SYNOPSIS

Brussels in crisis time. 13 back office assistants gather on the corporate’s courtyard for a team building session. Strangely enough there is no instructor nor instructions.

A truck enters and dumps a pile of giant bamboo sticks.

The employees assume they have to “stick together”. When they notice they are watched however, they realize: this is a selection procedure. The cooperative games turn into a mean competition. When the instructor shows up after all, they are confronted with their mistake and grasp the chance to build a team, for real.

INTENTION

It started with the discovery of a visual and musical spellbinding stick dance. Regardless of its variations worldwide, it departs from an intricate pattern of giant bamboo sticks. Dancers agilely leap in and out the gaps that appear between mercilessly beating sticks. Without cooperation it is bound to make casualties.

I collected 41 bamboo sticks and invited 13 amateur players who chance to live in Brussels to “stick together”. Our attempt to play a stick game together became a strong metaphor for the social game we play daily in a society that is growingly diverse and competitive. We want to collaborate, but never lose. We have to deal with cock of the walks, tacticians, cheaters, know- it-all’s, weaklings and winners. How to play that game? Which game?

On the basis of our public and participative choreography, I wrote a film script. I placed the story in the context of the corporate world, where the paradoxical relation between cooperation and competition takes extreme proportions.

The truthful wish to build a team painfully clashes with the pressure to outdo the other. Stick Together is a critique on neoliberal society, whose ingrained competition polarizes groups and sacrifices Others.