Simple, just like that! Instructions on how to be happy based on the recommendations of Michel de Montaigne

A Japanese, an American, a Swiss and a German are visiting pithead baths for the first time. The object and purpose of the plant is explained to them and soon, they are all deep in conversation about the daily life of the miners and foremen who used to work there at the Zollverein colliery in Essen. In the middle of the discussions on soot, pride and solidarity, Junko Wada, a dancer and performer fromTokyo, suddenly asks: »Were these people happy here?«
Speechless faces. Then David Moss’s laconic answer: »They were optimists of gravity!« A comment that would surely apply to the disparate four: Stefan Kurt from Berne, who entered the spotlight of television fame as of all things Schattenmann or Shadow-man; the German sound artist and composer Hans Peter Kuhn; American vocalist David Moss; and Junko Wada. What they have in common is the search for lightness in the midst of the gravity of being. Like diviners they are looking for the truths outside the evident and elevated; in their laconic actions, each always discovering a simultaneity in the other. They are byways which reveal themselves through the dance, the singing, the sound or the light or even just through a wink or a shrug.
»Were these people happy here?« – Junko Wada’s question led the quartet back to the French humanist and sceptic Michel de Montaigne and his writings. In them, they discovered traces which read like recipes for happiness: »never did any ill-looking, morose physician do anything to purpose«; or »not to be covetous, is money; not to be acquisitive, is revenue«. And, very importantly: »I see no people so soon sick, and so long before they are well, as those who take much physic.«
Now, supported by the musicians Martin Klingeberg and Michael Rodach, they are entering the jungle of understanding and conjecture, always remaining true to Montaigne’s maxim: »in the subject of which I treat, our manners and motions, testimonies and instances; how fabulous soever, provided they are possible, serve as well as the true.«