This collective gesture is also at the heart of Annie MacDonell\u2019s installation Holding Still \/\/ Holding Together<\/em> (2016), a five-channel video work that represents protesters engaged in the act of going limp as police officers and other figures of authority attempt to carry them away. Like Johnson, MacDonell looks at the relationship that ordinary people have with governing forces, and how both collective action and unusual physical movement can counter and disrupt the imposition of exploitative, authoritarian, and cruel policies through a bodily refusal to cooperate with the systems in place. By treating both authoritarian oppression and its resistance as performance, Berlant opens up the idea of a poetics of resistance that gives primacy to the body and its expression. Below, I elaborate on the idea of \u2018collective gesture\u2019 by looking at its implications and its particular expressions in MacDonell\u2019s and Johnson\u2019s works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s begin with Holding Still \/\/ Holding Together. <\/em>Based on archival documentation of public protesters going limp in order to resist being carried away by police, MacDonell asked professionally trained dancers to study, restage, and perform the scenes. The videos are set in an empty room, where we see the dancers first study and then perform MacDonell\u2019s collection of photographs. These photographs, which are included in the videos, form the foundation of this work and are part of a collection that the artist began in 2014. Mostly from the West, the images depict anti-war protesters as well as people fighting for civil rights, racial equality, labour rights and, in the artist\u2019s words, against \u201cthe inequality generated by rampant networked capitalism.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Annie MacDonell, \u201cNotes for Performers,\u201d C Magazine<\/em>, no. 130 (2016): 39\u201350.<\/span> In the videos, we see the dancers working through the different ways that a body can go limp when being held and removed by another body or bodies. The sheer physical burden of removing a limp body is immediately evident as they struggle to grasp, lift, and hold. Most often, more than one body is needed to remove a limp one. The dancers have to physically, intimately embrace, sometimes hugging or cradling a limp, lifeless body in order to move it. By visually overlapping different takes, distorting time and movements, MacDonell builds a visual cacophony that makes the dancers\u2019 gestures difficult to read and understand; a poetic nod to the tense, chaotic, sometimes aggressive, sometimes violent, and almost always stressful atmosphere of protests. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Going limp is a method of passive resistance, the antithesis of violence. Yet it is a radical act, a bodily gesture that extends the collective action of protest through the need for other bodies to move the dead weight of a person.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n What does it mean to go limp during a protest? How can bodily stasis be disruptive or facilitate resistance? A protest is collective action. It is a publicly disruptive physical gathering, a claiming of space, to show disapproval of and objection to something, most often government policy. Going limp is a method of passive resistance, the antithesis of violence. Yet it is a radical act, a bodily gesture that extends the collective action of protest through the need for other bodies to move the dead weight of a person. Going limp requires both absurdity and intimacy: \u201cabsurdity\u201d conveys ambivalence \u2014 enacting submission by making one\u2019s body incredibly vulnerable in order to oppose and refuse the myriad intertwined capitalist networks that ordinary people are oppressed and ruled by; \u201cintimacy\u201d because limpness requires touch, a physical embrace, which visually blurs the lines between force and care. As for the police officers, their role is to enact authoritarian performance by keeping protesters at bay \u2014 cordoning off spaces, removing people from those spaces, corralling them, dispersing them, abducting them. In this work, MacDonell points to authoritarian performance at its most literal \u2014 as state workers use their authority to physically remove those deemed a threat to state power. One of the strengths of going limp that the dancers (and photographs) reveal is that more than one police officer is needed to carry a limp body away. The gesture disrupts state time and resources by slowing down the process of removal. Non-labour causes extra labour. Holding Still \/\/ Holding Together<\/em> unpacks the various ways in which authority figures and limp protesters engage in what MacDonell calls a \u201ccontradictory embrace.