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Pursuit of Happiness is a 2017 co-production of the American group Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the Slovenia-based, multinational En-Knap dance company. The genre-defying production provocatively misleads the audience through the textual as well as performative aspects of the piece. From slapstick scenes, through dynamic dance movements, all the way to philosophically challenging perceptions about the nature of our reality, the play balances on the edge of timid expressions of existentialist angst, Baudrillardian overload of simulacra, and an attempt to address a mechanical reproduction of art (and life) reminiscent of Walter Benjamin.This contribution endeavours to present an analysis of  Pursuit of Happiness  as an explosive contemporary piece that portrays a disintegrating world, where fear and anxiety engulf people’s lives as suddenly as the play’s formal structure breaks and changes. Following Jill Dolan’s ruminations about “hopeful performatives”, the paper seeks to plot out a set of such performatives and narratives in the selected play, and to show how they function in the liminal combination of dance and drama, movement and performance, art and life, and how these narratives can become part of what Elliot Leffler and Michael Mellas call divergent dramaturgy.

journal of contemporary drama in english

FeArt and Dance-xiety in Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s  Pursuit of Happiness : Artificiality, Authenticity and Fun as the Building Stones of a Hopeful Performative