The End of Happiness

Our research and development project, Broken Ground's Happiness Index finished on Wednesday after running successfully at The Arthouse since the 21st. This project is now complete and we will be looking at how we will be developing this work ahead of ontheedge@templeworks in July. Big thanks for the brilliant performances by Ian Sharpe, Holly Kavanagh and Jonquil Claughan, to Peter Boyd for photography, Rob Reed for video documentation which will soon be wizzed up into a tasty promo and The Arthouse for their support in this project.

Findings from the Happiness Index are presented at The Hepworth, Wakefield on the 7th June as a Pecha Kucha night along with presentations by other creatives. Get yourselves down there.

Beyond this, keep up to date with Broken Ground Theatre's projects at http://brokengroundtheatre.blogspot.com/

More Questions Than Answers

There's an exam coming up and we don't have time to teach you everything on the test. Put your hand up if you're stuck, we'll be coming round to help you. We've got the answers written down. You should ace it. Don't panic. We're here to help you. You can trust us.

Image copyright of Peter Boyd

1. Where is the happiest place on earth?
2. Where does the happiest man in the world live?
3. Who are happier, Americans or Canadians?
4. Does money make you happy?
5. Which was the first country to prioritise Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product?
6. How does string theory work?
7. Where is the Katona effect felt?
8. Ch – Bm = N. Explain.
9. Do you know the way to Timbuktu? 
10. Happiness rays were first used in which country?
11. Which of these is the correct spelling of a European country; LATVIA, LATVEAR or LATVERIA
12. What’s going on in Greenland that they’re not telling us about? 

Broken Ground's Happiness Index opens this Saturday (May 21st) at The Arthouse, Wakefield and is a free entry event.

How To Bake For Your Neigbours In 10 Easy Steps

Step 1

Search the internet for a recipe and pick one that you like the idea of. I had a star shaped biscuit cutter so I picked a recipe for star shaped biscuits.

Step 2

Go to the supermarket and buy ingredients; Flour, caster sugar, butter and other such nonsense (unless of course you already have them in your cupboard; if so skip forward to step 3).

Step 3

Make the oven be hot using the nobbly bits on the front. Make sure you have all your equipment ready ( you may have to improvise. As a recent convert to the world of baking I don’t actually own a rolling pin but, loving the vino the way that I do, I discovered that a wine bottle makes an excellent rolling pin. Just make sure it is well floured)

Step 4

Weigh out all of your ingredients ready to be added together in whatever way the recipe asks.

Step 5

Mix it all together. It probably will not look very appealing at this stage but do not let this dull the happy glow that is beginning to warm your cockles.

Step 6

Prepare your ingredients for the oven – in my case I had to roll out my mixture ( yes, with a wine bottle. Get over it) and cut out my biscuits into the shape of a star with my bright red  star cutter: awesome.

Step 7

Yep you guessed it, Bake.

Step 8

Get whatever is ready out of the oven whenever it is ready and put in a suitable receptacle to give to your neighbours.

Step 9 

Pose with your biscuits (in my case menacingly but maybe that is what my face looks like when it is happy, so there)

Step 10

Go round to your neighbour’s house, disturb their dog from its peaceful dog-like slumber, make them wonder who could possibly be coming round at this time of night (8.45pm) and then do an awkward explanation-dance-arm-flailing-thing whilst handing them the box of baked goods. Let’s just hope they don’t have any allergies. It will make you feel happier... honest. 

What Does The Cornish One Think?

We've got a new recruit! The Happiness Index continues but our ranks have been swelled by Cornwall's own Holly Kavanagh. She's in our new improv video (posted below), but she's also decided to brave the blog. Here she is on loneliness, happiness, selflessness and Akon.

In the words of Tomcraft's 2003 hit Loneliness: 

Happiness seems to be loneliness

 and loneliness chilled my world

To me that seems to make not much sense at all. "What Holly? That’s a bold thing to state". That may be, but is he saying that being happy comes from being lonely? Loneliness might suggest nobody to talk to or no one to visit or play with. 


The essence of loneliness is clearly portrayed in Akon's 2005 hit 'Lonely'. Akon's song lightens the sombre feelings of the protagonist by emulating the voices of the great artistes Alvin and the Chipmunks, but even in their chipper voices, he doesn’t sound too happy.

