Awkward Happiness or Everything I Don’t Remember About Meeting You
Performance in Polish, Anglish, French and Slovak
The journey of two couples in their struggles to discover happiness. Four different perspectives on the nature of happiness and how to reach it (or not).
The performance is a reflection on the futility of happiness, inspired by Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Pascal Bruckner’s Perpetual Euphoria.
The passage of time paints a relationship with layers of beauty, secrets, surprises and misunderstandings. When you hold a mirror to a human relationship, does the image it reflects bring you closer to an understanding of happiness? Is happiness something that we seek in another person, but will never fully be realized?
The seed of the performance began from Studio Matejka’s research on the human body in contemporary performance practices. During 18 months of research while in residency with the Grotowski Institute, the physical training and exercises were explored through themes and images drawn from the performers’ own inspirations. These rough drafts of creative material were crafted into physical fragments of duets and solo structures, which went through a continuous process of deconstruction and reconstruction under the direction of Matej Matejka and a series of guest collaborators including Cécile Da Costa (Spitfire, Farm in the Cave), Milan Kozanek (Artyci Dance Company) and Vivien Wood (DV8). Fragments of these structures were shared in public work demonstrations, demonstrating the practical research and the transformation into performative material. With the collaboration of DogDocs (Slovakia), Studio Matejka took the creative structures into the medium of film with the development of six short films. In July 2012 Studio Matejka collaborated with Vivien Wood to complete the first stage of the performance’s development. The creative material was restructured into a work in progress titled Everything I Don’t Remember About Meeting You, which premiered at the 2012 KioSK festival in Stanica Žilina-Záriečie, Slovakia. The performance premiered on 14 February 2013 in the Grotowski Institute as part of a programme of short performance works called “Solo Situations”. The text is primarily composed of the performers’ own writings. These writings are the result of two years of reflections and questions on the themes of human relationships, happiness, dreams and desires. Additionally, fragments of texts by Anna Świrszczyńska, Alexander Fleischer, Yehuda Amichai and Milan Kundera will be woven into the final performance to complement the performers’ own writing.
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come…We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch… Einmal ist keinmal… If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Milan Kundera
The musical structure was developed from the approach of transforming live elements into sampled sounds in accordance with the action on stage. The musical landscape explored in the performance also includes contemporary jazz songs and instrumental compositions. Rather than using music as a background or simply to colour the atmosphere, the music in the performance is utilized as an element that is integrated with the physical action.
- AUTHORS: Matej Matejka, Guillaumarc Froidevaux, Zuzana Kakalikova, Daniel Han, Magdalena Koza
- DIRECTED BY: Matej Matejka
- PERFORMERS: Guillaumarc Froidevaux, Daniel Han, Zuzana Kakalikova, Magdalena Koza
- MUSIC: Guillaumarc Froidevaux, Daniel Han, Zuzana Kakalikova
- MUSIC AND VOICE CONSULTANT: Ditte Berkeley
- MOVEMENT SUPERVISOR: Vivien Wood
- COSTUME DESIGNER: Agnieszka Katyńska
- LIGHTING: Marcin Wójcik
Duration: 70’
Compagnie T-d’U was created in 2007 in Switzerland by Zuzana Kakalikova and Guillaumarc Froidevaux to facilitate meetings and exchanges between artists from different backgrounds. The group offers the opportunity to gather and disseminate multi-disciplinary performances by facilitating the concrete realization of production. The company’s artistic focus is, first of all, physical theatre, but the company is very familiar with the use of music, multimedia and unconventional space arrangement. After creating Silence... and Ôkô, the company members joined Studio Matejka and started a close, long-term collaboration with the ensemble. The wish to link people inspired the company to collaborate in supporting the production of Awkward Happiness. The power of the present casting is the long and intense background that the four performers have together through a common training and language in addition to the variety of experiences and cultures from which they come.
More: www.cietdu.com
