Overview
- Explores performance practices that address the intersection of youth, race, disability, and gender with unemployment between 2010-2018
- Focuses on performances that are created by unemployed non-professional performers
- Interrogates the relationship between community, the individual, and the arts
Part of the book series: Contemporary Performance InterActions (CPI)
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About this book
This book explores what happens to socially committed performance when state systems of social security are dismantled. Since 2010, a punishing programme of economic austerity and a seismic overhaul of the Welfare State in the United Kingdom has been accompanied by an ideological assault on dependency; a pervasive scapegoating of the poor, young, and disabled; and an intensification of the discursive relationship between morality and work. This book considers the artistic, material, and ideological consequences of such shifts for applied and socially engaged performance.
Performing Welfare reveals how such arts practices might reconstitute notions of work and labour in socially constructive ways. It focuses on the political potential of participation during a period in which classifications of labour and productivity are intensely contested. It examines the migration of discourses from state policy to the cultural sector; narratives of community and aesthetics of dependency; the paradoxes of visibility in creative projects with stigmatised participants; the implicit relationship of participatory performance to neoliberal productivity; and, the parallels between gendered divisions of labour, social reproduction, and applied performance.
It will appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in applied and socially engaged performance, participation, community, representation, the welfare state, social policy, labour, and unemployment.
Performing Welfare reveals how such arts practices might reconstitute notions of work and labour in socially constructive ways. It focuses on the political potential of participation during a period in which classifications of labour and productivity are intensely contested. It examines the migration of discourses from state policy to the cultural sector; narratives of community and aesthetics of dependency; the paradoxes of visibility in creative projects with stigmatised participants; the implicit relationship of participatory performance to neoliberal productivity; and, the parallels between gendered divisions of labour, social reproduction, and applied performance.
It will appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in applied and socially engaged performance, participation, community, representation, the welfare state, social policy, labour, and unemployment.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Sarah Bartley is a Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her research examines the intersections of work, participation, and performance at play within socially engaged and applied theatre practices. She has previously published in Contemporary Theatre Review and Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Performing Welfare
Book Subtitle: Applied Theatre, Unemployment, and Economies of Participation
Authors: Sarah Bartley
Series Title: Contemporary Performance InterActions
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44854-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-44853-0Published: 04 September 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-44856-1Published: 04 September 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-44854-7Published: 03 September 2020
Series ISSN: 2634-5870
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5889
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 265
Number of Illustrations: 5 b/w illustrations
Topics: Contemporary Theatre, National/Regional Theatre and Performance, Applied Theatre, Performing Arts