HappyPiece

Helena Waldmann’s stage designs are as rigorously filleted as all other parts of her performances. She sticks to the general rule of thumb: “cut away the fat until only the meat is left on the plate” so that a single element – language, dance, multimedia or music – never steals the show, but contributes sparingly to the success of the whole.
A prime example is her most recent work, “Happy Piece”. At regular intervals white letters on a black background announce that happiness will appear in ten minutes – then freedom, then death. Below, four performers caper, carouse and cajole their way through a golden curtained arena until – thanks to the wonderful light design – the sparkling tinsel becomes a funereal crape. Meanwhile, the spirited performers continue to scamper after happiness, whose coattails they will never quite grasp. With ever-more grotesque Ensor-like grimaces, they finally lurch into the abyss of motionlessness. Life punishes those who miss the moment – with torpor, a cold heart, anaesthesia. Forced among the ranks of the living dead.

Wonderful! A nostalgic variety theatre surrounded by a velvet curtain with golden tassels. Three good-looking men smile while cheerfully gliding through their dance numbers. Curtain up and it’s already there: happiness!
If you go to see “Happy Piece” by the Berlin-based dance director Helena Waldmann, the first impression you get is of people who are clearly in their element. The captivating finger-snapping choreography of the three male dancers or the breathtaking solos of Brit Rodemund will definitely put you in a good mood. Helena Waldmann presents Lindy Hop, an American dance style from the 1930s, whose influences include Charleston, tap and jazz.
But, as we know, happiness is fleeting, and Helena Waldmann doesn’t make things easy. Someone who brings subjects such as Alzheimer’s (“Get a Revolver”) or the Islamic full-body veil and Japanese bondage techniques (“BurkaBondage”) to the stage is clearly not interest in cosseting their audience.

Dancers as the Aggressive Grimaces of a Feel-Good Society
The ensemble, made up of three men and one woman, becomes increasingly restless and fidgety. Smiles give way to wary glances. The dancers have become grotesque happiness-puppets, the aggressive grimaces of a feel-good society that will chase after any promise of happiness. But why the relaxed mood changed is never fully revealed. Wasn’t enough enough? It was all so wonderful!
There is – or at least so it seems – a way out of the crisis. With a collective shaking of the knees the four are able to smile again. In the final Breakout the ensemble dances as if suddenly set free. No longer an entertaining, well-behaved revue number. The buzz of happiness comes from total expenditure.
To sum up: Helena Waldmann’s most recent work, which was premiered in December 2011 in Berlin, is a piece that is well worth seeing, that swings, that grins conspiratorially into the audience with a self-ironical wink.

The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno once wrote: “Fun is a medicinal bath”. And even if fun isn’t the same as happiness, it is evident that today happiness too has become something of a duty or an addiction, something that we imagine we can achieve through drill or consumption. This view is at least that of the Berlin-based choreographer and director Helena Waldmann. In her “Happy Piece” she lets the four dancers André Soares from Portugal, Brit Rodemund from Berlin, Moo Kim from Korea and Tobias M. Draeger from Munich tread the knife-edge between what happiness is, and what happiness seems to be. Waldmann shows how the performers chase after happiness or are overwhelmed by it. “Happiness comes in 10 Minutes”, we read. And with a wonderful irony instructions for dying are projected onto the tent: “Take a remedy against nausea, 80 anti-malaria tablets in apple purée, sleeping pills and an upright position. Good luck!” Is human happiness based on the certainty that we are allowed to die, that life is finite? Theodor W. Adorno says that only someone who has suffered is capable of feeling happiness. Applied to the conclusion of the performance, this could mean that only someone who is conscious of the finiteness of life is able to live in the moment.

