Practitioner report: running walls: the performance of the limit in prison
Abstract
The limit to freedom, represented by the wall of the prison,
is the limit to run to reach the finish-line of the marathon:
run the limit! Training prisoners to run a marathon as a
practice of the limit. Inside and outside meet on the limit, in
a suspended place where running is a movement of
rehabilitation and transformation.
Go Daddy!
is an educational project based upon the
pedagogy of resilience and a form of anthropological
research into body and movement. It is a case study
investigating personal limits through an art performance
based on marathon running with prisoner-fathers; a limit-
experience as a ‘practice of freedom’ (Foucault) to activate
the prison and through it see a social system where
neoliberalism is expressed; a pilot project for wider
research at the intersection of different academic traditions,
pointing towards a new direction for critical engagement
with performance. Drawing from that experience, this
article examines the potentialities of marathon running in
prison as a performance of limits: a healing possibility for
personhood to be based on
‘presence’
(Abramović) and awareness, since, as Foucault notes, the experiential body
can become a locus of resistance
against normalising
power
. Through analysis of the
Go Daddy!
project, this
paper considers how an art performance can be an
experiment in the sense not of testing a hypothesis but of
opening an exploratory path of inquiry into human life and
a new way of conducting anthropology as a learning process
—in other words, the possibility for art to be science.
Citation
Maccagno, P., (2015). Practitioner report: Running
walls: the performance of the limit in prison. Scottish Journal of
Performance, 2(2), pp. 33–59.
Publication
Scottish Journal of Performance
ISSN
2054-1961Type
Report
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