It’s 2015 and I am in a community centre in Gateshead, a town situated in the North East of England. I have come to interview participants of MindFULL, an applied arts project delivered by Helix Arts and Tyneside Mind in which participants produced a film documenting the increasingly hostile processes encountered by disabled people who are trying to access state-administered financial support in the UK. Two members of the group make me a cup of tea, pull three chairs into the corner of the room, and ask me if I liked their film, But I’m Here for Mental Health .1 The two participants talk animatedly for an hour about their experiences with chronic illness, unemployment, and the state welfare system; but mainly, they speak about the process of making But I’m Here for Mental Health : how it was joyful, how it was painful, how they wanted to show the hopelessness of fighting the system, how they intended to redress pervasive representations of benefit claimants as scroungers. Throughout our conversation the two keep returning to the anxiety that surrounded their participation in the arts project, encapsulated by the exasperated avowal: ‘well they’d say, “if you can sit there and tell your story, you can sit at a desk and do a job”’.2 The ‘they’ refers to the Department for Work and Pensions, the arm of government that oversees welfare provision in the UK; but it also resonates with a wider increase in public attention to activities undertaken by welfare claimants since 2010. The feeling of unease articulated by these participants lies at the heart of Performing Welfare. Arts projects engaging unemployed people are increasingly shaped by the challenges of representing demonised and surveilled subjects. Further, the ambiguous blurring of the boundaries between participation and labour within participatory arts projects is intensified by engaging the non-working subject, whose proximity to work—or anything that might resemble work—is policed and punitively regulated by the state and sections of the media. This book explores the uneasy terrain socially committed arts practices occupy when state systems of work and welfare are in flux and considers strategies that enable this unease to be navigated or deployed in useful ways for participants. I consider how projects can enable people to tell their stories in ways which do not expose them to disciplinary actions from the state and how arts practices premised on participation function in conditions where classifications of labour are so loaded.
The unemployed figure is increasingly deployed by the state and the media in ways that resonate with Victorian notions of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. Benefit claimants are utilised as a divisive tool, a way to scapegoat the allegedly welfare-bloated state as partly culpable for this period of austerity.5 In the chapters that follow, I draw attention to the callous treatment of unemployed individuals and document applied and socially engaged performance that seeks to stage their experiences during a period of economic austerity and welfare retraction.6 I reflect on the implications of the erosion of social security for socially committed arts practices and examine how such performance intervenes in this shifting landscape. In particular, this project explores how representational strategies deployed in applied arts practice disrupt or reinforce negative constructions of marginalised people; concurrently, it exposes how participation in performance, particularly by individuals deemed unproductive, nuances rigid configurations of labour and therefore blurs the boundaries of work under a capitalist regime. Does the desire to promote participation in the arts resonate with a move towards active labour market policies and the accompanying mentality of the implicit value in doing, or rather, do representations of the unemployed figure in applied performance unsettle narrow understandings of productivity and labour? Further, I consider how the labour at play within applied performance—specifically, economies of participation , implications of remuneration, and definitions of productivity—offers resistant practices within a neoliberal labour market.It might seem to some observers that the Department of Work and Pensions has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the nineteenth century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens, rather than seeking to respond creatively and compassionately to the real needs of those facing widespread economic insecurity in an age of deep and rapid transformation brought about by automation, zero-hour contracts and rapidly growing inequality.4
The UK Welfare Reform Acts of 2012 and 2016 introduced a series of wide-reaching changes in state-provided social security. These reforms included significant reductions in social housing provision and destabilising changes to social rents, a series of re-categorisations in disability benefits, and increased conditionality around the obligations of claimants, leading to an intensification of financial sanctioning (i.e. stopping people’s benefit). Further, the Coalition and subsequent Conservative governments phased introduction of Universal Credit—an attempt to consolidate all working-age state benefits into a single payment—will reduce the financial support claimants receive by £3 billion a year by 2020–21.7 These changes and their cumulative severity in instigating financial cuts to benefits have left claimants in a position of acute precarity. In 2010–11 foodbank charity The Trussell Trust gave out 61,468 emergency food parcels, and by 2018–19 this figure had risen to 1,583,66888; between 2010 and 2016 there was a 54% increase in homelessness in England9, and the financial sanctioning of claimants nearly tripled during this period, topping two million people in 2013.10 This systematic removal of funds from state welfare means unemployed people, dismissed and precarised by the labour market, consequently find themselves dependent on state support that is itself increasingly insecure. This dispossession of the most vulnerable in UK society has been underpinned by an ideological assault on dependency and collective support; a pervasive scapegoating of the poor, the young, and the disabled; and an intensification of the discursive relationship between morality and work. The implications of these changes are significant for understandings of the erosion of the post-war UK welfare contract and also for universal understandings of how social security, state support, and dependency are constructed in neoliberal contexts.
I was compelled to undertake this research by the intensification of negative representations of unemployment in political and popular discourse following the global economic recession of 2008 and the subsequent implementation of economic policies of austerity in the UK. The rapid rise in unemployment in the country brought the issue to the forefront of the political agenda, placing it at the centre of new public service commissioning models. These shifts generated money for arts projects engaging with unemployment. This resulted in unemployment not only being a possible situation of people participating in applied and socially committed arts practice, but the unemployed were increasingly recognised as a participant group in their own right. In my own practice as a freelance community artist, I was increasingly being invited to facilitate arts projects with unemployed individuals, particularly unemployed young people, which sought to initiate behavioural changes in order to make participants more employable. In my experience, these projects were predominantly focused on achieving individual change rather than interrogating any underlying historical, cultural, and structural reasons behind unemployment. Additionally, during the period examined in this book, I was employed by Newcastle City Council to work in partnership with Jobcentre Plus on a four-month research project in 2012 that explored provision for youth unemployment in the region and had two periods where I was unemployed and claiming unemployment benefits, in 2011 and 2013. Informed by my own experiences and the shifting social and political terrain of unemployment in the UK, I interrogate the relationship between socially committed performance and social policy to illuminate the consequences of this intersection for the politics of representation and practices of the social in performance.
