Running Blind: The Tucson Border-Crossing Diaries

Day 6: Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Games without Frontiers

In 1961, President Charles de Gaulle of France had a vision that the youth of Germany and France should come together in a series of friendly and funny games as a way of moving beyond the horror show aftermath of WWII. The result was a TV show called Jeux Sans Frontières (Games without Frontiers). De Gaulle’s vision was played out as a pop cultural spectacle with participants wearing outrageous costumes and performing silly tasks in games that somehow repaired, transcended and then reaffirmed the political, social and human borders violated by war and conflict. Eventually, the game show spread to just about every other European country and became known by the title, It’s a Knockout. Peter Gabriel’s hit song, Games without Frontiers, was inspired by the show. Given our group’s international makeup and our otherwise diverse origins, interests and agendas, as well as the playful nature of La Pocha Nostra’s methods, Games without Frontiers is a powerful metaphor for our collective experiences. Furthermore, it seems especially fitting that all our crossing of borders is taking place here in Tucson, which is the epicenter for the war on immigration.

Today we began our session by playing a collective performance game. Our homework was to write a script with three distinct actions. All of our scripts were then placed in a hat. We each we took turns pulling one out, performing it and then reading it aloud to the rest of group.

The scripts were sweet, bizarre, metaphysical, playful, intense, silly and confrontational.

The one that sticks in my mind is the one performed by Larry of the Clown Army. After reading his script, he paused briefly to collect his thoughts. Suddenly he dropped to the ground with a thud and began rolling around. He twisted himself into such contorted positions that I thought his script must’ve directed him to turn himself into a human pretzel. Later, someone else told me she thought he was giving birth to himself. As he rolled on his back he opened his legs and began groping around the seat of his pants. After a few moments of this he rose to his feet and paced tentatively inside the circle where we all sat on the floor watching. He leaned forward slightly as if looking for something. Then he placed his hand to his brow and peered left and right. He paced around some more then paused and uttered the word “hello” twice as if the second hello was an echo of the first. By this point I was flabbergasted. What could it all mean? Then he paused to face us with look of expectation that signaled his performance was over. We all laughed, although we weren’t quite sure why. Larry picked up his script and read it to us in a matter of fact tone. “Find a hole. Explore its universe. Lose yourself in it.” As the words sank in there was a spontaneous explosion of laughter and then we gave him and the anonymous author a warm round of applause!

Postscript

Today’s game led me to write down a series of questions that have begun to form in my mind about the nature of what we are doing in the workshop. I’d like to list them for you here without even attempting to answer them. I hope they’ll give you some insight into the nature of the issues that we are all grappling with both within ourselves and with each other.

If you cross a border without acknowledging that border, have you really crossed it?
If a game has no rules, what distinguishes it from any other activity?'
When groups of practitioners begin to cross each other’s borders, what kinds of relationships do they create among themselves?
What are the risks and obligations of crossing borders?
How do the borders that limit a community get defined?

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