The Second Woman | Nat Randall & Anna Breckon

On stage, there is a single professional actress: Stefania Goulioti. She goes through the same scene 100 times for 24 hours. Her stage partners: one hundred men, non-binary and queer individuals of various ages, nationalities, and professions. They are not necessarily actors, and no rehearsal has taken place previously.

A marathon of endurance—both for the main performer and the audience—an unparalleled manifesto on gender roles and the sensitive dynamics of relationships, as well as a live cinema experience, "The Second Woman" is an internationally lauded theatrical, sociological, and psychological experiment, conceived and directed by Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, two emerging creators from Australia, who present their work for the very first time in Greece.

The mechanisms of gender power are made visible, while a crew of filmmakers, whose members self-identify as femininities and non-binary individuals, records and projects close-ups of each meeting onto the set’s screen.

Stay for 24 minutes or 24 hours, enter once, or return. Either way, each meeting—tender, violent, funny, or emotional as it might be—is an experience in itself.

-Since its world premiere in Australia in 2017, Nat Randall and Anna Breckon's “Second Woman” has been a huge hit with audiences. Nat Randall is an Australian performer and writer whose work explores the interplay between theater and film, devised theater, and endurance theater. Breckon is a director, writer, and academic from New Zealand whose studies and professional interests focus on feminism and queer identities. In 2019, “Second Woman” was nominated for “Best Production” at the Helpmann Awards in Australia.

-The central figure of the performance is Virginia. The action is confined within a small box, with the camera recording every detail. The scene is played out 100 times, each time between Virginia and a new partner (played by professionals, amateur actors, and ordinary individuals responding to open calls) forcing the actress to adapt her performance for each iteration.

- All the iterations are unrehearsed, the element of surprise being a crucial element of the performance. And while the script of the scene is the same, the execution is different each time.

"The Second Woman" is unlike a play or a narrative production. While the script is based on a narrative situation, the drama of the scene largely hinges on the real stranger interaction. The script works to create situations between participant and performer. These situations produce a range of relations/emotions: awkwardness and anxiety, joy and connection, anger and frustration, sexual intimacy. "The Second Woman’s" political and emotional potency resides in the show’s ability to demonstrate the subtle ways in which power operates at the level of everyday emotional experience and ordinary social interaction. The Second Woman brings into being what Kathleen Stewart, citing Sianne Ngai, describes as “bad examples: not perfect representations of an ideology or structure at work in the real world, but actual sites where forces have gathered to a point of impact to instantiate something.”[1]

"The Second Woman" began as a small self-funded project. It was a high-risk endeavour as, although we could test the work with multiple participants, we couldn’t test the durational aspect of the show. There is no way to rehearse a 24hr production that relies on audience and participants. With so many variables and unknowns, we went into our first performance with a certain amount of dread.

After three iterations of the show in Australia, we were invited to do a performance at the opening of Weiwuying: The National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts. This introduced an additional set of variables. It was unknown how Taiwanese participants would engage with the material and if the form of the show would hold up in this very different cultural context. For this first international iteration, we introduced the idea of finding a local performer for each international presentation. Zhu Zhi-Ying was the performer assisted by A-Wing Hsu as co-director of performance. We are immensely grateful to Weiwuying—in particular Emma Liao and Kathy Hong—and Zhi-Ying for taking the risk to create with us a Mandarin version of this project.

While the format had worked in a particular way once, we had no idea how a change in cultural context—in this case a different city and festival—would impact the work. This is because "The Second Woman" doesn’t exist prior to its coming into being in the moment of its presentation. It is created each time by bringing together a series of contingent elements that can be curated and managed but never completely controlled.

"The Second Woman" is made by a female and non-binary crew. Behind the scenes, we have 4 camera operators, 2 vision switchers, 2 sound operators, 2 stage managers, and 2 participant coordinators. While we run training and offer guidelines prior to the show, this crew works to make representational decisions moment to moment. This ensures that female and non-binary ways of looking and modes of feeling hold the show together.

-Nat Randall & Anna Breckon

[1] Kathleen Stewart, “The Perfectly Ordinary Life,” S&F Online 2, no. 1 (2003)

Stefania Goulioti's wig courtesy of KDG Hair Boutique.