BILBOQUET#8 BÁRBARO

PLAY PAYS

Jordi Carmona Hurtado / PARIS VIII

About TRANSPARENT KOMANDO / Intermediae-Matadero 13 Junio 2008

http://ganarselavida.net/KOMANDO_TRANSPARENTE_en.html

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Eh... One sometimes finds oneself in strange situations, I mean, one can try to imagine things by sometimes one never quite gets to witness them until they start happening. For example, one finds oneself amidst some device, a kind of scenic device, but it looks more like something out of a circus, really, a kind of TV set, as they say, rather than a theatre stage. And, well, the world itself is already a theatre stage, there's no need to carry on putting props all over the place.

Also, at the end of the day, it's more like child play, like a spectacle made by and for kids, like a school play, or something like that. A kind of rather arty end-of-year party. But one is mainly under the impression that this will leave a huge mess, the floor covered with all these things, a mess. There are three beamers, some stands, some loudspeakers, there's an open area around the device where there's more action going on, where it all begins and ends. This outside-of-the-device is a rather neutral zone, it's like a dressing room, it's all fairly TV-like. It's as if it was themed, a theme park, but there's no Far West, no Fantasy Castle, it's a kind of Disneyland of Capital.

And, well, one is hitting "play" and "pause" and changing the sequence, and all of a sudden there's kids everywhere. There are so many kids, it's as if they're infinite, there's a kid coming up behind each one of them. It's incredible. In Santa Pola, for example, child birth is out of control, with kids everywhere, and women walk around with more kids inside their belies. There's been a good harvest of kids this year, I think, things are going well. The Ludotek team seem to have grasped well this endless supply of children, which is life itself, and it seems like they have been developing a line of work with kids. They play with them, they write on them or with them, they make them vote, they tape them, they dance with them, they make videos with them, they take pictures of them, they organise meetings with them, they drop by to pick them up, they invite them for a snack, all sorts of things. Then, they pay them.

It seems like they're trying to convince them of the idea that, if they have a good time, or if they play, whether they enjoy it or not, it doesn't matter, someone will show up and pay them 50 euros. I think that's an extraordinary idea. Play pays, like they say that crime pays. I don't know, it all looks like a kind of experiment. Nobody knows what kind of marks this can leave in the kids' minds. People speak of plasticity, but it's all very ambiguous. Maybe it would be nice to do an on-going monitoring, like, for example, to put a chip in them, or simply give them a ring, and then wait to see what will happen to them, say, in fifteen years. It would be very nice to have a whole team in order to follow their movements, their evolutions and their migrations, like they do with some birds or with whales. Kids are Ludotek's working material, but not only that. Kids get paid - they work. It's a strange working material this, one that gets paid. Normally, you pay for material, not the material itself.

Kids, as working material, impose a series of coercions to artists. You could have easily imagined that yourselves, but it's not until one sees a plan and a diagram in one's head and then ten kids running up and down the place or shouting or getting bored that you see exactly what coercions we're talking about. You could also call them actors, but the problem in calling them that is that they are already actors in the large-scale stage of the theatre of the world, and, often, they don't get paid for that. They almost always do things for free, and that is when they don't actually have to pay for some things, like for buns or for trainers. But, here's the trick, since what Ludotek do is not theatre, then the kids are not actors. They are more like contenstants, like in a TV show, on the conditions that we don't take this term - contestant - on its face value. In the Transparent Kommando, the action or piece, or whaddayacallit organised by Ludotek and the C.A.S.I.T.A. collective, there is a contest, there are inscriptions, controls, prize-draws, like in TV contests. But there is no competition. Everybody wins, everybody gains in enjoyment, everybody gains boredom, everybody gets a snack.

But it's not all that beautiful, that educational, or that tasty. There's death, there's a lot of time out, there's disorder. There's a lack of many other things one expects from a TV contest. The kids take part in the contest, they are contestants, but it's not very clear in what. Nodoby's too sure. There's a plan, the teams of Ludotek and C.A.S.I.T.A. have a plan, everybody has their role in the plan. Then the roles are swapped, some are exchanged, others disappear, others are imposed onto each other. There's music, there are fireworks.

