Permeate

Abstract

This performance project engages power structures and how are informed by Permeation, resistance, and circumvention. The Limbo of strategizing and negotiation of spaces constructs fabulation on the perception of power, memory, and how it affects projections. Power in this context is engaged as a navigational tool and obstacle. Permeation, resistance, and circumvention are important strategies for navigating and subverting dominant social power structures. These strategies can be used to gain visibility, disrupt dominant narratives, and create safe spaces for marginalized communities. Permeation refers to the process of infiltrating and influencing dominant power structures from within. Resistance refers to the act of pushing back against dominant power structures. Circumvention refers to the act of bypassing dominant power structures in order to create alternative spaces for marginalized communities.

Objects of the performance alongside the embodiment and action paraphernalia permeation, resistance, and circumvention are important strategies for navigating and subverting dominant social power structures. This creates alternatives and disrupts the normal. Countering, engagement and discourse in Foucault’s engagement sees this as manners in which knowledge is developed and socially performed and power relations are implicit in the production of knowledge (Foucault 1969). He supports the ideal of Permeation, resistance, and circumvention in asserting “what comes between ourselves and our experience is the ground upon which we can act, speak and make sense of things” (Foucault 1969). Discourses are about what can be said and thought, but also about who can speak, when, and with what authority. Discourses embody meaning and social relationships, they constitute both subjectivity and power relations (Ball: 1990:2).

According to Ball (1990) this is to navigate spaces that control and manage access to the status quo. The performance actions attend to the ideal on non-direction in the engagement and navigation of power dynamics. This Foucault describes as a mesh of antagonisms in his Subject and Power (1982). These antagonisms can be passive or active, rash or subtle but they are present and continuous in the defence of individualism. Resistance and interception of power is a type of power in itself. In spaces of oppression, seclusion, overlooking amongst others the navigation and charting through these phenomena are powers in themselves. Counter forces and Navigational mechanisms are forms of power that permeate what may be deemed popular, accepted or justified. This resistance, counter-navigation and so forth are means of social justice and empowerment that are keys to new spaces of interaction and activity. The performance entails a physical navigation of both tangible and intangible space of platforms and bases that have been run through the mill of use.

To embrace the possibility that power does not always assume just one form and that, in virtue of this, a given form of power can coexist alongside, or even come into conflict with, other forms of power and accepts the unpredictability imbued in the freedom of non-conformity. Foucault’s bet was that people are likely to win more for freedom by declining to define in advance all the forms that freedom could possibly take. That means refusing to latch on to static definitions of power. Only in following power everywhere that it operates does freedom have a good chance of flourishing. Only by analysing power in its multiplicity, as Foucault did, do we have a chance to mount a multiplicity of freedoms that would counter all the different ways in which power comes to define the limits of who we can be or become.