premiere: 15 Dec 2011 Radialsystem V Berlin (D)
further performances 16+17+18 Dec 2011

MOMENTS OF HAPPINESS – are rare, precious and highly energetic. They don’t just appear to order. But only when one has the courage to bet everything on a single number, to go for broke and leave one’s habits behind. With her new production “HappyPiece”, the dance director Helena Waldmann criticises the tendency towards a moderate happiness, and with her four protagonists turns the narrowest of stages into a bursting powder keg of dance.

With “HappyPiece” the renowned Berlin-based dance director Helena Waldmann follows up the phenomenal success of “get a revolver”. The internationally touring solo with Brit Rodemund (“tanz” magazine’s “Dancer of the Year 2011”) is a celebration of forgetting. And now happiness comes fourfold: once again with Brit Rodemund, alongside Moo Kim, Tobias Draeger and André Soares. These four fearless heralds of fortune find happiness in rebelliousness and dignity.


This never-being-happy. Nor entirely unhappy. Euphoria? Probably only at the price of a small depression. According to Adorno, happiness only comes with the suspension of suffering. If we are never unhappy, never feel pain, are not suffering, we are also not able to feel happiness.
“A little madness always helps”, according to Helena Waldmann. In “HappyPiece” the Berlin-based dance director lets her four protagonists (including “tanz” magazine’s “Dancer of the Year 2011”, Brit Rodemund) tear at the relations that otherwise simply encase life in the middle ground. It is not enough for them simply to sustain what has somehow been attained. Helena Waldmann’s work – in the narrowest of spaces and with furious energy – shows the full dramatic spectrum, between crash and flight. She thus works against the unhappiness of fear: fear of exceeding what is considered moderate, the shredding of a purported normality, the rejection of a recommended period of calm. Her happiness is one of rebellion and dignity, of having the right to determine one’s own life.

GlückStück is a production by Helena Waldmann and ecotopia dance productions
in cooproduction with Belgrade Dance Festival (Serbia), Burghof Lörrach (D), Festival Bregenzer Frühling (A), ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival (A), Migros culture percentage Dance Festival Steps (CH), Tafelhalle im KunstKulturQuartier Nürnberg (D), Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf (D)
supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds

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