I focus on performances that are created by unemployed non-professional performers and arts schemes that directly engage unemployed participants. I interrogate the relationship between community, the individual, and the arts in a context where social systems of support are being dismantled. The practices I investigate are conceptually layered and heterogeneously realised. In order to attend to the richness of this kaleidoscopic arts landscape, I consider the overlapping and divergent fields of applied theatre, community arts, and participatory performance. Sally Mackey has noted the absence of applied and social theatre in discourse surrounding ‘the social turn’ in visual arts and participatory performance practices.11 This book in part redresses this absence. Further, while applied theatre, community arts, and participatory performance intersect and inform one another, each area interacts with the context and experience of unemployment in distinct ways. Applied theatre offers a body of scholarship that addresses the instrumentalisation of arts practices in service to social and political agendas. Prevalent discourses of inclusion/exclusion and collective/individual operating within community theatre provoke pertinent questions in practices addressing unemployment. Finally, the parallel emergence and emphasis on participation, in both the labour market and contemporary arts practice, evidences the utility of offering an analysis that holds unemployment and performance alongside one another. It is essential for socially committed performance practices, which are regularly concerned with creative production and active participation, to reflect on its relationship to the destabilising of social security contracts, the intensification of models of productivity, and the pervasive rhetoric of individual responsibility. My examination of the unique economies of participation that operate within socially committed performance—by which I mean models of participant remuneration, systems of production, and divergent funding strategies—asserts how this mode of performance might disrupt established organisations of labour and capital under neoliberalism. Such performance risks validating these hierarchical systems of power and yet it is uniquely positioned to critique them through the aesthetic strategies deployed by practitioners and participants and the collective production practices it can utilise.
Labour, Unemployment, and Performance
The unemployed function as a regulating force under capitalist production. How such lives are deployed, dismissed and precarised, by the demands of neoliberal labour markets, which increasingly invoke this ‘disposable [post] industrial reserve army’, is the locus around which this study operates.if a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.12
Negative constructions of the unemployed emerge, in part, from the neoliberal subject’s uncritical relationship to the value of labour. Feminist political theorist Kathi Weeks rails against this depoliticisation of work: ‘[t]he value of work, along with its centrality to our lives, is one of the most stubbornly naturalised and apparently self-evident elements of modern and late, or post-modern, capitalist societies’.13 Locating an implicit value in work and its significance facilitates a deligitimisation of the unemployed people. Across the diverse landscape of applied theatre and socially engaged arts practices, there are projects that encompass narratives of instrumentality and concern themselves with the use of arts practice to upskill the subject and imbue them with a greater value in the neoliberal labour market; concurrently there are practices within these fields which operate at the fringes of productivity and labour and consequently challenge the naturalised value of work. Over the course of the book, I examine how moral and economic values affixed to the concept of work emerge in socially committed performances that represent the experiences of, and engage with, unemployed people.
Weeks traces the growth of the labourist work ethic in the industrial period, identifying how it ‘constitute[d] the working class as a class, serving to render it legible’.14 Subsequently, after the middle of the twentieth century, work was characterised as a path to individual self-expression, self-reliance, agency, and creativity.15 Work was no longer about developing a collective identity but instead became tethered to the self. Operating alongside the implicit value attributed to work is the assumed value work bestows upon us, bound up as it now is with our identity. The detrimental impact here for unemployed people is clear; they are both denied access to the collective identity of the working class and also unable to signify their individual identity and value. My engagement with this area is inflected with Weeks’ assertion that work is not just championed through economic necessity and social responsibility, ‘it is widely understood as an individual moral practice and collective ethical obligation’.16 I explore how the unemployed are constituted as a collective, interrogate the ways in which this collective is rendered ‘legible’, and consider the social and political stakes of doing so.
This definition positions the subject as contractually connected to the state and—in drawing on this definition—I highlight how policy, legislation, and performance intersect and diverge in socially committed arts practice. Contrary to terms such as worklessness—which gained prevalence in government discourse post-2010 and is indicative of pathological and ideological constructions of the unemployed individual—unemployment recognises the impact of broader considerations of business cycles and economic conditions on the availability and obtainability of work in particular labour markets. The term exposes the existence of discourses that promote pathologies of worklessness while offering a more comprehensive understanding of the material conditions of the labour landscape. While I use this definition of unemployment, I also problematise its failure to account for non-working people engaged in forms of labour that are not economically rewarded. The understanding of labour deployed in Performing Welfare recognises a broad range of human activity including, but not limited to, waged work.those without a job who have been actively seeking work in the past 4 weeks and are available to start work in the next 2 weeks. It also includes those who are out of work but have found a job and are waiting to start it in the next 2 weeks.18
Throughout the chapters that follow, I demonstrate the ambiguity of such classifications of labour and reflect on how applied performance might seek to radically illuminate that ambiguity. There are representations of modes of productivity operating beyond capitalist work regimes onstage, but how do such representations become acutely politicised when undertaken by individuals the state deems as non-working/non-productive? Drawing on theorisations of productivity that emerge in feminist, queer, and crip scholarship finds ways to trouble the parameters of state categorisations of labouring subjects.19 Indeed, Alison Kafer has identified resonances across queer and disabled subjects in relation to productivity, particularly noting ‘the mechanisms of state services certainly push one out of the logic of capital accumulation and onto the edges of labour and production’.20 Its application here encapsulates aspects of production and reproduction which this study unravels, particularly, in relation to reproductive labour and the diverse resistances to sanctioned forms of productivity engendered by marginalised young, racialised, gendered, or disabled subjects. Therefore, while I rely on a definition of unemployment that is anchored in the term ‘actively seeking work’, I problematise this definition and identify ways in which applied performance project might construct alternative models of labour and work that render the unemployed ‘productive’ beyond the parameters of a capitalist work regime.
