The notion of community has been persistently debased by neoliberal ideologies of individualism. Successive governments have disinvested in models of sociality and communal practices of care and support. What, then, are the consequences for a performance form that invokes collective understandings of community? We must be attentive to how our work responds to and participates in changes in the practices, articulations, and parameters of community. Here I am interested in considering the effect of the deterioration of the welfare state on community performance practices. Dominant narratives in UK welfare policy frame the individual as responsible for their own employment status while instrumentalising the notion of community in order to facilitate, and thereby justify, the withdrawal of public services. Understanding the welfare state as a network of guaranteed social security, both a symbolic and structural iteration of community, I explore what bearing the reduction of state-provided collective support and a renewed emphasis on the individual worker have on art forms explicitly dealing with the communal, specifically forum theatre and people’s theatres. My contention is that community performance includes formal approaches that inadvertently inscribe discourses of individual responsibility on the participant; at the same time, such performance also offers the potential to construct an aesthetics of dependency that reasserts community accountability and systems of networked support in a period of acute neoliberal individualism.
Exploring an aesthetics of dependency, I reflect on the organisation of intersecting texts, processes, and forms of interdependence interpolated by the UK government, whose linguistic framing of dependency is increasingly corrosive. Equally, an aesthetics of dependency is threaded throughout community performance, which is entangled in state engagements with dependency but also offers its own forms and practices through which to articulate new approaches that celebrate collective support and shared responsibility. Understanding in what ways an aesthetics of dependency emerges in community performance during a period of reduced social security acknowledges how different ways of living may be modelled by such practices. Finally, by deploying this term, I assert the need to examine the interlocking aesthetic positions of state articulations of the individual and community with how community performance positions and undertakes its practice. In a period of accelerating erosion of state-sanctioned social security, it is vital for arts practitioners to foster collective action and community attachments in order publicly to perform acts of dependency, thereby highlighting our interdependence as a pressing social issue and useful political strategy.
Against the backdrop of the co-opting of discourses of community by the UK state and the proliferation of a rhetoric of individual responsibility in welfare policy, my analysis of community performance interrogates the potential for arts practice to engender what Lauren Berlant has termed ‘cruel optimism’. This concept identifies the dependence of individuals on the very systems, structures, and desires of their oppression. Cruel optimism provides a lens through which to consider 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. Further, Berlant constitutes such affective attachments as indicative of the collapse of any promise of the good life amid a ‘crisis of ordinariness’ in contemporary Western capitalist culture (2010: 11).1 Such a state of being, characterised by Berlant as ‘impasse’, emerges clearly in the dual precarity and potentiality of the unemployed in the UK after the economic crash of 2008. This experience of impasse can be seen in instances of citizens locked out of oversaturated labour markets and yet also met with an increasingly demanding claimant contract that requires them to continuously demonstrate they are seeking jobs which they are unsuitable for.2 Here I examine how different practices in community performance might represent and/or seek to intervene in the encounter with impasse experienced by unemployed people in the UK.
Cardboard Citizens’ forum theatre play Benefit (2015) and Brighton People’s Theatre’s Tighten Our Belts (2016) are embedded in different performance lineages and ideologies that inflect how they construct unemployment in performance. My exploration of Benefit considers the problematic positioning of the unemployed individual as protagonist in a forum theatre model that casts such a figure as able to make, and be responsible for undertaking, productive changes to systemic problems. However, I also identify how Benefit , and forum theatre more broadly, has the potential to acutely illuminate the importance of support networks and organisations that surround the individual through enabling spectators to intervene as both the protagonist and in supporting roles. My engagement with Tighten Our Belts provides scope to reflect on the socially and politically radical history of people’s theatres in the UK and identifies the aesthetic strategies deployed by Brighton People’s Theatre to promote collective action. I identify the aesthetic strategies that emerge in Tighten Our Belts and Benefit , asserting the potential for community performance to enact and celebrate dependency, social responsibility, and collective action. The stigmatisation of the individual in social policy and the proliferation of emptied out political discourses of community provoke questions for languages, practices, and aesthetics within community performance.
