HAPPY HAPPIER DAYS- Arianna Economou

After the solo performance Breathing Eye (2021) and the walking performance/video/installation META (2022) based on Samuel Beckett’s FILM, Arianna Economou continues her research inspired by his play Happy Days, in a journey of life, explorations, and meaning.

In Happy Happier Days the creator shares with the audience, a look at the past, present and future: what has been, what could be, and seeking what could be defined as the happiest of days. From this mature artistic position she finds herself in an ongoing dialogue with the text, where she inevitably confronts her choices as an active artist in Cyprus from her early career to the present, drawing from her personal memories or thoughts.

Arianna Economou herself notes: “In Beckett’s play Happy Days, written 20 years after World War II which ended with a nuclear war disaster of Hiroshima in Nagasaki , which influenced many writers , Beckett sets the play in a desert landscape, a wilderness, a post-apocalyptic landscape where the two survivors, Winnie and Willie, await their own end. The heroine of the play, buried in a mound of dirt up to her waist (in Act 1) and up to her neck (in Act 2), ritualistically speaks of her daily life and routine. Her actions she performs – by putting things in and out of her bag in a restlessly – regulating the passage of time between the wakeup call and the bell for sleep .”

Arianna Economou notes, that “ all this takes place within the convention and timeframe of the ephemeral , both the ephemeral nature of performance but also of life”. She looks through past, present and future, for a kind of deeper essence and probes the manner in which we create meaning in a senseless free falling world today. Her relationship with Winnie is that at times she identifies with her and at other times she plays her own self . And there are times she merges the two personas .

Alongside the performance, a showcase of material from the artist’s archive will be on display. This action relates both to the themes of the performance and to a research approach that takes as its starting point the question: what is the life of the archive and in what ways do we activate it? Happy Happier Days is created within the framework of the Terpsichore programme of the Ministry of Culture.

HAPPY HAPPIER DAYS
Arianna Economou
Friday Saturday Sunday
5, 6, 7 MAY 2023
Dancehouse Lefkosia

Idea / Direction / Texts/ Music/ Performer : Arianna Economou
Dramaturgy , Collaborating Artist : Elena Agathocleous
Movement Advisor : Petros Konnaris
Sound Design: YIannis Christofides
Selections from the Archives of the Artist : Evagoras Vanezis
Scenography: Natalie Savva
Video and Promotion : Justyna Atamam
Technical Support : Yiangos Hadjiyiannis
Production Management : Pantelis Georgiou for ECHO ARTS _2023
The performance is taking place within the framework of the Terpsichore Funding Project for Research of the Deputy Ministry of Culture of Cyprus for 2023

Booking & Information
99 199 180