men, 4 women
A tender grotesque play about virtual loves, working women and househusbands. Inspired by a famous play by Tschekov, a young Czech-Chilean author Anna Saaverda has created its modern version about women’s lives in the third millennium, at the age of baby boom, dating websites, careers and esoteric courses where they teach you “how to become a self-confident woman”. They would like to save the world or at least themselves stuck at a sleepy place where the average people go lucky. Three sisters. Smokers and saviours.
We are surrounded by smokers and saviours. They are a metaphor not only to torn apart women, but also to torn apart people in general. They are stuck in the mud but they are looking up, at the stars. They have made lots of mistakes but in the end they might be able to find the courage and laugh at it. For this reason they will remind you of the characters from a famous TV show Sex and the City.
The play won the Evald Schorm Award for 2011.
The play is available also in English and Slovak translation.
Secret message from mother’s planet (Mamma Guerilla)
Cast: variable
“She always put her diapers on upside down, she thought it was a sign of punk.“
A lone astronaut lands on a planet inhabited exclusively by mothers. Witness his eccentric adventure! Do you have kids? Do you plan to have children? Why don’t you have children yet? What excuse do you use most often when your friends ask you? Do you like mothers with children? What do you think about them? Do you mind them? Do you admire them? Do you find them strange? Do you want to be like them? Who are they? The young Czech-Chilean author Anna Saavedra sought answers to these and other questions in her surroundings, and she learned everything you ever wanted to know about motherhood, but were too afraid to ask! Motherhood is a theme that goes across time, across generations, is common to the cultures of all continents, all religions and mythologies, and often also the alpha and omega of our personal histories.
A fascinating, disturbing, comic and torturous essay on motherhood in all its forms, with a colorful collage of dialogues, monologues, lyrical passages, ironic comments and documentary texts that try to find a blind spots on the map of our universe. The main character of the game is a choir of mothers, from which individual voices emerge…
The text was developed within the residency program of the Center of Contemporary Drama of the Letí Theater.
The play is available also in English translation.
Olga (Václav Havel Is Not at Home – Solo for the First Lady)
Cast: 3 men, 1 woman (variable)
Václav Havel’s life was as remarkable, adventurous and paradoxical as the unstable and changing history of the twentieth century. A son from an important family, a playwright persecuted by the communist regime, an activist, a political prisoner, one of the leaders of the Velvet Revolution and finally the president of democratic Czechoslovakia. An incredible story seen through the eyes of a woman who stood by his side all her life trying to live up to roles she hadn’t chosen herself. Olga Havlová, a former first lady of dissent, later the first lady of a country heading for democracy. Original, unpretentious, scathingly ironic, with a sense of humor and principles that were not bent even by totalitarian will and persecution. The play Olga (Václav Havel Is Not at Home – Solo for the First Lady) is not only a biography of a remarkable human destiny, but a much more surreal prank, which mixes time lines, historical twists and intimate everyday life. Ghosts of the past dance with the ghosts of the present. Love polygons are an expression of resistance against the state, and philosophizing over a bottle of beer turns into a speech in front of a thousand-headed crowd – all in fragmentary scenery referring to the poetics of Havel’s absurd dramas.
The play was developed within the LETÍ Theater’s residency program, and won the Theater Critics Awards for the Best Czech Play of the Year. Its production by the LETÍ Theater has won numerous awards.
The play is also available in English, French, German and Spanish translations.