Benefit and Tighten Our Belts: Lineages of Forum Theatre and People’s Theatres
Theatre-maker Adrian Jackson founded Cardboard Citizens in 1991 with the aim ‘to change the lives of homeless people through the performing arts’.3 Jackson’s practice has been profoundly influenced by his relationship with theatre practitioner Augusto Boal, whose work Jackson has been a leading proponent of in the UK.4 Cardboard Citizens’ practice is therefore bound up with the pedagogical and performance strategies of Boal.5 Based on approaches explored by educational philosopher Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Boal developed Theatre of the Oppressed in the 1970s.6 This approach to performance has developed to include an expansive series of aesthetic strategies underpinned by the desire to promote dialogue between spectator and actor and to render oppressed individuals agency to enact change. Forum theatre, as performance scholar Francis Babbage notes, is usefully set within a context of other practices that emerged at a similar time such as ‘Theatre in Education’, ‘Conflict Theatre’, and ‘Therapeutic Theatre’.7 Such an assemblage of practices indicates the pedagogical, resolution-based, and compassionate principles at play within the form. More specifically, forum theatre takes the model of initially presenting a play that depicts a specific issue and then asking audiences to make interventions in the protagonist’s choices in order to change their situation of oppression. These interactions are negotiated by a member of the company, labelled as the Joker, who supports audience interventions and facilitates discussion around the performance. As Babbage describes, forum seeks to allow audiences to ‘experiment with all possible manoeuvres to break the pattern of oppression that the […] play has dramatised’.8 This enables members of marginalised communities to attempt different approaches to challenging or navigating the constraints of their situation.
Benefit was Cardboard Citizens’ biggest forum theatre tour to date in 2015, playing 60 performances across 37 different UK venues (a combination of theatres, hostels, day centres, and prisons) between March and June of that year.9 The tour was part of a larger two-year project that consisted of UK-wide tours of three forum theatre productions, alongside a series of workshops for service users and arts organisations and several residencies at different regional hubs.10 Cardboard Citizens were building on the success of the smaller tour (12 shows in nine different venues) of Kate Tempest’s Glasshouse (2014).11 However, this marked a significant expansion of the company’s existing provision and evidenced a desire to increase Cardboard Citizens’ national profile through developing the collaborations that they undertake with regional partners. The company received the majority of the funds for this project from Arts Council England’s (ACE’s) Strategic Touring Fund, who awarded them £275,000 of the £450,219 cost of the two-year project. This was supplemented by utilising £60,000 of Cardboard Citizens’ National Portfolio Organisation funding, alongside London Boroughs (£10,000) and Big Lottery (£33,000) funding, and a range of smaller grants and box office takings.12
Benefit , written by Sarah Woods, was the first of these three pieces to be produced and toured. The set, a white cube open on three sides and framed by red piping, beams with the glow of institutional lighting. This space begins sparse and clean, but as the play progresses, it becomes more and more populated with plastic blue chairs, each one representing another claimant, stuck in the system. The play presents the interwoven stories of three characters struggling to access the labour market and subsequently the benefit system. Rosa is a second-generation Chilean immigrant, a single parent who has taken time out of work to bring up children and support her ageing mother. She finds herself signed up to employability courses that clash with job interviews and collide with signing-on appointments. Unable to determine which to choose, she is inevitably sanctioned—financially penalised, with her benefits stopped for a set period. Craig has a zero-hour contract on a building site, initially he is getting enough work, but steadily his hours are reduced. Unwilling to communicate with his partner Chloe, he distances himself from her. Craig’s shift from underemployed to unemployed is mapped against his feelings of emasculation, and this leads to an addiction to pornography. Patrick suffers from an undisclosed mental health issue. He has a number of negative encounters with service providers, who become irritated by their inability to easily fit him within the rigid structure of the benefit system. Patrick consistently fails to understand what is required of him and consequently is repeatedly sanctioned. Unable to navigate the impenetrability of the welfare system, he is rendered isolated and speechless by the close of the play. These four characters, who cross paths at foodbanks, Jobcentres, and employability courses, each represent a myriad of different struggles within the labour market and benefits system: migration, automation, precarity, sanctions, failing social services, debt, and housing. The company outlined that the production sought to ‘respond to contested social welfare reform issues high on government/media agenda’ and offer ‘an insight into lives, loves and the social systems upon which these depend’.13 Threaded throughout Benefit is a thematic focus on welfare dependency and a formal invocation of modes of performance that are dependent both on the audience to collectively intervene and on the protagonist to make a productive change.
