A sister piece to La Pasión según la Gente, Mextoys inverts the same vision. If La Pasión tells of a collective game between myth, reality, and representation, in Mextoys I ask what a game actually is: an automated behavior? A learned repetition? A body that only does what it was programmed to do?

Three percussionists use Mexican folk toys both as props and as musical instruments, each in their own right, as if they were children who don’t know the difference between playing and performing.

Two video interludes divide the piece. The videos are documentary: a popular street celebration, naked bodies playing and having sex with the same repetitive logic as the toys (the title Mextoys deliberately echoes sex toys). The mechanization of intimacy is not separate from the mechanization of play, of desire. A brief silent cut of people dancing at a party: the bodies dancing in silence reveal themselves as machines, their movements suddenly legible as programmed behavior rather than individual expression.

What the stage theatricalizes, the video documents, and what the video documents, the stage handles differently. Some elements belong to only one of the two worlds, others cross from one to the other, without the two ever fully coinciding. The audience thus finds itself between fiction and nonfiction, and Mextoys doesn’t help: it tangles things further.

Being among humans is like visiting a machine zoo. With Mextoys I first recognized the nature of my relationship to society: not as something outside of me but as a social-acoustic field to which I already belonged. A pre-coordinated, repetitive field, less free than I had believed.