I am specifically invested in attending to the material implications and realities of labour and participation among acutely exploited groups in a neoliberal economy. Thinking through unemployment in tandem with performance is bolstered by the recognition of the position of theatre between leisure and work. A liminal position made even more germane in performance practice undertaken by individuals outside of established working structures. Nicholas Ridout posits the potential of theatre as ‘a place and practice where it might be possible to think disruptively about work and leisure’.21 Presenting the labour of the unemployed, through participants’ public performance, offers an extension of this ‘disruptive’ challenge. Particularly relevant is Ridout’s reflection on the nature of the ‘passionate amateur’, which he suggests illustrates the possibility of theatrical labour to unsettle the logic of new capitalism and our ‘subjugation to wage labor and the labor theory of value’.22 Ridout thus identifies the potential of theatre to engage in different forms of value exchange and conceives ‘passionate amateurs’ as ‘those who work together for the production of value for one another (for love, that is, rather than money) in ways that refuse […] the division of labor that obtains under capitalism as usual’.23 Such a description can be applied to much socially focused performance, which is often concerned with the production of values other than the financial, as participants and artists alike engage for passion or ‘love’ of the work. Reconstituting the passionate amateur through the lens of the unemployed participant amplifies conflicts surrounding labour, economies, and performance. Performance projects that seek to cultivate alternative modes of value illuminate ways in which the unemployed figure might be framed as a radical force in participatory performance.
Rather than presenting access to a ‘real’ unalienated labour, such ‘works’ about work render labour ‘non-productive’; while they fail to present this real labour, they succeed in making acutely apparent the labour of theatricality. Building on this, as unemployed people are implicitly identified as unproductive, how might aesthetically framing them as ‘at work’ unsettle or reaffirm perceptions of their productivity?the frame of the theatre produces such labour as fabrication, as mimetic, as less concrete than it may appear. […] this abstraction produces a kind of non-productivity: No matter how much the stagehand sweeps the stage, he or she will not sweep the stage, but only show us sweeping the stage.25
There is a sense that audiences at cultural events ‘play at’, and indeed pay for, labour as part of their leisure experience. Adam Alston’s interrogation of when participation is ‘playing’ and when it is ‘labour’ underscores the complexity of the kinds of activity participants engage in. I consider whether this complexity intervenes in perceptions of the unemployed as non-productive subjects and further examine the boundary between creative participation and creative work.26 Alston appeals for greater attention to the implications of performing labour: ‘[w]e should also question what it means to “reveal” labour, particularly when that revealing is itself an aesthetic process’.27 In a period where labour status is deeply contested, performance must strive to develop a greater understanding of how it exposes labour and critically reflect on implications of the representations of labour it offers. Such questions are only intensified when considered in relation to the aesthetics of performances of unemployment.
Conceptualising Welfare and Performance: Dependency and Precarity
Arts projects addressing unemployment have a profound interaction with the state, both in addressing prescribed social effects and responding to policy agendas and in engaging with the community politics of place and social responsibility of citizens. Dependence has increasingly been positioned as contrary to work in contemporary British political discourse. In 1997, at his first Labour Party Conference Speech, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair stated: ‘[t]he new welfare state must encourage work, not dependency’.28 Such rhetoric removes ‘dependency’ from its broader meaning of mutual support and stability and instead locates it as what sociologist Richard Sennett terms ‘social parasitism’.29 Sennett identifies how during new capitalism—a period of dematerialised, globally networked, and concurrently precarised neoliberalism—dependence has become both dislocated from considerations of care or community and reconstituted as a position of neediness of which individuals should be ashamed. Distinguishing the unemployed as other is an act of segregation enacted by governments, media, and working publics, in order to distance themselves from the shame attributed to worklessness and the individual failure it has come to signify.
Alongside the retraction of formal systems of state support, the UK has seen a growth in informal networks of care (foodbanks, volunteer carers, childcare collectives). Such networks might be both a locus for resistance, where claimants can meet and organise modes of aesthetic and political opposition, and concurrently a practice of civic participation deployed in service of the creation and maintenance of economically active and productive citizens. As such, Performing Welfare examines both the communal potentials arts practice can envision and the material social systems within which participants are located. Previously, Shannon Jackson has prompted a consideration of the support systems in which relational or participatory performance is embedded, aiming ‘to place social systems in the foreground of analysis despite the fact they usually occupy the background of experience’.30 Jackson proposes such a foregrounding will, rather than echoing the ongoing binary discourse of efficacy versus aesthetic quality, provoke a heightened ‘awareness of our enmeshment in systems of support’.31 Similarly, I examine how the welfare state, and its erosion, is performed and experienced in socially committed arts practices. This prioritises the intersection of arts practice and social systems; rather than an emphasis on arguing for the value of specific aesthetic or social agendas, I examine what occurs when these fields overlap. I investigate the particular character of state sociality through the lens of the collective and collaborative practices. Jen Harvie explores how the welfare state might potentially incubate or challenge relational arts practice in the UK asking ‘how do these potentially socially democratic art practices and neoliberal capitalist ideologies produce, inform, challenge and/or undermine each other?’32 Such an investigation encourages a critique of the problematic economic and social relations that arts projects might engender and embed while also pointing to the potential of such arts practices to highlight the labour dynamics which proliferate in our contemporary context.
In progressively precarious social and economic contexts, Jackson and Harvie illuminated the position of art and performance within models of social governance. While critiquing potential issues surrounding such relationally intentioned practice, both advocate for art forms which foster interdependence and collective support systems, be they state-led or otherwise, in contexts of receding social security. In its attentiveness to the social context and political structures, out of which art practices emerge, Performing Welfare locates itself in the theoretical lineage of Harvie and Jackson. Representations of welfare in socially committed arts practices offer an opportunity to interrogate notions of representation, dependence, and production among unemployed individuals and communities. Further, attending to arts projects engagement with unemployed participants illuminates how arts practice directly intervenes in, responds to, and reproduces welfare policy.
