The Power Game BALTIC

Power Game is both a game and an unrehearsed performance that investigates the politics of identity and power. This version was shot at BALTIC, Gateshead for the AV Festival in 2010. First staged during the Festival for Chilean Liberation at the Royal College of Art, London in 1974, Power Game was then organized at the ICA, London in July 2009 (LUX collection).

Played as an altered game of Chemin de Fer , using a pack of word cards Lijn invented (54 cards, each card having one word printed per side), Power Game is principally concerned with the power of words and how people interpret meaning, depending on their interests and preconceptions. At the heart of the game are the players, who have been chosen for their wit, originality and influential economic, political and cultural status. The players – who, in 1974, included figures such as Derek Jarman , Michael Kustow and Patrick Seale – sit at a large gaming table and bet on the power of words.

Power Game clearly displays some of the restrictions and loopholes inherent in our democratic system. For this reason, each live performance is video-taped from beginning to end. Spot interviews are held with a cross-section of all the people attending the performance. This material is simultaneously broadcast live on the screens both in the casino and in the café bar, where those people not actively participating in Power Game can watch it from a safe distance. The video material from each performance is interwoven with past performances into a continually expanding layered video record of Power Game that is projected during each subsequent performance of the game. In this way, at each performance, the players are part of a spatial and temporal network, the projected video of past games serving as a ‘wormhole’ through which they become connected to past players and past games in the unending web of power.

Specifically about the game at BALTIC (30 players sat at 3 separate tables), Lijn pointed that the atmosphere at the tables was intimate and very few of the invited players left their seats before the end of the evening, allowing little room for others to take their places – unlike the previous staging at the ICA during which uninvited players grabbed seats at the one table and their controversial behaviour became part of the performance. The game took place in a multi-coloured glitzy space overlooking the river and the lights of night-time Newcastle.