ÁRON BIRTALAN

WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE?

Áron Birtalan (Budapest, 1990) is an artist who makes playful experiences in everyday environments. Working together with participants and their imagination as an artistic medium, he explores the nature of human interaction by facilitating a collaborative practice, called Transformation Games. Through his work, Áron encourages people to tap into a playful territory, where art, games, and magic mingle. In this territory, one has the possibility to create and experience new ways of seeing, being and new understandings, that otherwise would not occur. His work draws upon the history of transformation through rituals, and as a whole, rituals’ role in society. He currently lives in the Netherlands, running the experimental platform Secret Fiction.

With a background in music, writing, and role-playing, Áron is interested in delivering his practice outside of the conventional realms of art and into alternative platforms of politics and education. He is also active as a musician and co-runs a threeweek children’s fantasy camp in rural Hungary.

So, what are you doing exactly? I work through a practice in which I facilitate playful experiences for people. These experiences use the act of ‘playing together’ to create different ways of being, seeing, thinking and interacting with the world, with our thoughts and with each other.

Do you have a name for this practice? Yes, Transformation Games.

Who is this for? Everyone, since no one is ill-fit to play.

What happens in your work? Imagined and thus highly subjective and unrepeatable situations arise. Either on an individual or on a collective level. The role of the work (and my role) is to help these situations take shape in reality, to facilitate the conditions for the experiences to emerge.

What else? In playing, one is introduced to a fictional world, within our world, where the governing thoughts are the rules of the game. Conversely, the rules, roles and structures of the outside world are temporarily suspended, inviting the participants of the game to step outside of their everyday reality. On the one hand this allows one to experience ways of being, seeing, thinking and behaving that are beyond the mundane. On the other hand, stepping into the artificially created world of the game also points back at the artificially created structure of one’s everyday life. Through playing, we can understand that our daily social and political structures are no different than the arbitrary structure of any game. And through this understanding we gain the agency to change, to transform these structures. And how? Elements of rituals, role-playing, and exercises in movement, imagination and attention are incorporated into the everyday reality, thus interacting with it, and transforming it.

How long does it take? How many people are usually involved? That varies a lot! From a couple of people and a few hours, to large groups playing together for days, or even weeks on end.

How do you develop these Games? Through trial and error. I co-run Secret Fiction, a platform where we invite participants to try out and collectively develop different games, rituals, exercises and so on. We do this through labs, workshops, short retreats, et cetera. We then take the experiences we have as a base to develop works for the future. This process is also the way we collectively produce most of the knowledge and ideas that shape the practice of Transformation Games – making it an empirical practice.

What is your role in a Game? I provide the framework, the guidance and the support so that this experience can become something powerful, yet still safe to undergo. To put it bluntly, I’m the facilitator between the participants and the structure of the Game itself –a living extension of it.

Participants Playing ‘Covenant, a Transformation Game by Áron Birtalan. Photo by Jesus Iglesias 2017 — DNR, The Hague, NL

Participants Playing ‘SEE’, a Transformation Game by Áron Birtalan. Photo by Julia Willms 2017 — Frascati, Amsterdam, NL

Children playing in a suburban park (detail). Photo by David Seymour 1948 — Budapest, Hungary

Where does this practice come from? As a child, I would spend all my summers playing with other kids, for weeks on end. We would pretend that we are the citizens of a fictional kingdom –a Kingdom where all that happens is up to us to decide. We could become whoever we wanted to be – knights, wizards, explorers, merchants, kings and queens, you name it. Besides the fact that it was great fun to do all this, what I found was that the moment I returned to my everyday life, I was somehow not the same as before. The experiences I had while I was embodying a fictional character also affected me as a real person. To this day I hold onto these experiences as the most transformative thing that ever happened to me. I see, but how does that translate to your present practice? Years later I found myself coming back to these experiences and started to wonder what role they can have in my life now that I’m an adult. A role that is beyond just a memory of my childhood summers. This is where the practice of Transformation Games came in. To put it very simply, Transformation Games happened when my path as maker started to consciously enter into a dialogue with my past as a citizen in the fictional Kingdoms of my childhood. From what I experienced as a kid, I’d like to believe that there is way more to what playing can offer us – something that helps us shape and navigate ourselves in the world we live in.