In the UK, austerity has been deployed to disinvest in the poorest in our society, to encourage the shift of public services into private ownership, and enable the transfer of wealth to an increasingly small elite.The Government paints a picture of austerity in which everyone has tightened their belt together but, […] while the bottom 20 per cent of earners will have lost on average 10 per cent of their income by 2021–2022 as a result of these changes, top earners have actually come out ahead. This is compounded by cuts to public spending, including on housing and education, that have hit the lowest-income households the hardest, and in England amount to cuts of 16 per cent or £1,450 per person.36
In conjunction with the economic and social precarity identified by Lorey, I also consider the material and embodied vulnerability of distinct communities. Judith Butler posits the concept of ‘precarious life’ in a post-9/11 American context of censorship and violence.37 Two central tenets of Butler’s conception of ‘precarious life’ are that humans are implicitly interdependent and vulnerable and that some are more exposed to that vulnerability than others. These articulations of differently vulnerable individuals and interdependent communities are vital to my consideration of social security and discourses of community arts practice. Foundational to this project is Butler’s acknowledgement of ‘normative schemes of intelligibility [that] establish what will and will not be human, what will be a liveable life, what will be a grievable death’.38 I identify how and where these ‘normative schemes’ operate in and around the context of participatory arts practice. Such a consideration reflects the material and embodied vulnerability of the unemployed in a contemporary UK context, where people are being corporeally impacted by welfare reforms.
While precarity can be perceived and employed as a deeply negative entity, Lorey and Butler also identify it as a space of possibility, a banner under which disparate communities can potentially gather and deploy ‘precarity as activism’.39 Lorey proposes that the current state of precarity has the potential to unify a multiplicity of social and economic positions, promoting new forms of resistance that emphasise horizontal rather than hierarchical organising to create ‘a new form of democracy’.40 Similarly, Butler advocates for the power of the precarious in ‘organizing themselves without hierarchy, and so exemplifying the principles of equal treatment that they are demanding of public institutions’.41 Precarity then might operate as a mode through which to engender solidarity, a way to build relations across social and economic divisions, and a mechanism to expose the oppressive organisation of wage labour under capitalism. Arts practice explicitly engaging with precarity might unsettle the traditional organisation of hierarchies through a privileging of the non-worker, or heightening an awareness of precarious labour contexts affecting both the publics who witness them and the participants who perform them.
In establishing the experience of the unemployed across society more broadly, rather than purely focusing on trends in the arts industry, I seek, in part, to address the lack of critical attention on experiences of insecurity at the margins. While the geographical parameters of this study limit its focus to the UK, I direct particular attention to unemployed people who are cast by the state as ultimately more ‘disposable’ and acutely exposed to punishing contemporary welfare reforms. I am committed to exploring such lives through the framework of performance and thus advocating for the utility of some ‘artworlds’ over others as a way to examine ‘life times of disposability’. Therefore, through invoking the term precarity, this book seeks to examine the consonance between socially and economically insecure individuals and arts practice.44the coeval precarity of other women’s lives consigned to “life-times of disposability” elsewhere in the production cycle of global capitalism, as well as the grounding of precarity in the domestic and unwaged servitude […] will be correspondingly neglected.43
The Welfare State and Socially Committed Arts Practice: A History
Performing Welfare asserts the intertwined ideologies and histories of social welfare and socially committed arts provision. In 1946 the National Insurance Act, the cornerstone of the UK welfare state, was implemented and The Arts Council of Great Britain was founded. These coinciding events, indicative of a post-World War II appeal to social equality and cultural accessibility, stand as symbolic of the parallel histories of welfare and arts provision which sought to cultivate communities of co-dependency, mutual support, creativity, and cultural democracy. In this section, I trace historical shifts in welfare ideologies alongside the emergence of employment as an important signifier of effective social arts practice. The reforms, policies, and arts agendas I outline here form the social and cultural backdrop of the research undertaken in this book and are indicative of the progressively worsening economic and material hardships faced by individuals reliant on destabilising state systems of support.
Jenny Hughes has previously traced the lineages of applied theatre and Victorian workhouse entertainments, excavating ‘fledgling social theatres of the nineteenth century’ and drawing attention to potential historical lineages of applied performance in Christian discourses bound up with social regulation of citizens’ utility.45 Hughes illuminates how these workhouse entertainments resonate with twenty-first-century cultures of welfare, drawing fruitful parallels between these latent histories and contemporary theatre projects which ‘might both work with and against (neo)liberal welfare regimes that require individuals to take responsibility for lifting themselves out of pernicious networks of economic inequality’.46 The characteristics of self-improvement, individual responsibility, and social support within applied theatre’s histories are threaded throughout my analysis of contemporary examples.
