To Be Powerful Without the Means of Power

Abstract

This article inquires into the tension between power as restriction and power as empowerment, as investigated by means of performance in two works: aCORdo by Alice Ripoll and Azdora by Markus Öhrn. These works, which offer a glimpse of the possible shifts from ‘power over’ to ‘power to,’ are put into dialogue with feminist thinkers Luisa Muraro and Rosi Braidotti. Their concepts of authority as a way ‘to be powerful without the means of power’ and of potentia as ‘the capability of enduring and resisting’ are oriented to think power as oriented to the construction of possibilities and relationships. The two performances give to these concepts a body marked by a specific identity: the poor man of colour and the industrious housewife. Yet, rather than setting at the centre the bodies themselves, the works complexify the relationships around them. Through the theatre device, they flip around a set of relations between fixed identities and open them up to often unnoticed ways of performing power and authority, embed their transformation process in a radical relationality, and set the conditions for the experience of an affirmative potentia.