Polish Performance Archive

Description by Filmoteka Muzeum

Happy Day is an intervention in the urban space lasting only a few minutes and performed for the first time in December 1976 in Krakowskie Przedmieście Street in Warsaw. To the sounds of Vivaldi’s Summer, played loudly from the windows of the neighbouring houses, some forty garishly-clad people entered the street from various directions. For a second, they filled Krakowskie Przedmieście Street with colours, carrying armfuls of flowers, baskets filled with citrus fruit and sausages, whose supply was rationed at the time, and mirrors. The performance came to an abrupt end and the street returned to its everyday unrelieved drabness. The intervention was repeated later in Łódź and Olsztyn.

References: Akademia Ruchu. Miasto. Pole akcji. City. The Field of Action, ed. by M. Borkowska (Warsaw 2006).
 

(AK)