With disdainful courtesy Waldmann has no specific programme; her work sets out to perturb, to provoke, but also to make the heart dance, the soul leap. This she achieved on Sunday evening with the wonderful “Happy Piece”. André Soares, Moo Kim, Tobias M. Draeger and Brit Rodemund sweep across the stage with such a refreshing physicality that it is a joy to watch. A glittering mini circus ring becomes the scene of action, and the source of the happiness that the quartet of dancers is so intent on seeking out. And, in doing so, often loses the ground beneath its feet, seeming to defying gravity to reach for the wonderful moment of light-heartedness. “Happiness comes in ten minutes” is suddenly announced in large letters. But as soon as one has the chance to enjoy the good news one learns that death is not too far off either. Black and white, happiness and unhappiness are closely linked; they could even be said to depend on one another. Where no tears have flown, there can be no laughter. Where there has been no rage, there is no room for miracles. And thus Waldmann’s cloverleaf-troupe alternates between joy and sorrow, and in doing so even touches on the threshold of madness. For whoever is not already a little mad can never be deliriously happy. Mad in a positive sense of course. The tight one-hour performance is accompanied by a lively soundtrack, combining Elvis with the infectious sounds of the Charleston, jazz interludes and a tap finale. The happy end brings a smile. Happily.

When a work chooses the title “Happy Piece”, it is almost inevitable that a strong dose of irony is involved. Especially since the ideas-friendly dance theatre is not especially interested in lottery prizes or stirring up its audience. The Berlin-based body-language author Helena Waldmann now follows her recent treatment of dementia with the hardened grin of deceptive exultation.
It could almost be the supporting act for the latest Oscar winner “The Artist”. In a canopied arena four dancers run through the swing and rock eras, wordlessly and breathlessly in pursuit of a good mood. The soundtrack is set in golden-oldies mode. The actors get into the stride of big-show nostalgia, and their salvation is broadcast in an illuminated text: “Happiness will come in 10 minutes”. And death, as we read afterwards, will also make an appearance. Nevertheless, the scaremongering is kept in bounds; at most the forced laughter is put temporary on hold. Ah well, in common parlance “to get lucky” only means to get away.
In her most recent works the conceptual choreographer Helena Waldmann has never dared so much while claiming so little. “Happy Piece” is free of overtly critical theses and full of mischievous entertainment – a Las Vegas concentrate of minimalist show numbers, whose original spirit is quoted and then sent high-speed through the circuits of the brain. Happiness as finger clicking, as a rushing between Charleston and shuffling, shaking Elvis, manifesting radiant enthusiasm in senseless straddling, and emitting hilarious playback noises, remains what it is: a phantom to cuddle.
Four soloists in top form and humour: Brit Rodemund, garnishes heavenly showbiz fun with infernal laughter, her three partners (Andre Solares, Moo Kim and Tobias M. Draeger) eschew neither leaps nor pulling faces. The performance functions both as food-for-thought and as a revue. The audience were able to grasp the happiness and cheered appropriately.

Fats Domino and all the other hits from the 40s to the 60s that fill the evening really put you in a good mood.
Nevertheless, the swinging music cannot disguise the fact that this “Happy Piece” is not really about being a happy piece, or even an unhappy piece. It’s more like a rhetorical question addressed by the choreographer to her audience. And that is: You call that happiness? This fake cheerfulness?
A woman and three men in elegant suits descend an elegant stairway, dance jauntily like Fred Astaire in his best period. They swing, jazz, tap and smile. Occasionally sentences appear on the curtain at the back, alternating between irony and seriousness: “Happiness will come in ten minutes” or “Death will come in ten minutes”. This is accompanied by advice on how to commit suicide. For the well-known Berlin-based choreographer, happiness means freedom –hence also the freedom to decide when to terminate one’s life.
In the snappy 60 minutes there are increasingly moments where the show changes suddenly. Arms and legs twitch wildly to Elvis Presley. The dancers spin at high speed on the spot. The wonderfully precise Brit Rodemund laughs with diabolical despair. Another shouts out his rage. But everything is held in the frame created by the stage design. A loosely draped curtain is drawn almost into a circle, creating a rather restrictive space for the dancers. It is hung with long glittery fringes and little light bulbs. That too tends to represent the promise rather than the fulfilment of happiness. Here is the stage: be a star!
In her much celebrated works Helena Waldmann examines society up close. In the past she has worked with women from Iran; last year she presented a work about dementia. The irony with which the choreographer stages her new piece is wonderful. She rightly avoids all symbols and theatricality. Nevertheless, at the end we are left with the rather empty impression that she has danced around real happiness. However, perhaps that is the insight of the evening. After all, what is real happiness?