In the UK, state intervention into the provision of economic and social support for its citizens emerged at the outset of the twentieth century when the government adopted an increased level of responsibility for providing pensions, unemployment insurance, healthcare, and a range of other economic systems of support. Despite emerging out of a number of disparate schemes of support and assistance that had developed over the first half of the twentieth century, the foundation of the welfare state is largely attributed to the 1942 ‘The Social Insurance and Allied Services Report’ produced by William Beveridge and commonly known as the Beveridge Report.47 In September 1944 the White Paper on Social Insurance set out the government’s response to the Beveridge Report; subsequently the National Insurance Act 1946 established the first comprehensive social security system in the UK.48 This act formed the blueprint for the welfare state and is merited with founding the National Health Service and implementation of a coherent universal social security system in the UK. A range of benefits (sickness benefit, unemployment benefit, retirement pension) were made available to all those of a working age who made weekly contributions. Significantly, this contributions-based model did not offer unemployment provision for those with disabilities, non-working or married women, or the elderly who had not accrued contributions.49 The National Assistance Act 1948 further broadened social security to all, even if one had not previously made National Insurance contributions.50 This established a universal and comprehensive system of state support that acknowledged the equal right of all citizens to freedom from poverty. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, this system worked reasonably effectively, though at times contentiously, with leading political parties seeking to further develop and amend provision in order to offer citizens protection from the abject poverty experienced during the interwar years.51
Towards the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, the post-war welfare contract was exposed to growing scrutiny. As the economy began to stagnate and inflation grew, the UK was rendered increasingly precarious in a global market unsure of the nation’s financial security. As economic historian Jim Tomlinson notes, the 1970s were a turning point for economic policy in post-war Britain.52 This period of economic ‘stagflation’, coupled with a marked increase in unemployment, led to the UK government borrow from the International Monetary Fund in order to meet public spending needs.53 This resulted in a challenge to the legitimacy of a Keynesian economic policy, a fiscal model that sought to offer full and extensive social and economic protection to all citizens. The subsequent change in attitudes to welfare was amplified over the following decades by the emergence of neoliberal ideology and its accompanying economic policies.
Concurrently, the 1960s and 1970s saw socially committed, non-hierarchical, and culturally embedded collaborative arts practices thrive, most clearly encapsulated by the blossoming of the Community Arts Movement—a shifting co-operative of artists and organisations broadly making work that attended to similar ideologies and practices. Alison Jeffers and Gerri Moriarty have vividly documented these practices, drawing the temporal parameters of the Community Arts Movement as 1968–86 to indicate a period of intense interest in collaborative practices and cultural democracy.54 Community arts practices across this period were regularly committed to experimentation, in form and content; cultural engagement and a desire to embed artistic practice within communities; and finding new modes of accessible creative play. Further, as Jeffers’ historical tracing of the Community Arts Movement in particular attests, there were strong links between community arts practice and the broader UK labour movement during this period. Most notably, the artistic practices utilised in economically vulnerable and disenfranchised coalfield communities, and other industrial communities encountering high unemployment and a lack of state investment.55 However, by the mid-1980s the social, cultural, and economic landscape of the UK had dramatically changed and the once burgeoning Community Arts Movement was struggling to define its fluid ideological underpinnings and navigate a scant funding landscape.
The intensive determination of activity became primary, marking a turn towards participation in labour markets as ‘actively seeking employment’ became the central focus on which conditionality was evaluated and, therefore, on which access to financial support was achieved.Where it has been determined that a person is to be deemed in accordance with regulations to be actively seeking employed earner’s employment in any week, the question of his actually doing so in that week may be subsequently determined on a review of the determination as to his deemed doing so.57
The first to engage with economic discourse, the report repositioned the arts in terms of investment, multipliers, and indicators, thus shifting vocabularies in the field from the aesthetic and social to the economic, appealing to the sensibilities of the burgeoning neoliberal order. Employment was a central tenet of this argument for the arts: evidence of job creation throughout the sector was a powerful signifier of the importance of the industry in a context of receding industrial employment. The narrative of the arts as a valuable employer has since threaded through cultural policy from Myerscough to the present day.The Report set the stage for a generation of impact studies, and other analyses […] which sought to document and argue the case for the role of the arts and creative industries as important agents for economic development and urban renewal, and begin to measure this impact in quantitative terms.59
New Labour came to power in 1997 with a landslide victory underpinned by their Third Way ideology, an attempted synthesis of market-oriented economic approaches and communitarian social and cultural policies. Their policy approach was characterised by efforts to achieve social equality, increase representation and community cohesion, and promote economic prosperity in a globalised marketplace. Inflected by these plural objectives, the government installed their flagship employment policy New Deal as soon as they took office. The policy was considered highly successful, bringing unemployment below one million for the first time in 25 years by March 2001.60 New Deal targeted groups who were deemed as having multiple obstacles to accessing the labour market; there were specific strands for young people, lone parents, disabled people, those who were classified as long-term unemployed, and people over 50. This programme is indicative of the wide-reaching and targeted support offered by New Labour; however, underpinned by the Third Way ideology, New Deal also emphasised a rebalancing of ‘rights and responsibilities’. Where previously as a citizen you had a right to social security, New Labour further engrained rhetoric that asserted claimants had to demonstrate themselves responsible to the state in order to earn their benefit. Aligned with this, and directly building on the policies of the previous Conservative government, New Labour established the Jobseeker’s Allowance and accompanying Jobseeker’s Agreement. This agreement introduced financial sanctions of varying severity that could be imposed on claimants who refused ‘suitable’ employment, failed to actively seek work, or became unavailable for work. Towards the end of the New Labour government, the Welfare Reform Act 2009 signified a further drive towards workfare schemes and a push for a tougher sanctioning process.61 This Act was the culmination of the decade-long emphasis on responsibility over right by New Labour. An ideological stance subsequently advanced by both the Coalition and Conservative governments.
