INTER”PLAY”

Le Centre Clark, Montreal Qc. 2021

ENTER - PLAYER

Lines and numbers mark the rules. Twists direct the motions to get into. Some tools to pick up. Alternate bodies to become. Michelle Furlong’s Inter”play” invites us into the mindset required for  “play” where the repetitive gestures of game, sport, and ritual suggest a new possibility around rules, skillsets and armory for world-building. The games as we know them collapse alongside an almost manic re-imagining of futures. This is the play that is forming inside of us. These spaces of transformation are familiar:

The pool shark’s flow.
Your batting average stats.
The pulse of a drumming ceremony.
Dances, marches, punches, swings, kicks, catches, throws, rolls.
Your avatar is really you, out-gaming you.

The materials for playing with play are tools reshaped into wands, or things we might like to smash: drumming sticks, the scratchy green turf of a soccer field, our cleats digging-in, the cue ball careening across a green velvet surface.

There are also the gestures that wring from the hands. The somatic effects of everyone’s body acting together without being told to, the steps of the dance in your arms and your legs, a frequency of being and becoming together.

A catcher’s mask.  
Mitts, gloves, and jerseys.
The stamping of feet, sacred or carnivalistic.

The game has a higher stake as our ancestral and bodily memories enter the game. They ricochet outwards as sound, energy, a protest, nets or walls torn down. Sometimes the game is about stepping over a boundary into another space, a non-space where there is freedom, no one knows but us. Touch the walls of it. Map and re-dream it. So at least we know it’s possible.

Michelle asks us to explore other ways of being in the world. To drop our weapons. Fold our hand. Let all the faces of all the games we’ve played work on simultaneous planes in our consciousness. Then shuffle them. Scatter the I Ching. Pick our way through them towards the disassembled, ‘broken’ parts — divining the unknown? If only to comment on what is to come.

Eyes on the field, hand signals to the catcher.
Skip, fall, chant.
Quest for profit and extraction.
A certain trance overtakes us,
Sometimes with violence.
Quest beyond our limits.

Remember, “I dreamt one thousand basketball courts. Nothing holier than sports.”*

—Text by Alisha Piercy

*Lyric credit: Cocorosie “K-Hole”