Brighton People’s Theatre was established in 2015 with the desire to ‘make theatre for the people, by the people’.14 Artistic Director Naomi Alexander describes the company’s emergence as an attempt to diversify cultural engagement during a period of economic austerity: ‘[d]uring a time of austerity with the cuts hitting the poorest, hardest, why is public subsidy of the arts being used in a way to produce work that primarily attracts white, wealthy, well-educated professionals to the theatre?’.15 The company originated from a collaboration with Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project (BUCFP) where Alexander ran five exploratory workshops for service users at the Centre, followed by ten open workshops to more intensively explore themes pertinent to the group that was forming. Collaborating with Alexander, these participants then formed a company and established a relationship with the Brighton Dome.16
Tighten Our Belts was Brighton People’s Theatre’s first production, developed over 15 months with service users, staff, and volunteers from BUCFP. The performance was created through a series of research and development workshops exploring themes of austerity and different approaches to performance drawing on contemporary performer makers such as Chris Goode and Bryony Kimmings. Alongside these artists, Alexander utilised the devising approach ‘from source to performance’ developed by Islington Community Theatre’s Ned Glasier to underpin the Brighton People’s Theatre’s making process.17 The group of 11–13 non-professional performers did a work-in-progress sharing in February 2016; this was followed by a full-length performance on 26 November 2016; both performances took place at the Brighton Dome.18 The project received a £15,000 Grants for the Arts award from ACE while the performance was in development in July 2015; it received a further Grants for the Arts award, again of £15,000, in June 2016.19 The company was also awarded funding from Unity Theatre Trust and Greenhouse, alongside £500 finance and approximately £5000 worth of in-kind support from the Brighton Dome.20 In keeping with the company’s desire for accessibility, Tighten Our Belts operated a ‘pay what you can’ ticketing system. There was a clear appetite for the performance and a responsiveness to the payment structure; initially only scheduled for a single evening performance, the show sold out all 200 seats before any advertising could be distributed. The Brighton Dome agreed to hold an additional matinee performance, which also sold out.21 For their matinee and evening performance, the company took £2200 on the door.22
The performance followed a series of characters struggling with the realities of austerity policies: an elderly woman who waits for carers who never come, unemployed benefit claimants facing the threat of sanctioning, a disempowered foodbank volunteer feeling unable to offer sustained or sufficient support, and a Jobcentre worker under acute pressure. The performers introduced themselves at the outset and dropped in and out of different roles, with the line between performer and character often blurred; this served to emphasise these stories as real situations, happening to real people. Directed by Alexander, with a creative team including contemporary dancer Gary Clarke, from dance organisation Hiccup, and dramaturg Lou Cope, the production utilised a range of formal approaches from agitprop, movement pieces, third-person monologues, and political songs, together composing a number of vignettes, providing snapshots of characters rather than a singular complete narrative. Performed on a sparse stage, against a white backdrop with a stark sketch of the Brighton skyline, the production had an austere aesthetic. Performers sat at the back of the stage throughout, on similar blue chairs to those which appear in Benefit , the universal signifier of institutional space.