Lonely

 I'm so lonely

 I have no-body 

 To call my own

In fact, I would say that he sounds quite sad.

So, back to Tomcraft; although a catchy tune, I don’t think happiness seems to be loneliness. "That’s presumptuous of you."  Well,  it's an idea I may explore later on but I have other ground-breaking Broken Ground things to be doing in the next few days. 

This week I am pursuing some tasks that may lead to my own happiness. To do this I am doing tasks that do not promote loneliness, but interaction with others. For internal happiness we need external influence.

We have five (What? Five?) Yep, five, and here they are:

Give someone a hug
Let someone in front of you in a queue
Give someone a gift
Give to a charity shop
Pick up litter as you're walking

The first three tasks are a collective decision between us all, and we individually chose two more that appealed to us. My choices are to pick up litter that I see as I'm walking. I liked the phrasing of this and the idea of not stopping walking, so I am going to make several attempts of picking up litter without stopping, like a gannet swooping up a fish from the river, or my mum hoovering the displaced gravel on the garden patio with her trusty Dyson and giving no time to stop and think about what just happened. The second is to give to a charity shop, something I have never done before so lets see how that goes.

From the list of things we're doing (which we stole from the Internet), every task seemed to be directed externally, not internally.

According to Wikipedia, Akon grossed $21 million in 2010. Does that make you happy, Akon? Does it make you as happy as picking up litter as you're walking? Like a gannet on a river scooping up fish in its beak? Food for thought maybe, hmmmmmm?

First task is litter picking, I’m off to Leeds so will make this part of my journey. Hope it doesn’t end up being a greasy Burger King wrapper.


So, happiness isn't loneliness, even though it seemed to be to Tomcraft (and Samuel Beckett, though we won't go into that here). The moral of the story seems to be 'never trust a  turn-of-the-century German Techno DJ', more on this later no doubt.


As promised, here are some choice cuts from our latest filmed improvisation session:

See you next time for more of this kind of thing. Keep Happy.

Broken Ground @ The Arthouse: Early Design Sketches

We've begun planning how the Arthouse project may work in May. It's very early stages and we're keen to document as much of the process as possible so we can see what ideas we had when and how things have changed. Having had a walk around the space last week, we're now planning what ideas we have and where they may work. Above is a very early draft that we'll be looking at in rehearsal this week.


We're playing with the idea that each of the performances has an over-the-top, bombastic title in the vein of Yorkshire Black Metallers Bal Sagoth (We've never heard their music but the song titles are incredible; "Journey to the Isle of Mists (Over the Moonless Depths of Night-Dark Seas)" anyone?). And so...


Happiness is an Object Shaped By Its Passage Through Space and Time

Measuring peoples happiness on their journey along a corridor, creating interactions that may make people happier or sadder and then indexing them on the chart that runs alongside them on the wall. We might offer people money or chocolate or the opportunity to not watch professional wrestling with us.


Look At Me! It's For Your Own Good

A parade of useful and less useful suggestions to help our audience live better, fuller, happier lives. 

In Which Science Is Misrepresented, Taken Out Of Context and Discredited 

Bad maths, bad science and as many geographical fallacies as we can think of (With low-fi propaganda in favour of the arts).


Kind Words Written On Dirty Paper

The things that make people happy, hung up in public for all to see.

A Place To Tell Stories, Make Things and Exert One's Self Physically

A top table of sorts. Where the good stuff goes to get tried out.

Of course, all this could have changed by next week. We may have had better ideas. We may try these ideas and realise that they don't work. We may just sack it all off and get a job in Rumbelows (Disclaimer: We will not be sacking it all off and getting a job in Rumbelows).

If we haven't indexed you yet, we still want to know:

Where Are You From?

It would be great to hear from someone from Greenland, None-Greenlanders are very welcome though.

How Happy Are You On a Scale Of 1-100?

How Rich Are You On a Scale Of 1-100?

As in, Bill Gates is 100/100 on the rich scale. Bankers are probably about 70/100. Most people aren't doing quite so well.

What Makes You Happy, Other Than Money?

Come on, there must be something. Nitrous Oxide?

What's Going On In Greenland That They're Not Telling Us About?

Can you get wi-fi in an igloo? Is it PC to say igloo? Just how ignorant are we?

