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The Dinner Club
The Dinner Club is a performance shaped as an evening class. Over six practical workshops, participants learn how to enjoy themselves at a dinner party with strangers. Good manners and social etiquette are taught, as well as practical tips on mastering weddings, dinner parties and openings. Exercises might include ‘Basic social dancing’, ‘The A to Z of Mingling’, or ‘Elementary Table Manners’. A three-course dinner then doubles as the exam for the session, and every visitor who passes receives a personalized diploma.
In The Dinner Club, Poste Restante carves into “good manners” to uncover a gaping divide between the sexes. Men are treated as men – and they treat women as women. We like to think we’re equal, but how often do women actually object when a door is held open by a man? Do men ever resist the flattery when asked to open bottles and jars by women?
As inequality between the sexes is delicately served up, embarrassment and confusion become the hardest mouthfuls to swallow. The Dinner Club encourages us to reflect on our own behaviour, and to digest the shame it may have caused.
Co-produced by Mossutställningar in collaboration with the Polish Institute in Stockholm. It has since its critically acclaimed world premiere in Stockholm been shown both nationally and internationally.
"However, other deeper levels to The Dinner Club cannot be underestimated. A certain eerie feeling becomes apparent. The applied social conformity functions as an intelligent and revealing game. We catch sight of the sense of obligation that exists in formalized social situations that have become outmoded in most contemporary contexts. The first thought that strikes one is: Things were probably not better in the past. The second thought: What quiet, dictatorial rules govern us today?"
- Ingegärd Waaranperä. Dagens nyheter 2009-03-11
The Dinner Club is a performance shaped as an evening class. Over six practical workshops, participants learn how to enjoy themselves at a dinner party with strangers. Good manners and social etiquette are taught, as well as practical tips on mastering weddings, dinner parties and openings. Exercises might include ‘Basic social dancing’, ‘The A to Z of Mingling’, or ‘Elementary Table Manners’. A three-course dinner then doubles as the exam for the session, and every visitor who passes receives a personalized diploma.
In The Dinner Club, Poste Restante carves into “good manners” to uncover a gaping divide between the sexes. Men are treated as men – and they treat women as women. We like to think we’re equal, but how often do women actually object when a door is held open by a man? Do men ever resist the flattery when asked to open bottles and jars by women?
As inequality between the sexes is delicately served up, embarrassment and confusion become the hardest mouthfuls to swallow. The Dinner Club encourages us to reflect on our own behaviour, and to digest the shame it may have caused.
Co-produced by Mossutställningar in collaboration with the Polish Institute in Stockholm. It has since its critically acclaimed world premiere in Stockholm been shown both nationally and internationally.
"However, other deeper levels to The Dinner Club cannot be underestimated. A certain eerie feeling becomes apparent. The applied social conformity functions as an intelligent and revealing game. We catch sight of the sense of obligation that exists in formalized social situations that have become outmoded in most contemporary contexts. The first thought that strikes one is: Things were probably not better in the past. The second thought: What quiet, dictatorial rules govern us today?"
- Ingegärd Waaranperä. Dagens nyheter 2009-03-11