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ibid. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Johnson\u2019s film takes place in a small, eerily vacant post-industrial town occupied by bored, apathetic people. The town exists in the abandoned remains of capitalism\u2019s wake. Adults spend their time doing nothing much at all: drinking in empty bars or working for the junkyard, the only industry that the town seems to have left. However, it emerges that the town also has a circus school, attended by teenagers who learn, not easily, to spin, fall, twirl, and jump. They learn how to move their bodies, and how to move together. The teens are not nearly as apathetic as the adults. They are restless, curious. They want more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At one point in the film, we are watching a middle-aged woman who is at her \u201cjob,\u201d so to speak, of sweeping an empty, abandoned building. In my view, this act of sweeping is part of the state\u2019s authoritarian performance: it needs its people to perform such duties because doing so enacts the belief that the collapse the town is currently enduring will eventually give way to a boom cycle. In the act of sweeping, the state\u2019s authoritarian performance is fulfilled through the presumption, and enactment, that the building will continue to function as capitalist infrastructure, under the \u201ccontrol\u201d of the state. The film\u2019s fantastical climax grows out of this sweeping scene, as the woman is approached by some teens asking for a ride. She resists and they surround her, suddenly moving her into position to execute a back flip. It is at this moment that Alice Deejay\u2019s hypnotic trance hit Better Off Alone<\/em> (1997) starts to play and that almost everyone who lives in the town enters the scene dancing. Together they all perform \u2014 fairly awkwardly \u2014 a choreographed dance routine replete with front and back flips, twirls, hand holding, and cartwheels. Their synchronized movements provide a stark contrast to the lone woman\u2019s act of sweeping, as it disrupts the monotonous submission to capitalist authority through the collective action of dance. However, as we watch them move, this collectivity is constantly questioned through Deejay\u2019s song, which repeatedly asks, \u201cDo you think you\u2019re better off alone?\u201d It is a question that could be directed to the woman who was sweeping but also to everyone in the town. The teens, like the protesters, would answer \u201cNo.\u201d Collective action and awkward gestures are key to breaking the visible and invisible binds of authoritarian performance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Through Berlant we can locate the gestural resistances that ordinary people can enact, together, to counter exploitative hegemonic systems. Refusal can be performed in ways that are expressive, intimate, and undermine the binary logic of authority. Whereas Johnson points to such instances through an unreal, fantastical collective moment, MacDonell\u2019s distillation and study of limpness during protest is rooted in physical reality, in events that actually happened, and stems from photography\u2019s ability to index such actions. Both artists elucidate the power and poetry of embodied resistance, collapsing collective action, bodily proximity, and authoritarian performance to reveal the precarity of power dynamics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Traduit de l\u2019anglais par Sophie Chisogne <\/p>\n\n\n![\"Annie](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/96-DO-IM_Rigg_MacDonell_Nuit_Blanche_Toronto_03_CMYK_lr.jpeg\")
<\/strong>Holding Still \/\/ Holding Together<\/em>, performance, Nuit Blanche, Toronto, performers (left to right): Simon Portigal, Danah Rosales, Emily
Law, Emma-Kate Guimond, Ofilio Sinbadinho.
Photo : Andrew Williamson, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/96-DO-IM_Rigg_MacDonell_INSTALLATION_01_CMYK_lr.jpeg\")
Holding Still<\/em> \/\/ Holding Together<\/em>, vue d\u2019installation | installation view, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, 2016.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/96-DO-IM_Rigg_WALL-FINAL-FOR-COLOUR_May1st_00_03_30_03_Still003_CMYK_lr.jpeg\")
<\/strong>Holding Still \/\/ Holding Together<\/em>, video still, 2016.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/96-DO-april-hobbs-in-in-the-air-scaled.jpg\")
In the Air<\/em>, video stills, 2009.
Photos : \u00a9 Liza Johnson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/96-DO-traichsplit1.jpg\")
<\/strong>In the Air<\/em>, video stills, 2009.
Photos : \u00a9 Liza Johnson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n