You can leave your answers i the comments section, find BROKEN GROUND THEATRE on facebook or email us @ brokengroundhappinessindex@yahoo.co.uk

Things We've Learnt About Happiness

When we started this project we asked ourselves a lot of questions. What makes us happy? What makes other people happy? Where is the happiest place in the world? Mostly questions about happiness. 

Then we answered some questions. We joined in the public consultation process for the Office of National Statistics 'Measuring National Well-Being' survey. One of the questions was:

Would you like the results presented as

a) A large number of signifiers?

b) A small number of signifiers?

c) A single signifier?

We tried to imagine what this single signifier number would be and if it would mean anything. Douglas Adam's famous answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything in Hitchiker's Guide To the Galaxy occurred to us. Knowing the answer is 42 is only of use if you know what the question is.

Then we went off and asked some questions to people on the internet. I talked to my friend Sam (an admirably enthusiastic maths and science geek/ student) about means, modes and medians. We talked about bad maths, bad presentation. We talked about misleading ways of data presentation. So,  how do we present our findings?

The first question we asked was an easy one to get people into the swing of things:

Where are you from?

By triangulating the coordinates of people who have responded so far we have found out that people are, on average (though in actuality, nobody is), from West Haddlesey, North Yorkshire. It's a quaint village on the Selby canal with a used car dealership and a wesleyan chapel. We probably all drink in the George and Dragon, voted best community pub of 2009/10 by The Yorkshire Evening Press.

Look how happy these prize-winning pub people are! 

How Happy are You (on a scale of 1-100)?

We've been asked before why we're using a scale of 1-100 and not 1-10. We've been telling people that they are too complex to be summed up by something as rudimentary as a scale of 1-10. They seem to like this. Hopefully it makes them happy. How happy? We'll we've worked out a median score of 68.75 and a mean of 67.41. If we'd used a boring old 1-10 scale it would probably be a functional but dull 7. But we didn't. So it's not.

How Rich are You (On a scale of 1-100)?

Asking people how rich they are is apparently a no-no. It's like asking a woman 'How old are you?'  or 'Are those your real  breasts?' We haven't actually asked how much people have in their purse/ bank account, just how they rank their wealth on a scale of 1-100. Do they think they're doing OK compared to everyone else? Turn's out we're skint. A median of 34, a mean of 30.26. One engineer who responded suggested a formula involving 

the sum of my purse and the smile I now have on my face (…+1 multiplied by 9 and taking the square root of this number).  

We didn't understand this and are therefore glad that people smarter than us exist so that we can trust them unquestioningly.

What Makes You Happy (Other than Money)?

From our averages it seems that people are more than twice as happy than they are rich (though this is not taking into consideration correlations, there will be graphs soon to point this out though). So something other than money must make us happy. It's just difficult for us to put our finger on. It could be conversation, pink wafer biscuits or the first rule of engineering ( “When in doubt, assume it is zero” ). It probably depends on the situation. Are these things tangible? Are they universal? Why do we have more questions now than when we started?

What’s happening in Greenland That They're Not Telling Us About?

We don't know who they are or why we've accused them of misleading us. We just know that we saw a map where Greenland was grey. Just like North Korea, Libya and Afghanistan. We imagined something must be going on. So did you. Matt from Skeleton Project suggested that the country is trapped in a pre-2008 technological past (This would mean they had never seen an iPad, let alone the slimmer, lighter iPad 2). He also suggested that there are two divergent tribes of Greenlander, one of which (The Classic-Greenlander) takes their names from a list of Norse Gods they found on the internet. Our friend Shaun suggested that it is 10% smaller than it appears on maps (2,144,426 sq km rather than 2,166,086 sq km).

We'd like to thank everyone for their contribution so far. We're going to go away and make some graphs and charts now. If we've not heard from you yet then we'd love to. It will ensure that our graphs and charts are out of date before they're even completed. We like the futility of this.   

Indexing the Company

Broken Ground answer the questions that we've put to our audience to prove that we're all in this together. The Big Society works! It was probably not that great an idea to ask for other people to answer our questions before we'd even done it. We had a successful filmed improvisation session and thought it would be good to share some of the results.

We're now thinking that we should go to our audiences, maybe host some kind of one-on-one performance that integrates the questions, and use these intimate performances to inform a larger, traditional theatre-based performance.

We still welcome written replies.

Be good to each other.