Where happiness begins art ends. The same holds for Helena Waldmann’s “Happy Piece”. The choreographer addresses a theme that is very alien to art – her new dance performance sets out in search of happiness.
Art ends where happiness begins. Most of the time at least. Nobody makes a film that continues after the happy end. For centuries dance and theatre stages all over the world have been populated with love, death, tragedy – and unhappiness. But happiness? Only very rarely.
Glittery curtain, small stairway, spotlight: the four dancers – three men and a woman – search for happiness in the spectacle, in the limelight, in the attention of others, occasionally also with others in a dance. They swing, tap and twist, sway their slender hips and strike poses. A big entertainment number drawing on aspects from the revue, the circus, the fair. If happiness means being alive, then the dancers get very close. Their energy is astonishing. Above all the three men, Moo Kim, Tobias Draeger and André Soares – the latter’s expressivity recalling Klaus Kinski – let their energies run wild.
The fact that, despite all this, they are still not happy quickly becomes noticeable – at some point in the nonchalant stepping back and forth, the strain becomes visible. Smiles freeze; teeth get clenched. Glowing faces harden. The head nods in time to the music until it aches. The dance keeps going, but it has lost its sense of lightness. Something strained, distressed, occasionally even bitter, exhausted and empty, appears with increasing insistence.
Happiness is something ambivalent, no question about it. And the search for happiness resembles a hunt that can end in despair. Or even in death.

In her new work Helena Waldmann deals with the everyday feeling of happiness, taking it to unexpected levels by providing happiness with a fitting stage. A splendid circus ring full of festiveness. Faithful to the formula that “A little madness is always a good thing”, the dance director subjects her four protagonists to the ups and downs of an emotional rollercoaster ride with a ruthlessness that verges on insanity. At one-minute intervals the next emotion appears in a heading at the back. Here, it is a matter of the full spectrum of extreme feelings between the most catastrophic crashes and soaring flights. A breathtaking André Soares who, rather unsettlingly resembling a young Klaus Kinski, dances himself into a terrible rage with rolling eyes, mad and extremely funny, a very composed Moo Kim, who increasingly loosers his composure in the course of the performance to finally become completely derailed, as well as a very natural and, in his honesty, impressive Tobias M. Draeger, and last but not least the extremely masterly dancer Brit Rodemund transform the evening literally into a happy piece.

In der Bonner Republik war die Ado-Gardine – ‚die mit der Goldkante!‘ – der Inbegriff häuslichen Glücks: kein ordinärer Volant, sondern Ausdruck bürgerlicher Schutz- und Trutzmentalität. Zwanzig Meter goldene Ado-Gardinen, als publikumsseitig geraffte Manege arrangiert, begrenzen Helena Waldmanns ‚GlückStück‘ im Berliner Radialsystem. Die vier Herrschaften, die hier ins Varieté ihrer Privatobsessionen laden, sind jedoch bei lebendigem Leib begraben. Vor lauter Glückssucherei verpassen sie den entscheidenden Augenblick, und deshalb verdüstert sich das lamettaselige Ambiente allmählich zur anthrazitfarbenen Sargauskleidung.
Die Berliner Choreographin Helena Waldmann hat vielen Kollegen eins voraus: Statt Steckenpferde zu Tode zu reiten, holt sie für jedes Stück einen neuen Gaul aus dem Themenstall und lässt ihn über den Zeitgeist-Parcours galoppieren. Von der Demenz (‚revolver besorgen‘, 2010) ist sie umgehend zu jenen Glückshürden gewechselt, über die uns unzählige Ratgeber-Autoren zu hieven versuchen – meist vergeblich. Nach Waldmanns Lesart gibt es für diese Blockade eine simple Erklärung: Wer in steter Nach- oder Vorlust schwelgt, verbringt das Leben im Wartestand, bis er emotional skelettiert ins Grab sinkt.
Eine Frau und drei Männer trudeln wie einst Ginger Rogers und Fred Astaire durch die Arena und treiben den Herzschlag des Wohlgefühls ans Hochfrequenz-Limit. Aber Technicolor-Showbiz war vorvorgestern, und alle weiteren affektbetonten Versprechungen – ‚Freiheit, Wut, Tod‘ – lassen auf sich warten.
Im Niemandsland zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft fällt das Quartett (als Statthalter der Gesellschaft) auseinander, weil die Momente wechselseitiger Wahrnehmung und gemeinsamer Schwingung auf Millisekunden schrumpfen. Jeder seines Glückes Schmied? Heißt hier: den kollektiven Glückssargnagel schmieden.

