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’ (Abramovic) 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.
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’ (Abramovic) 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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 33-59 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | The Scottish Journal of Performance |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 26 Jun 2015 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgementsThis project is dedicated to all ‘lost fathers’ prisoners of a world of
walls. To all friends of solitude. I would like to thank Lia Sacerdote, President of Bambinisenzasbarre, who welcomed the idea of the project helping me to develop it. A particular thank you to Andrea Muehlebach (University of Toronto) with whom I had many interesting discussions about neoliberalism which provided a fundamental background to the project. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments have helped to significantly sharpen the theoretical underpinnings and narrative of this article.
Keywords
- marathon
- running
- prison
- walls
- presence
- limit