Hedone’s Dinner
Hedone’s Dinner
A multisensory dinner-performance
Hedone’s Dinner Party is a multisensory dinner-performance celebrating taste, food and pleasure.
Throughout the evening, the audience is invited to share a meal, partially in darkness, while experiencing a triptych of performances by femme-identifying artists, unfolding between courses and around the dinner table.
What does taste evoke? What memories does it awaken? What sensations emerge when we eat together? How does experiencing performance change when our senses of taste and smell are activated?
Hedone’s Dinner Party explores these questions while inviting us to reclaim the
pleasure of eating together in a culture that continues to restrict and police,
particularly, women’s relationships with food, appetite and desire.
Through writing, food, performance and sound, the evening creates a shared space
for curiosity, connection and collective pleasure.
Time table:
✍️ 18:30–19:30 | Hot Saucy Story — Writing workshop by Sophie Guisset
🥘 19:30–20:30 | Serving Pleasure — Cozy vegetarian winter dinner by Limpho Pearl.
🫦 20:30–21:00 | mean_meal — Performance by Valeria Secchi
💌 21:00–21:15 | Hot Saucy Story — Anonymous story sharings
🎧 21:15–21:45 | Rest & Digest — Live soundscape by Dimitra Sofroniou accompanied by a hot tea
Important note: Hedone’s Dinner Party is a participatory experience. If you decide to join us, please make sure to arrive on time and take part in all the activities throughout the evening,
Full programme:
18:30–19:30 - Hot Saucy Story Writing workshop with Sophie
Hot Saucy Story is a playful creative writing workshop inviting participants to write the beginning of a sexual encounter that hasn't happened yet.
Inspired by the theme of three-pepper sauce, participants will be guided through aseries of writing prompts to create the setting, atmosphere and first moments of an imagined encounter. What are you wearing? Where are you? How do you feel? How does the encounter begin? And where might the heat take you?
Everyone will receive paper and a pen, allowing stories to be written anonymously. Rather than completing a full story, this one-hour workshop focuses on creating an opening: a fragment that sets the scene and leaves space for imagination. By the end of the first performance, some of the anonymous stories will be shared, read aloud.
About the artist
Sophie Guisset (1987, Tournai, BE) is a performer and performance maker. After completing her education in acting at the Royal Conservatory of Mons (BE) in 2011, she took part in the Dance Intensive Program at Tanzfabrik Berlin in 2013.
Her artistic practice focuses on the notions of intimacy, pleasure and playfulness. In her performances, she engages with spaces that allow protagonists, or players, to find a certain freedom and safety in order to explore private spheres. She is interested in how queer spaces are imagined, politically conceived and socially organised, from a feminist point of view. In the projects she develops, she aims at exploring the social and sexual dynamics at play in these spaces.
19:30–20:30 - Serving Pleasure
We gather around the table to experience the simple pleasures of eating together.
This tasteful trip will be prepared by our guest cook: Limpho Pearl.
Limpho prepares a cozy vegetarian winter dinner. Expect winter veggies, warm spices and comforting flavours.
20:30–21:00 - mean_mean
Performance by Valeria Secchi
mean_meal is a vibrant space for discovery, care and play.
In this performance, Valeria Secchi investigates the similarities and contradictions between slime and the body. Slime reveals the complexity of the human body and its constant capacity for transformation, both physically and mentally.
Through touch and gaze, the audience is guided on a journey of transformation.
mean_meal becomes a collective experience that creates space for connection, curiosity and new ways of relating to the body.
About the artist
Valeria Secchi (she/they, born 1992 in Sardinia) is a maker and performer based in Antwerp. After obtaining a bachelor's degree in dance at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, they began working as a dancer and performer in Italy and Belgium. Over time, they expanded their practice into making and multidisciplinary artistic work.
Their work explores the body and the ways emotions are expressed through movement, with a particular interest in choreographic and performative approaches to the self and its multiplicity. Their early projects grew out of a collaboration with visual artist Giulia Cauti, combining material research with explorations of movement and the body.
21:00–21:30 - Rest & Digest:
Live Soundscape by Dimitra Sofroniou
After eating, it's time to rest, digest and listen.
Accompanied by digestive tea, Dimitra Sofroniou creates a live-looping soundscape using processed field recordings, foley sounds and beats. Weaving these elements together in real time, she builds immersive sonic textures that invite the audience to slow down, rest and digest the evening
About the artist
Dimitra Sofroniou (she/her) is a composer and multidisciplinary artist from Athens, Greece, based in Amsterdam.
Her work explores the relationship between sound, space and visual media, often through collaborations with visual artists, filmmakers and choreographers. Her current research focuses on field recording, active listening, spatial sound and sonic landscapes, investigating how places, memories and everyday environments are experienced through sound.
She is particularly interested in domestic and urban soundscapes as spaces where personal memory intersects with wider social and political realities.
Hedone’s Dinner is a multisensory dinner-performance centered on taste, food, and pleasure. Three meals are interwoven with a triptych of performances. In between words, slime, sound, textures and a variety of tastes, the audience is invited to indulge in the sensuous through sight, smell, taste, writing and listening.
