This evening, taking Sónia Baptista’s dance piece as our inspiration, we will join together two psychologists, a biologist and a writer and choreographer to take part in a conversation about sadness.

We are constantly told that we have to be more in everything we do: more happy, more joyful, more clever, more eternal. This paradox exists and it is not by chance that people say: much laughter, little wisdom. This warns us that growth and change call for us to be serious and to abandon those negative emotions that we feel. Growth is based on transformation, and change reflects discomfort, which, in turn, reflects the wish to change.

However, all the stages on which we appear encourage us to be joyful and happy, ranging from the social media (where, for example, all the photographs we exhibit are full of smiles and prove that we don’t feel any sadness at all) to our relationships. If we’re sad, we immediately “have to react”, “aren’t you becoming depressed?”, “cheer up!”. This is a time for denial.