From the outset, Labour leader Tony Blair made apparent his aim to put the arts to work as part of his government’s cultural strategy.62 Characteristic of New Labour’s policy initiatives was the reframing of arts and culture through a rhetoric of social inclusion.63 Social inclusion policies sought to tackle deep rooted and interdependent modes of exclusion such as high levels of unemployment, crime, ill-health, and poor education.64 The publication of François Matarasso’s ‘Use or Ornament’ in 1997 provided a methodological approach for examining social impact in the arts and arguing beyond the financial for ‘economics in its deeper sense’.65 Seven of the 50 social impacts of participation in the arts outlined by Matarasso were directly related to employment/employability; if soft skills development is included, this adds a further four.66 This spoke to the appetite for marrying social inclusion and economic productivity within a Third Way Model and identified the arts value within such a framework. Alongside this, the government established 18 Policy Action Teams (PATs) to research and implement solutions in specific areas of social exclusion. Having begun to demonstrate and document its social impact, PAT 10 was established in order to explore how best to utilise arts, sport, and leisure to challenge poverty. In 1999, the PAT 10 report concluded that arts, sports, cultural, and recreational activity ‘can contribute to neighbourhood renewal and make a real difference to health, crime, employment and education in deprived communities’.67 Within the same year, the Scottish Arts Council found ‘art plays a critical part in empowering communities, providing jobs, skills and training’.68 The arts were thus recognised as successful providers of skills, training, and employability provision. In addition to aligning with discourses of social inclusion throughout the New Labour years, the arts and cultural sector maintained a focus on productivity and employment provision. The inception of the Creative Industries in the UK coincided with New Labour coming to power.69 The Creative Industries Task Force was conceived in 1997, working across government departments it sought to evaluate and strategise performance throughout the creative industries in order to maximise effectiveness. Producing Creative Industries: 1998 Mapping Document and later repeating the evaluation in 2001, the Creative Industries Task Force signalled its focus on statistical analysis of employment in the sector, thereby providing a justification for the arts that was reliant on its capacity for job creation. This served to further entwine the value of arts practice with the promise of employment.
When the Coalition government came to power in 2010 (and later the Conservatives in 2015), they introduced increased conditionality for those claiming unemployment benefits, and subsequent increase in sanctioning, implemented through the new Claimant Commitment.70 This has resulted in a more punitive and disciplinary system of welfare. In 2016 the government introduced a four-year freeze across Jobseeker’s Allowance, Employment Support Allowance, and Universal Credit, meaning that they would not rise in line with inflation and resulting in a 6.5% real terms cut in financial support.71 An increased vulnerability to economic hardship and financial crisis for those relying on state assistance has characterised welfare reform introduced by governments since 2010. In part this has been due to the faltering and costly introduction of Universal Credit, the most ambitious attempt at a system and culture change within the state welfare structure. Universal Credit aims to assimilate all six working-age benefits and intends to revolutionise the manner in which people encounter unemployment and receive financial support from the state.72 Further, it intends to enable claimants to roll on and off benefit if they undertook short-term or zero-hour contracts. Universal Credit was due to be nationally in operation by 2017; however, beset by system and IT failures, it has been rescheduled seven times and is forecast to be fully rolled out by 2022 at a cost of £15.8 billion.73 Further, cuts to Universal Credit by the treasury in 2016 mean the benefit will be significantly less than its predecessor with 1.2 million families on Universal Credit set to receive an average reduction of £41 a week in financial support.74 This shift not only affects the unemployed but the working poor with 1.3 million working families currently entitled to support in the tax credit system no longer entitled to any in-work support, leaving them on average £42 a week worse off.75 Additionally, claimants have to wait five weeks between applying for Universal Credit and receiving any financial support. The Advanced Payment facility enables claimants to access a government loan from the point of making their claim; however, this often leaves people with little money left once their government loan repayment is deducted each month. MPs launched an inquiry in 2017 into the roll out of the service as claimants faced lengthy delays in payments, resulting as Labour MP Frank Field states ‘claimants falling into debt and rent arrears, caused health problems and led to many having to rely on food banks’.76 The system has been widely condemned across the political parties, the charity sector, support services, and by the United Nations due to it regularly leading to increased social, economic, and physical precarity for those dependent on it.
Alongside these financial changes, there has been a shift in the delivery of employment support with the Coalition government launching their five billion pound flagship welfare-to-work scheme in June 2011. The Work Programme was a mandatory work and employability scheme targeted at the long-term unemployed that outsourced contracts for employment support to a combination of private, public, and third sector organisations. Participants in the Work Programme are evaluated and agencies supporting them are funded through a payment-by-results scheme which, as I go onto discuss in Chap. 2, has led to a significant disparity in the quality and amount of support people receive. Between June 2011 and December 2015, only 28.5% of people (503,106) on the Work Programme were supported into a job.77 The Work Programme ran between 2011 and 2017 and was the central vehicle for unemployment provision over the period of research.78
This Conservative tactic of demanding a financial justification in a fiscally fragile Britain echoes the period in which Myerscough was writing in 1988. Arts Council England responded to this call by commissioning the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) to write an independent report examining the macroeconomic contribution of arts in Britain.80 The CEBR report returned to and refreshed the economic arguments of the 1980s; once again there was a strong emphasis on job creation as a benefit of supporting the Creative Industries. In July 2018 the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced that 1 in every 11 jobs in the UK was now in the creative industries.81I come to you today and ask you to help me reframe the argument: to hammer home the value of culture to our economy […] some simply want money and silence from Government, but in an age of austerity, when times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture’s economic impact.79
These parallel histories demonstrate the UK government’s shifting relationship to welfare, collective support, and dependency; concurrently, the arts sector has encountered new discourses of instrumentalisation which seek to emphasise the social and economic utility of arts practice. The period investigated in the chapters which follow marks an acute acceleration of the destruction of the welfare state under an economic policy of austerity. However, this programme of social support has been progressively eroded since the UK’s economic difficulties in the 1970s and deindustrialisation in the 1980s; more widely, the last 40 years have been marked by a neoliberal economic model which persistently undermines social security systems and ideologies. The utility of focusing on the welfare state as an object of study rests in its implicit link to the financial, labour, and social structures which operate in the UK.
