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.