This year‘s first Evening Tea had a certain amount of exclusivity when Igor Timko, the popular singer and frontman of the band No Name, visited Bata Villa on 10 January. Jakub Malovaný led a discussion with Igor Timko, the whole evening was also accompanied by music, during the conversation Igor Timko‘s students from the conservatory in Bánská Bystrica performed several times, namely Júlia Miciková and Filip Ďuriš.
On Thursday, 22 February, another Evening Tea was held at the Bata Villa. This time the theme was travel, and the young traveller and writer Jan Rendl took all the visitors to far away Pakistan.
On Thursday, 28 March, another of the Evening Teas took place. This time the Bata Villa welcomed the band Teige from Kutná Hora, in which Štěpán Princ, actor of the Municipal Theatre Zlín, is active. The concert featured not only original songs by this trio with Czech lyrics, but also Czechoslovak hits of the 1960s - such as Hvězda na vrbě (Start on the willow tree) or Čerešně (Cherries) - in non-traditional interpretations.
As part of a talk entitled ‘Song as symbol or following the footsteps of a cultural phenomenon of mankind’, which took place on 18 April, the experienced musician and writer Jiří Plocek searched for what a song, as one of the basic elements of human culture, means to a man. What role does it play in history? What does it mirror? What does it mean for each of us personally? What does it say about us? And what does it say about our times?
On Thursday, May 30, the last Evening Tea of the first half of 2024 took place and it was a truly extraordinary experience. The adventurer Tomáš Vaňourek, the main face of Expedition Z101, which has been crossing the African continent in the footsteps of legendary travellers Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund for the past three years, visited the Bata Villa. During a special talk, which was the very first after Tomáš Vaňourek‘s return to the Czech Republic, it was presented how the world is changing and we with it.
The first talk in the fall series of Evening Teas took place on October 8. The talk took visitors not only into the woods, but more importantly into the world of learning about all kinds of mushrooms. The discussion was led by Petr Švehlák, a mycologist from Zlín.
On 21 November, a discussion with the legend of Czechoslovak pop music, singer Stanislav Hložek, took place on the occasion of his significant anniversary. Hložek celebrated his seventieth birthday in the Bata Villa and on this occasion, many of his key songs that everyone knows were performed.
An evening full of beautiful chansons performed by the the pianist Kateřina Marie Kraftová took place in December. Visitors enjoyed well-known and lesser-known songs with winter and Christmas themes, and even some brand new ones.
