Cultural Scripts, Dialogue and Performance: Creating Processes for Resistance and Resolve

Abstract

Understanding human behaviour through frames of performance generates alternate cycle of friction, resistance, conflict and reaction. Resistance can be manifested in many ways, as silence, opposition, cooperation, or even ignoring the other. In everyday impositions by systems of power, the patterns of resistance emerge from a deep understanding as conveyed by defiance of rules in schools by children subjected to long periods of control. Depending on the context and actions, resistance creates changes or evokes resolve. This paper has talked about resistance as an everyday act or challenge. Theatre as an art-form opens human behaviour and its complex everyday rhythms through verbal and physical acts revealing diversities. Physical actions display power and resistance concealing no surprises. Social relations seemed imperative and inherently seeped in uneven power structures; social friction seemed organic to the warp and weft of the social fabric. The intertwining of the warp and weft create rhythms of resistance weaving new patterns. Resistance is thus an inherent aspect of social dynamics, either overtly or covertly. The hidden aspects of resistance are often not available to people in powerful positions, and can only be accessed through other means, like the informal expressions of individual and collective experience.