What is Studio Kokyu’s new project about?

Can happiness be programmed? Is there a formula that allows a human being to achieve fulfillment? Or does every attempt to find it move us further away from what we are truly seeking?

“Algorithm: Happiness” is a new theatrical project by Studio Kokyu, inspired in part by Aldous Huxley’s reflections in his novel “Brave New World” and his essay “Brave New World Revisited.” The starting point for the development of the performance is a question about the contemporary ways in which human desires, needs, and ideas of happiness are shaped.

We live in a world that constantly suggests what we should desire, how we should look, what we should think, how we should live, and what we should do in order to achieve happiness. The development of technology, social media, artificial intelligence, and increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of influence makes the question of freedom of choice more relevant today than ever before.

Yet the creators of the project are interested primarily not in technology, but in the human being in the ways we experience the world, build relationships, encounter freedom, loneliness, intimacy, and loss, and create meaning in our own lives.

The material for the performance is being developed through actor training, improvisation, literary texts, and responses collected through a survey distributed in five language versions: English, Spanish, Italian, Belarusian, and Polish – exploring happiness, freedom, love, loneliness, and the meaning of life. The creative process brings together philosophical reflection, the personal experiences of the performers, and inspirations drawn from nature, literature, and contemporary culture.

“Algorithm: Happiness” is not an attempt to provide a definitive answer. It is an invitation to share in the experience of asking questions.

What is happiness? Is it a choice, a state of being, an experience, a memory, a relationship or merely a word we use in an attempt to name something that resists definition?

We do not know the answers.

That is precisely why this performance is being created.