For the contest or circus spectacle is also a story. It's a bit like the story of Capital in the 20th Century, told to kids, in a series of actions. There are many clowns, there are journalist clowns (the Telekommando), there's a money clown (*Dinejeto*), there are symbolic clowns (Time and Money), the Polemicists, well... there's quite a few. There's quite an allegory here, but, luckily, it's a fairly crazy one. These clowns don't have to be funny. They're clowns inasmuch as they're circus or TV actors, much like when they say that a TV spokesman is a clown, or that the lion being tamed byh the tamer is also a clown. The story is about money, and although there's a main character starring as money, and he is born, he dies, and he is resurrected and all that, what's interesting is that it all reveals very well the fact that, above all, that whole money thing is a question of circulation. Money is not localised, it's a character, but it can also be balls falling out of Beckett's eyes projected on a screen. Money adopts diverse forms, and passes through all kinds of places. Money comes out of one's eye, but also out of the loo, money is defecated or belched out or vomited, it's eaten, people make juice out of money. Money is promised in lotteries. And money is also banknotes of different colours, but also coins, either small change or pure gold. Money is a little bit of everything and a little bit of nothing, and this is what this is all about. A little chill with regards to money, a little bit of distance, of freedom. Too much money, too much circulation, everybody's a bit fed-up.

In the play, everything happens very fast. Almost no-one has time to understand anything, there's no time, there's a lot to do. Kids sign up, they put on their kommando uniforms, they wait, they assist the birth of money, they learn simple mechanisms of action-reaction related to work and to money. But, by the time one realises what's going on, they're already busy with other things. Imagine you're only 7, and you get your arm rubber-stamped, then they pass a laser scanner all over your body, then you see yourself eating a large biscuit banknote, and there's money falling everywhere, then you take part in a fixed contest with stewardesses that ask you to bribe them, then you see yourself with a gun in your hand amidst a military instruction, then there's target practice and someone kills someone else and there appear some bad vibes, then people start commenting on what has happened, then they take out a miniature device with figures of each actor, the fireworks are put out, there's some talk about what has happened, then the watches are broken with a hammer, putting a coin on them. Strong stuff, all that. Imagine you're only 7 and you get to do this on a Wednesday afternoon, this is what the Transparent Kommando is really all about.

But it's not a defect that everything should happen so fast and no-one should get to understand anything - it's even probably a virtue. In any case, it's not too different from everyday life. The best thing about the Transparent Kommando is that it doesn't fall into the trap of pedagogy. It's horrible, all that new wave of pedagogy out on the loose. The kids already know. They're like little animals, they know a lot of things, they somehow cope with this disaster, they don't need anyone to lecture them on money or on work. What they need, or, at least, what they accept, is seeing themselves surrounded by money, despising money, seeing themselves surrounded by chaos and fun and boredom. It's a question of teaching freedom, a little bit of freedom from certain oppressive and exhausting things. Not of teaching citizenry, but of educating into freedom. Freedom is a strange word, a little bit pass�, a little bit rotten thanks to the effort of certain people, but we know what we mean by it. We know what it means to hammer a watch with a coin on top of it. It's politics, it's education, all that stuff that comes with the Aesthetic Revolution.

So, what there is in TK is a series of experiences, a succession of shocks, something hard to articulate. Maybe the kids haven't learned that an other world is possible, but maybe they have felt something much more important: that a little bit of play can get infiltrated into every workspace, into every space where time is exchanged for money. There's always a loophole, a fault or a crack in every single time/work through which play squeezes in. You only have to identify it. It's like learning a gift, a talent, rather than a political programme. A player factory. TK is full of imprecisions and inexactitudes. This is play - imprecisions and inexactitudes, that love one another, that have spirit, grace. It's not a question of teaching anything, it's a question of revealing it. The order is the least important thing.

A man is only a man when he plays, and he only plays when he's a man, so says Schiller. But man is not an adult, and an adult cannot get enlisted in the TK, the man is the child. What was created in TK was something like a space of exception, a place where money, work, play, were rid of their usual relationships. You don't pursue money, money pursues you. It's all like that. Nothing happened according to its usual relationships, but rather, in a space of exception, in an aesthetic space, in a crazy, unhinged space, therefore. Adults are left outside, there is hope for them. That whole idea of emancipation through maturity has probably had it. And, probably, the programme hinted at in TK is precisely that of emancipation through maturity. We have to re-learn not to speak, says TK. To articulate the aesthetic space of exception with certain tendencies of these little animals that play and that are always hanging out there and which we don't quite know what to do with, this was also what TK was all about. But this aestheticising of relationships doesn't lead to the contemplation of a harmonic theory, but rather to the participation in a discontinuous series of experiences.

There's no audience in TK, either. There are some voyeurs, hiding. How funny, those kids, how crazy those artists, all that. No admittance to anyone over 12. Something for the adults was inscribed on the surface of the film. Maybe something for the kids was inscribed on the surface of the brain. We'll see.