In the positioning of Brighton People’s Theatre, specifically as a people’s theatre, the company locates itself in a historical lineage of radical community performance practices. Indicative examples of such a rich history of civic theatres are the Unity Theatres in, among other cities, Liverpool, London, and Glasgow and the Newcastle People’s Theatre, all of which were part of a constellation of amateur companies borne out of the Workers’ Theatre Movement and rooted in socialist beginnings that flourished from the early 1900s, particularly post-1945.23 Funded in part by the Unity Theatre Trust and first collaborating with BUCFP, Brighton People’s Theatre echoes this historical association with radical community practices. In 1980 the Trade Union Centre agreed to establish a number of unemployed workers’ centres, ‘to advise, assist and involve unemployed workers’.24 BUCFP was established in 1981 in response to high unemployment and, in terms not dissimilar to those I have quoted from Alexander earlier, sought to locate the unemployed individual in a network of broader concerns: ‘[i]t’s not our task to make life more tolerable for the unemployed, nor to reconcile them to their fate, but to raise them up to fight the capitalist system which creates mass unemployment in the midst of plenty’.25 The Centre has offered a range of provision that has sought to provide education, welfare advice, housing support, and childcare for the unemployed in the Brighton and Hove area. By making BUCFP their first collaborative partners, Brighton People’s Theatre have, as Alexander states, ‘put theatre at the heart of civic and artistic life of the city’.26 Brighton People’s Theatre have subsequently received funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to undertake a project in 2019 exploring their potential for operating as a civic theatre for Brighton.27
In unpicking the complexities of terminology for alternative theatre in Britain, Baz Kershaw identifies that, ‘the European notion of a “people’s theatre” was used to suggest either a broad, class-based politicised theatre or a liberal theatrical embrace of the whole population’.28 Tighten Our Belts certainly asserts Brighton People’s Theatre’s creation of performance that interrogates relationships of class and inequality.29 Further, the company’s inclusive remit also aligns it with Kershaw’s latter articulation of people’s theatre, with their website stating a desire to ‘create a theatre company that is owned and loved by the people of the city. They love it because it makes shows about things that matter to them, and because those shows have them performing in it’.30 Brighton People’s Theatre seek to represent a community’s concerns back to itself in order to galvanise political action, marrying Kershaw’s two foundational tenets of community collaboration and politicised performance in their practice. The company indicates an intention to reclaim theatres as a space where people can participate in creative practice and see themselves represented, reasserting the civic function of the theatre space for its local community.
Invoking and Instrumentalising Narratives of Community
Increasingly the language of community is deployed in political discourse in order to identify ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens. I expand below on the specifics of such a derision of community in policy narratives and the concurrent shift away from community arts as a label for socially focused practices; but first I briefly ground my articulation of community and its function within welfare discourse and performance practices. Benedict Anderson’s writing on nation, which he defines as an ‘imagined political community’, understands community as an ideological, symbolic, and regulating construct.31 Anderson asserts that ‘[c]ommunities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but in the style in which they are imagined’.32 This privileges an examination of the modes through which a community, and shared identity, is produced. How communities are ‘imagined’ and affirmed, both in political discourse and cultural practice, is what I am concerned with here. Similarly, Gerard Delanty, who traces the theorisation of community in modern sociology and anthropology, attends to three major conceptions of community: as tradition, as moral agent, and as symbolic.33 By deploying these three foci, Delanty argues, ‘[c]ommunity has been an important normative dimension of democracy, civic culture, and even radicalness’.34 Delanty’s layered conception of the term attests to understandings of community in relation to both regulative civic structures and radical social practices. I appeal to intersecting understandings of community, collectivity, and social welfare while also acknowledging the potential for such concepts to be utilised in service to capitalist modes of accumulation that entrench inequality.