Working Through Performing Welfare
The unemployed are not a homogenous group. It is pertinent to demarcate the diverse experiences of individual claimants and the different types of benefits people access. Particularly as the effects of austerity have been disproportionately felt by young people, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and disabled people. In the UK youth unemployment (classified as 16–24-year-olds who are not in education or employment) rapidly increased after the global economic crash of 2008; at the same time, young people were increasingly excluded from accessing state welfare.82 Exploring youth unemployment is central to developing an understanding of the representational strategies deployed by the state and arts organisations given the prominence of this growing cohort and the specificities of their claimant status between 2010 and 2018. I also investigate representations of people claiming Employment Support Allowance (ESA). ESA is available to people who are unemployed due to illness or disability. Changes in ESA have been a key area of welfare reform since 2012, garnering significant media and political attention.83 Given the deeply contested representations of ESA claimants, and their experience as characteristic of this period of reform, it is pertinent to consider how these individuals are engaging with, and being represented in, performance. Beyond state-delineated cohorts, it is important to perceive unemployment in relation to other identity markers. Race and gender (examined in Chaps. 4 and 6, respectively) have a significant impact on individuals’ experiences of the labour market, and consequently their encounters with unemployment. I underscore the impact of different identity markers on individuals’ participation in labour markets and arts provision. While attending to the specificities of these particular cohorts or identity groups, I also address broader changes to conditionality for those receiving Jobseeker’s Allowance and other more generic state benefits. Examining these wider shifts enables an exploration of how the state reconstituted its relationship to work, welfare, and the individual during this time.
I have sought to capture the breadth of arts practice being undertaken in urban contexts across the UK; however, due to my London location and relationship to geographically sited community arts ecologies, the main examples I examine are located in England, specifically in Birmingham, Brighton, London, and Tyneside.84 I particularly focus on London and the North East, where unemployment has been persistently high throughout the period this research examines. The North East was the region with the highest unemployment rate (7% as of February 2017), London stood as the third highest (5.5% as of February 2017) in the UK.85 The time period investigated (2010–18) has been delineated by the introduction of severe and far-reaching economic policies of austerity in the UK since 2010, the growth in unemployment with rates peaking at 8.4% in 2011, and the introduction of significant welfare reforms in 2012 and 2016.86 In 2018 at the Conservative Party Conference, then UK Prime Minister Theresa May shimmied onstage to ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’ and declared ‘austerity is over and [the public’s] hard work has paid off’.87 Despite this claim, the damaging disinvestment in the UK’s poorest communities is ongoing and public services continue to be forced into catastrophic saving measures. These eight years therefore mark a significant period in the UK during which social provision and collective support were under sustained attack. At the same time, the perception of the welfare claimant has become increasingly stigmatised and individualised. While this book examines the particular dismantling of the welfare state in the UK during this period, it is more broadly concerned with intersections between state constructions of dependency and ideologies of applied performance, strategies of making visible marginalised subjects, the resonances of policy rhetoric and performance practices, and the implications of staging (non-)productivity in socially committed performance.
As Performing Welfare foregrounds critical considerations of representation and practices of labour, the book is organized into five chapters, arranged into three distinct sections: language, image, and embodiment. Broadly, these three sections examine how performance draws attention to neoliberal shifts in language describing the unemployed, documents and analyses the proliferation of often negative images of the unemployed, and exposes the necropolitical forms of governance operating within the welfare state. My methodological framework draws on a hybrid of strategies of performance analysis predominantly guided by cultural materialism and critical discourse analysis. This project synthesises a diverse range of material across performance practices and social and cultural policy; therefore, it is informed by research practices in theatre and performance studies, economics, and political science.
Cultural materialism is central to my methodological approach given the Marxist underpinnings of this project and its concern with constructions of labour and unemployment in policy and performance.88 Marx, in his identification of the relation between material production and cultural experience, recognises the socially constitutive nature of material life. My engagement with cultural materialism is guided by Harvie’s assertion of ‘culture as always enmeshed in social, material and historical conditions; contributing to the production of ideologies; and therefore important to consider in the construction of social relations, especially hierarchies of class’.89 Harvie’s emphasis on the ‘production of ideologies’ and socially stratified power relations resonates with important areas of investigation in this research. Therefore, I utilise Harvie’s work as a model through which to interrogate the politics of labour in contemporary performance and explore the social, political, and cultural implications of participatory arts projects. Further, my research adopts Ric Knowles’ approach of ‘historicising the here and now’, documenting the plurality of representations emerging around unemployment between 2010 and 2018.90 In so doing, it challenges the stability of dominant narratives of welfare provision that may appear significant in future histories of the period.91 My intention to highlight, document, and provoke instances of ‘dissident’ practices within socially engaged and applied arts uses the methodological framework of cultural materialism to anchor and activate my critique of the distribution of power in labour markets, social policy, and performance. Utilising a cultural materialist approach engenders a space for oppositional intervention and illuminates how such representations function within neoliberal modes of governance.
Alongside cultural materialism, I use critical discourse analysis to engage with linguistic, visual, and embodied texts deployed by different stakeholders in relation to unemployment. Social semiotician Theo van Leeuwen notes, critical discourse analysis has ‘moved beyond language, taking on board that discourses are often multimodally realised, not only through text and talk but also through other modes of communication such as images’.92 Therefore, alongside close readings of policy and articulations of state and artist agendas, my interrogation of imagery and embodied performance is also informed by critical discourse analysis. This approach is fundamentally concerned with tracing how discourse is formulated through social and cultural practices while asserting that discourse also produces social relationships. I am concerned with the dialogic construction of discourses around unemployment, investigating where arts practice is ideologically and practically inflected by dominant discourses and also where it might hold the potential to reconstitute prevalent representations of the unemployed.
