Play

SYNOPSIS

PLAY (from the English play: to play audio/video, game, to play, theatre play, to perform, to play music, action, simulation) is a stage-based investigation, created and performed by Matías Umpierrez, into hate speech, ways of inhabiting power, and the hell and the paradise of consciousness.

It asks about the difficulty of not recognising who lives beside us in a world that burns with jungle heat, that floods with the whirlpools of the wind.

An orchestra of voices, amplified by old radio cassette recorders, rehearses modes of survival, while an army of puppets gets lost in the archipelago of vanity.

PLAY is a conference-performance. An installation. The dismantling of the theatrical society in which we live. Cassettes. Sculptures. Radios. Telephones. People. A rhizome of stories. A circus of abuse. An atlas of resentment. The tearing open of an archive on hate.

About PLAY

Is Play the first shared code in a universe where the cyborg fuses the human and the technological? Playwas implanted worldwide in electronic devices without translation, and since the 1960s human stories have begun to be reproduced electronically under that command. Play, a tool of a system that dominates. English as the language of the social unconscious. Play to activate discourses, to play, to perform, to play music, to act, to simulate. Play as a theatre play.

In PLAY, we have thought about how to perform archives through a research process on hatred in the fiction of life: mythologies, discourses, histories, works, ghosts; the devil.

We decided to tear this restless archive open, forcing it to perform what cannot be systematised: glitches, remnants, silences, dissidences that do not integrate and that choose to define themselves through detachment.

That is why PLAY operates as a décollage of popular images, where we engage with genres historically considered marginal —such as grotesque theatre, variety theatre, or even the lecture understood in non-academic terms— making visible the labyrinth of time and the impossibility of cataloguing or understanding the world’s subjectivity, as a way of questioning stability and power.

Matías Umpierrez

Running time: 90′

PLAY, a production by Estudio Matías Umpierrez, in co-production with Contemporánea Conde Duque (Spain), ArtHaus Centro de Creación Contemporánea (Argentina). Co-presented by UNAM Teatro (Mexico).