A Beautiful Day Dawns Somewhere

Performance / installation based on Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days

On 29 October 2023, at the Emergency Needs Park in Ptolemaida, A Beautiful Day Dawns Somewhere, a performance/installation based on Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, was presented.

The project emerged through a series of workshops in playwriting, improvisation and video art, bringing together amateur participants from Ptolemaida and Kozani. A group of nine women and one man became the performers, collectively developing the material of the performance through personal stories, improvisations and shared research.

The project was conceived by Eleni Dimopoulou and realised in collaboration with the cultural association Ypsikaminos.

The creative team and the performers explored themes of loss and decay, as well as the profound transformation experienced by the regions of Ptolemaida and Kozani through the process of decarbonisation and the phasing out of lignite mining. What is lost when an entire way of life changes? What remains? And, most importantly, what is the new thing that is about to come? What awaits us tomorrow?

In dialogue with the world of Happy Days, the performance places the body and the voice within a landscape of transition. The spectators move through and around the space, choosing where to stand, what to observe and from which distance to experience the bodies, images and actions.

Each spectator therefore creates their own path through the performance, while the landscape of Ptolemaida itself becomes part of the work: a place carrying the memory of its industrial past while simultaneously facing an uncertain and still-forming tomorrow.