Happy Together

Happy Together is a game of seeing and being seen, a hall of mirrors without vanishing point, a labyrinth of human images. Happy Together deals with the contradictory position of man between nature and culture and shows the body as a combat zone of this double life: the profoundly felt integration in nature in contradiction to a culture which is based on its definition, observation and subjugation. A further inquiry which the body experiences in Happy Together is about its role as a place of longing for beauty, eternity and its decay, as well as a playground filled with wishes, desires, superficialities, hedonism, pop and glamour and their dark sides like shame, guilt and rejection. At times playfully, at times earnestly, the performers navigate through the play. They rebel against the past and create worlds whose consequences they have to bear at the same time. As humans somewhere between Adam and Eve and beings from the future, they search for the answer to the question of how much of the apes can still be found in art.

Choreography, concept: Ben J. Riepe
With: Lenah Flaig, Simon Hartmann, Daniel Ernesto Müller Torres, Jbid Hatschaduryan
Light design/Technical direction: Dimitar Evtimov
Costume: Anna Kleihues, Anna Rohr
Musical advice: Carolin Schweitzer
Musical arrangement: Alex Alves Tolkmitt
Stage construction: Felix Ersig
Organization/Choreo. assistant: Izaskun Abrego Olano
Production management: Tanja Engel
Photos: Ursula Kaufmann

Happy Together is a production of Ben J. Riepe, co-produced by tanzhaus nrw and Goethe-Institute Montréal in cooperation with Circuit-Est Centre Choreographic Montréal. Funded by Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Kunststiftung NRW and Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf.

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