Happyology

Self-optimization is on everyone’s tongue. So, how much does the prevailing requirement to always be happy influence our behaviour and our subjectivity? In her first HAU co-production, Dragana Bulut and her team examine the promises and paradoxes of positive psychology. To this end, life coaching plays a big role in increasing physical and mental well-being. Through the playful appropriation and deconstruction of different coaching methods, the choreographer places individual desires in contrast with the commercialization and instrumentalisation of happiness and paints an uncanny picture of the individual torn by sadness-burning life strategies. With this work, Dragana Bulut continues her staging of social choreographies, in continual pursuit of the question of how our feelings, desires and fears are commodified.