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An American Kind of Happiness
Pursuit of Happiness is the very loaded title and premise of the newest show from Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, the hyper-creative team behind the New York City experimental theatre company, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and performed by the Slovenian dance troupe, EnKnapGroup. Loaded because the phrase has been lifted from the “unalienable rights” enshrined by America’s Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence, and because Liska and Copper do not take language lightly. In fact, a previous Nature Theater of Oklahoma production, Life and Times, teased meaning out of every single word of 16 hours of conversation between company members:
Molly Grogan
an unparalleled feat of verbatim storytelling. So what is “happiness,” exactly? Liska and Copper hint at a few answers that combine to subvert that nationally enshrined, characteristically American pursuit of it. To make their point, however, they draw on any number of easily recognisable motifs from American pop culture. Pursuit of Happiness skews somewhere between a really bad spaghetti western, a vainglorious action film and the cheery dance platitudes of Broadway musicals. The show’s first half, set in a saloon that is populated by a sorry band of bruised-up cowboys, nods to the American western, but in that genre’s fist and gun-slinging