So is this also a political practice then? Yes. I think of Transformation Games both as an artistic and as a political practice. Playing is an active social agent in discovering other ways of seeing, being and behaving. It allows us to step into a space where we can create, explore, and experience, and embody realities that would not happen otherwise. And these realities can lead us to new understandings about ourselves and the reality we live in. Not only that, these understandings can also make us realise the means and the potential we possess to re-imagine and transform the structures that govern our everyday life.

What is the purpose of this practice? There is no explicit purpose or governing ideology — playing is only ‘playful’ as long as it is not tainted by any rhetoric. Transformation Games is a practice that is intended to facilitate the conditions for new experiences and understandings to happen, rather than to propose specific ones. In this sense Transformation Games are anti-games: There is no winner or loser in a Transformation Game; ‘creating an experience itself’ is the only goal.

This sounds a lot like performance art, improvisation, participatory theatre. What is the difference? Firstly, there is no audience or cameras involved – no one to perform to. Secondly, it is a collaborative practice in which every participant of the experience is also the creator of it. It is not scripted and there is no division between active and passive roles. We do not have artists, performers or audience here. We are the things itself.

This sounds a lot like role-playing. What is the difference? There is no dress-up involved and no fixed roles to adopt — unlike the classic image of Live Action Role Playing (LARP). Instead, a neutral space is the backdrop and participants themselves create the experience, based on a rudimentary outline, developed and guided by the facilitator.

This sounds a lot like some sort of therapy, psychodrama, or alike. What is the difference? In a Transformation Game one’s everyday responsibilities, hierarchies and social roles are temporarily suspended. This is the great power of playing games, overall: The frame of a game provides one with the opportunity to safely interact and make decisions outside the mundane way of thinking. Transformation Games are designed to be safe, yet powerful to undergo, keeping the fact in mind that the experiences of the fictional and the real often overlap. These principles are present in many forms of alternative therapy. What sets Transformation Games apart from practices like Psychodrama, Family Constellations and so on, is that in Transformation Games there is no explicit therapeutic goal involved. Of course, transformative experiences can and do arise during these Games. However, I’d like to think, that that is what should be the case with art in general – art should allow us to undergo experiences that we would not have otherwise.

Isn’t this whole thing dangerous to do? No, not really. Especially compared to other social situations in life, like going to school, being employed at a company or having dinner with the family. Here, since we are only playing, we can be daring, while taking care of one another. This is not Stanford, or Milgram. Nothing is compulsory and you can opt out any time, without any consequence. This is the emancipatory power of playing – it allows us the safety to bravely approach the unknown.

What are you doing these days? I hope to develop Transformation Games into a practice that goes beyond me – that is, that it becomes a practice that can be passed on, picked up, adapted by anyone interested. I think of my role as being a part of a process, intertwining with the inherent human desire to play. Because of that, it would make sense to explore how my practice can become something that is not just mine anymore.

Can I read more about the practice and where does it come from? Yes! Thing is, I’m working on a publication now –Which is also my graduation project. It’s called ‘What is Within?’ It’s is a publication-in-themaking that explores playing and playfulness both as an autonomous form of art and as a tool for political transformation. Taking the practice of Transformation Games, and its roots found in a Hungarian counter-cultural tradition, ‘What is Within?’ sets out to reintroduce playing as the active social agent it is, in exercising autonomous thinking and behaving. Furthermore, ‘What is Within? ‘hopes to become a manual and handbook, proposing a playful practice to create and experience new realities –and to transform the reality we have.

The publication is a collaboration between artist Áron Birtalan and graphic designer Márton Kabai, with the support of AHK Amsterdam, STROOM Den Haag and Fonds Kwadraat

www.whatiswithin.com

Master Wizard (right) teaching his apprentice in his own practice of magic. Photo by Gyöngyi Barta 2017 — Children’s Kingdom of Caer Cadarn, Hungary