Produced and Directed by Marike Splint, Assistant Professor, School of Theater, Film, and Television, University of California, Los Angeles

This event represents a culmination of the work Marike Splint will do with students during her residency at the Arts and Design Research Incubator, September 30-October 5, within the context of developing On the Other Side, a documentary performance addressing visible and less visible acts of bordering that permeate our daily lives.

We live in an era that is seeing unprecedented migration flows as a result of global inequities, climate change and political regimes. Simultaneously, there is a tendency to make the world increasingly bordered: existing unions and countries are breaking apart into smaller entities, and the map with which generations grew up is being redrawn. We are territorial beings. We mark lines that divide the world, delineate territories, divide property. On the Other Side questions and challenges our growing tendency to draw these lines on a national level, but also on the level of our own bodies.

With the students from Penn State, Marike will explore the territorial nature of playground games from the U.S. and other parts of the world. They will unpack these games in both an embodied and a theoretical way, looking at their rules, origins, and what is unleashed in the players of the game.