At its core critical discourse, analysis is concerned with what Ruth Wodak and Michael Mayer have termed ‘de-mystifying’ the distribution of power, hegemonic ideologies, and institutional structures through promoting close evaluations of the semiotic encounters that enact and articulate these outcomes.93 As linguist Jane Mulderrig states, it is ‘[a] form of intervention in social practices and social relationships’, which hopes to highlight and challenge social inequalities.94 This desire to expose social inequalities and identify how such inequalities are enacted threads throughout this book; I aim to underscore latent ideologies that serve to naturalise, neutralise, and maintain unequal power relations. Applied performance is implicitly concerned with engaging groups to co-produce representations of their context; it is therefore necessary to reflect how such projects co-create discourses and to consider the effect of the linguistic frames practitioners construct on participants. The critical methodologies of this project therefore focus on neoliberal labour systems and state welfare through a materially informed and semiotic analysis of policy documents, performance practices, and media representations, in order to understand how various elements function together to construct identities of unemployed individuals.
Chapter 2 explores shifting agendas in arts funding and engages with growing debates around potentially exploitative and exclusionary working conditions in the arts sector. I analyse public service policies and strategic arts funding in order to map out the marketisation of state services over the past decade and identify the arts sector’s increasing investment in cultural commissioning. In particular, I explore how arts organisations have engaged with both state-funded welfare-to-work schemes and a renewed government emphasis on apprenticeships since 2010. I focus on two nationally funded arts-based employability projects, the Creative Employment Programme (2013–15) and Talent Match (2014–). Through examining the potential instrumentalisation and linguistic co-optation of arts practice in the service of employability agendas, I consider how the economic vocabularies of state-sanctioned discourse can effectively contaminate ideologies of community which may exist in socially engaged performance. However, I also highlight the desire across arts organisations to make positive interventions in employment practices including rejecting the monetisation of learners, cultivating community practice, and encouraging collaborative working.
Chapter 3 tracks contested notions of community in political rhetoric and models of social welfare through an analysis of increased individualism, eroding networks of dependency, and moments of collective action. I argue that shifts in discourse and policy impact on community arts practice and thus provoke a need to reconsider how community is politicised, presented, and encountered within such projects. Underpinned by Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, the chapter considers how the discourses of individual transformation and empowerment, which operate within some community performance, might render participants at fault for their failure to correctly carry out their function within a post-Fordist capitalist society.95 I explore two performances—Cardboard Citizens’ Benefit (2015) and Brighton People’s Theatre’s Tighten Our Belts (2016)—to argue that the strategies and accompanying performance vocabularies deployed in these productions interpolated different understandings of responsibility and community in relation to the unemployed figure. This chapter draws on emerging scholarship addressing care in performance and stresses the importance of reflecting on how formal approaches to community practice foster networks of dependency and collective accountability in performance.96 Further, I undertake a performance analysis of policy that identifies how certain policy agendas might be enacted onstage and also where we might usefully examine performance practices alongside policy documents in order to see where these two fields conflate and conflict.
Chapter 4 focuses on The Bite Back Movement’s A Dangerous Figure (2013), the only visual arts project examined in the book, to explore how artistic representations of unemployment utilise tactics of visibility and invisibility in order for participants to negotiate policy, social constructions of shame, and a context of civil unrest. Exploring the hypervisibility of young claimants—particularly young Black people and people of colour—after the economic collapse of 2008 and the England Riots of 2011, this chapter identifies the complexities attached to appearing unemployed. I engage with the construction of threat in relation to images of youth, race, and the ‘underclass’, both highlighting the demonisation of these groups and utilising that demonisation as an affective strategy to activate change. My discussion is rooted in queer and feminist articulations of navigating violent arenas of representation, drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification, Peggy Phelan’s nuancing of visibility, alongside an interrogation of Jacques Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’.97 By holding Rancière, Phelan, and Muñoz together, I tease out the complexities of, and paradoxes within, visibility and invisibility in arts practice with marginalised or stigmatised communities.
In Chap. 5, I examine how the welfare system is underpinned by the concept of biopolitics—the governance of life processes and populations—in order to expose the acute contention between the living body of the unemployed individual and the legal status of the benefit claimant. Drawing on two examples, Tangled Feet’s One Million (2013) and Helix Arts’ MindFULL (2013), I propose that applied performance deploys bodily strategies that disrupt the construction of the unemployed in political rhetoric and unsettle rigid definitions of labour in neoliberal work regimes. In particular, I consider three different intersections of productivity, the body, and labour: (1) the radical potential of reanimating unemployed bodies as productive in performance, (2) the problematic valorisation of labour in participatory arts practice, and (3) how depictions of unproductive bodies that reject, and are rejected by, reductive state definitions of labour might present new models of resistance in arts practice. Although participatory performance risks unquestioningly valorising labour, a self-reflexive approach to performing labour is uniquely positioned to critique it through the powerful aesthetic and symbolic tools it accesses.
Chapter 6 recognises that representations of, and encounters with, unemployment remain overtly gendered. I examine Spent (2016) and Joanne (2016) by Clean Break Theatre Company, alongside the work of Woman and Theatre, to reflect on key issues in feminist performance examining austerity, work, and welfare. I draw on Silvia Federici’s writing on social reproduction to read representations of women’s unemployment onstage alongside understandings of labour beyond waged work. In tracking the remuneration of participants, I highlight economies of participation and document developing strategies to navigate state welfare systems and pay participants while not causing disruption to people’s benefits. I utilise this specific context to ask: Does applied performance as a discipline echo or disrupt the value systems attributed to waged labour and unwaged acts of care or reproduction? This chapter asserts applied performance’s capacity to both perform acts of care and, as a discipline, embody a care-full practice which unsettles traditional forms of exchange but also locates applied performance itself as a precariously placed practice.
By looking at applied and socially committed performances of unemployment, Performing Welfare examines economies of participation and reveals how such projects might reconstitute notions of work and non-work. It reflects on the material realities of labour and participation among exploited groups under later capitalism and within applied performance. Further, given my particular focus on welfare reform, this research underscores the relationship between government policy and arts practice, where the two coalesce and conflict and how both participants and artists are inflected by this relationship. Finally, in engaging with unemployed individuals, it offers an urgent perspective on practices of visibility and invisibility being deployed in socially committed performance practices with marginalised subjects.