In the same immersive and grandiose manner as in a football match, El Plan takes over all spaces of HKW, amplifying the process, actualized through play, in which Colombian transdisciplinary artist Juan Betancurth and his nephew consider how aspects of their family history are connected to the sport. Surpassing their differences in terms of experiences, while preparing their performance Juan Betancurth and Esteban Betancurt began to bond over their successes, failures, stresses, and dreams. Each brings the different resources they possess: in Esteban’s case, the spectacular skills and internal realities of being a young aspiring professional player, now owned by a football league in the US who brought him to that country; and in Juan’s case, the practice of a queer artist that unpacks, via the liberatory potential and semiotics of BDSM, the workings of power and desire, and the implications of the conceptual frameworks of subject and object. Juan’s sculptural devices, installations, and activations serve as consensual grounds upon which to explore alternative constructions of personal and collective histories, fantasy, and social performativities. Juan and Esteban help each other to interweave and see anew their current and past contexts, revisiting the aggressive setting in which football was played in their family’s neighbourhood, and how different forms of participation and reactions to the game mirrored the family members’ dissimilar life paths. El Plan, as they used to call the game, was also the street where sex workers, drug dealers, gang members, and amateur players gathered; a playground for the territorial ruling of the neighbourhood. Accompanied by three sport commentators narrating with their habitual intensity, the actions of the performance take acoustic shapes in different languages, and are broadcast through the building’s internal speakers circuit. This choreography lends a level of heightened emotion that is characteristic of football as a form of total theatre, where geopolitics, class, race, gender, and sexuality are symbolically and materially at play.

Commentators: Julieth Gonzalez Therán, Tom Middler, Jan Sell, Florian von Stackelberg

This event takes place in the frame of On Football and the Theatre of Collective Body Making.