Boundary Games: games of connects and disconnects, games of lines continually shifting from drawn boundaries to opportunities for bringing people together, games that outline a scene, both strange and familiar, where aesthetics and politics meet, nurture one another, outsmart one another… This is not what some today consider to be a “return of political art”, which very often tends only to be a return towards an ideological art form in which the Artist, as the brilliant expert, has to state the truth of a world whose crisis he or she is better able to diagnose than most. Instead it is about inhabiting the crisis, going where the performance trembles, is unable to end with the image of a sick or healthy “us”, but rather requires our missing images, these lacunas and gaps to be put together, from which a stroke of imagination can timidly sketch out a horizon which we can work towards differently.  

In this shift from imagery to experience, there is not a “refugee crisis” that the Artist is to come and expose. There is just the challenge experienced together and by everyone of our representations of “them” and “us”; there is just the disruption of this boundary-wall that would put “us” on the good side of the crisis and which here becomes the boundary-passage along which “I” start trembling; “we” put ourselves in a crisis or we apply it in its capacity to open up identities that, wanting them affirmed and assumed, we end up closing.  

What the artist Léa Drouet is questioning in this piece is not the “immigration policies” practised by our contemporary governments, but rather the political potentialities of our moving, migrating subjectivities. They are our ability or inability to welcome others, to welcome “us” as others and, through that, to reconnect with the meaning and sensitivity of the policy: the composition of the communal that will never be common. That is what is felt throughout the performance, which is intimately experienced more than could be shown objectively by the power of a stage and the power of the actors. We move endlessly from power to forces or the sensitive recognition of if not our impotence, then at least out difficulties in “including” what is not familiar to us, putting ourselves in other people’s shoes.  

It is not theories that expose these tensions to us: it is games, almost as simple (and profound) as children’s games. Performers stroll around, put down a certain kind of material, a world of blankets becomes our world, we move in, we more or less take it over… or we gradually make it our “own”: what belongs to us and makes any difference inappropriate, abnormal, disturbing, intolerable… Reliefs appear, the material remains the same, but a new unknown pattern penetrates the medium and the whole world seems to collapse… hospitality is not firmly embedded. “We do not even know what a body is capable of,” said Spinoza and this does not just mean that we underestimate the powers of sensitivity where, in reality, we would be able to find our salvation. It can also mean that we do not know at what point our physical existence or organicities are unable to bear otherness, different material, what “I” does not recognise as belonging to me, to the same, to exactly the same in which I forged my identity. No, the encounter is not an innate dynamic between individuals; it is what singularities do and what constantly agitates them.  

With the lightness of a children’s game, Léa Drouet engages us with the complexity of our sensitivities. She makes us experiment as much on the conflict found in any kind of relationship, in all relationships with the heterogeneous, at the same time as with the power and opportunity in the conflict asserted as such. Perhaps we will never agree, we will never form a perfect unity, but in this disturbing experience where our jaws grind and our skins tighten when we come into contact with the stranger, there is perhaps the horizon of a transformation, a conversion, indeed a sensitive revolution from which we could emerge, rather than the diagnosed crisis and the politics of hospitality.  

Above all “aesthetics” means “being able to experiment”. By allowing us to experience what “us” constitutes by endlessly dismissing “us”, what detaches us from established and assigned identities by pushing us along the road of multiple futures, futures of an “us” made of relationships with the many, Boundary Games invents a political aesthetics without pretension, without a manifesto, without a “cause” to defend.  

Where perhaps it should be said that the performance presents a new, unknown point that is not theorised about, where aesthetics become a requirement of future policy. The kind without which “we” ourselves will not live on, the one that allies conflict and the ordinary world: a politics of hospitality again. Even more so.  

Camille Louis, Philosopher and dramaturge of Boundary Games