Eine kleine Manege steht auf der Bühne des Radialsystems. Mit dem goldbesetzten Vorhang, den Lamettafransen sieht sie aus wie eine riesige Weihnachtgeschenkschatulle. Vielleicht hat Helena Waldmann ihr neues Stück tatsächlich als ein Geschenk an die vom Adventshopping gestressten Zuschauer gedacht. Zuletzt sorgte sie mit „Revolver besorgen“, einem Stück über Demenz und Vergessen, für Diskussion. In „GlückStück“ legt sie zunächst eine unverschämte Leichtigkeit an den Tag. Doch der Ausgangspunkt der Choreografie war die Überlegung, warum sich in dieser Wohlstandsgesellschaft so viele Menschen „irgendwie tot“ fühlen. Einen „existenziellen Mangel an Lebendigkeit“ diagnostiziert der Philosoph Peter Strasser – das ist die Krankheit unserer Zeit.
Durchs Manegenrund traben keine bemalten Clowns, keine dressierten Ponys, vier Tänzer schlagen hier ihre Kapriolen. André Soarez stürmt als erster über das Treppchen, wie durch Knopfdruck erscheint ein breites Lächeln auf seinem Gesicht. Sie müssen ausdauernd ins Publikum lächeln, die Tänzer, die hier zu wahren Heiterkeitsathleten werden. Zu Beginn der Proben hat Waldmann ihre Darsteller gefragt: „Macht Tanzen glücklich? Und wenn ja, warum erscheint der Tanz auf der Bühne so viel unglücklicher als in einem Ballsaal?“
Von DJ Jayrope hat Waldmann sich dann einen Soundtrack mit Swingmusik zusammenstellen lassen, überwiegend Bigbandsounds, aber auch recht skurrile Nummern. Von Elvis kommt das geheime Motto des Abends: „A little less conversation, a little more action.“ Was soll das ganze Gegrübel? Besser die Beine in die Hand nehmen! Die Choreografie lehnt sich bei Tänzen aus den dreißiger und vierziger Jahren an. Und so steppen und schieben und gleiten die Tänzer über die Bühne, machen X- und O-Beine, springen in einen angetäuschten Spagat, schlagen ein Rad. Bei den Tap-Dance-Andeutungen denkt man an die amerikanischen Filmrevuen mit Fred Astaire und Ginger Rogers zurück – und wird ein bisschen wehmütig. Denn Waldmann lässt nur minimalistische Varianten mit simpelsten Schritten zu, die rhythmisch oft nicht richtig zünden. Zur Swing-Seligkeit reicht es nicht. Zwar hat der Abend manchmal die Ausgelassenheit eines Kindergeburtstages. Doch das Vergnügen wird eingetrübt, mitunter wirken die Tänzer wie gedrosselt. Nur das Glück des befreiten Körpers, der alle Disziplinierung abschüttelt, vor Augen zu führen – so einfach macht Waldmann es sich nicht. Sie setzt sich auch kritisch mit all den eilfertigen Glücksversprechen auseinander, mit denen wir tagtäglich bombardiert werden.
„Das Glück kommt in 10 Minuten“, steht anfangs auf einer Leinwand zu lesen. Das Dauergrinsen verzerrt sich bei den Vieren schon mal zur Fratze. Der feinnervige Koreaner Moo Kim verfällt in einen Zittertanz. Und die steppende Brit Rodemund rutscht auf dem Frohsinnsparkett aus, rappelt sich aber wieder auf, um ins Happy End zu gleiten. Alle steigern sich schließlich in eine stumme Wut oder schlottern mit den Knien, was fast schon wieder lustig ist.
Letztlich tanzen André Soares, Brit Rodemund, Moo Kim und Tobias Draeger gegen die Angst vor dem Tod an. Wir verpassen das Glück, wenn wir ihm verzweifelt hinterherlaufen – will uns Waldmann sagen. Ihren furchtlosen Entertainern sieht man aber mit Vergnügen zu.

TechRider Happy Piece_2012 (german)
TechRider HappyPiece_engl