Eva Weaver
The Bread of Those Years
The Germans are ‘World-Record-holders in bread-eating’ but can bread cure heartache? Brown, white, grey, black, mixed? Crust, or no crust? What do you prefer? The Bread of Those Years is a roller-coaster ride through the world of bread and cultural confusion, a challenging, dark and funny performance, using bread as a focus through which issues of cross-cultural identity, history, stereotyping and belonging are explored.
The journey starts in Germany, the country of 300 types of bread, and leads over a trail of bread to the UK, an island laid out in toast. In this cultural bread-mixture, stories, vignettes and curiosities concerning bread emerge from suitcases, are collaged, re-told and sung. From childhood anecdotes, accounts from Auschwitz, Chaplin’s ‘bread-roll dance’ and Nuremberg’s complex and terrible history with its sweet gingerbreads, these ‘bread-stories’ are reworked bi-lingually in text and song, video and action. Toasted, sniffed, sculpted, shared, walked on, stuffed, ripped, loved, devoured and worn, BREAD is ever-present and sticks to us.
Eva holds an MA in Performance from Queen Mary University and has shown solo work at East End Collaborations, Tract, Arnolfini, Toynbee Studios, OMSK and other venues.
She is support by Basement Arts Productions South East, Brighton, Arts Council South East and Brighton and Hove Arts Commission.
With thanks to Helen Paris, Rose English and Silke Mansholt for their mentoring support.