It is important to emphasise that beyond the rhetorical, social, and symbolic production of community my analysis here is also concerned with how and why community is interpolated by both governments and artists. As Miranda Joseph illuminates, the invocation of community can function to legitimate inequality, entrench oppressive power structures, and underpin the violent functions of capitalism; Joseph asserts that only through working to reveal the intersections of social and radical formations of community with neoliberal agendas can we seek to develop effective modes of collective resistance. Joseph’s warning that ‘fetishizing community only makes us blind to the ways we might intervene in the enactment of domination and exploitation’ is a pertinent consideration for community performance scholars and practitioners.35 Thinking again of Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism and applying Joseph’s work to an analysis of community performance underlines where such practice might risk reinforcing damaging narratives of community that maintain structural inequality. It also illuminates the potential for genuine collective interventions that articulate and share strategies of resistance to the domination of capital.
Matarasso tracks changes in the economic and cultural landscape of the UK to suggest that the trend of shedding the name community arts parallels the dissolution of the significance of community within political discourse in the UK, from the Thatcher government onwards. There has been a move against the deploying of community in relation to arts projects, which he attributes to a broader debasement of the value of community. Matarasso’s reading of community arts practice as implicitly bound up with how the state deploys narratives of community is particularly useful as it recognises the intersection of state and aesthetic practices. Examining how community is invoked in specific areas of welfare policy further highlights the intersection of the two. Additionally, it underscores the importance of understanding such relationships in community performance practices representing the welfare system.The renaming of community arts is not without meaning. It is both symptom and indicator of a profound change in the politics of Britain after the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979, a change that saw individual enterprise promoted at the expense of shared enterprise and a recasting of the citizen as a consumer engaged in transactions rather than relationships.36
In 1910 the Network of Labour Exchanges was founded, and on 1 February that year, 62 offices, forerunners to the modern Jobcentre Plus, opened across the country to provide employment support to those looking for work. These Labour Exchanges were an ideological shift away from the Poor Laws of the Victorian era and, on opening one in 1910, Winston Churchill (then President of the Board of Trade) stated: ‘[t]hey are a piece of social mechanism, absolutely essential I believe, to a well-ordered community’.37 This entreaty to ‘community’ from the outset of welfare reform in the early twentieth century is indicative of the marriage of welfare, employment, and community in political discourse, pointing to the centrality of welfare to conceptions of community support in the UK. The Labour Exchanges were the first steps towards national state-sanctioned employment support and were indicative of broader social reform.38 As I outlined in my introductory chapter, just over 40 years later, ‘The Social Insurance and Allied Services Report’ was produced by William Beveridge in 1942, and subsequently the National Insurance Act 1946 established the first comprehensive social security system in the UK.39 This expansive system was created in order to protect citizens ‘from cradle to grave’ and offered access to support in period of sickness, unemployment, and retirement.40 The National Assistance Act 1948 further broadened this financial support to all citizens even if you had not previously made National Insurance contributions.41 As such, with the release of the Beveridge Report in 1942, the lone figure of the individual in UK welfare policy looked to be redundant. Instead the state cultivated a ‘new type of human institution’, where ‘men stand together with their fellows’ to engender a ‘pooling of social risks’.42 The state here overtly acknowledged the unequal distribution of labour and health provision and so advocated for an increased social and economic interdependence, a collective response.
Parallel to the ‘social turn’ in arts practice, since the 1990s there has been a ‘communitarian turn’ in social policy: an increased focus on the community in political discourse, specifically on the interrelation of the community and the individual. Shortly after his election in 1997, Tony Blair made a speech on the Aylesbury Housing Estate in South London, in which he outlined New Labour’s social exclusion policy to address chronic inequality and reshape Britain as ‘one nation’, in which each citizen ‘has a stake’.43 Half a century on from the introduction of the welfare state, Blair’s language echoes the sharing of social risk for which Beveridge advocated, and yet there is an underlying emphasis on the parallel assertion of personal obligations rather than social rights. Despite overt discourses of inclusion, the ‘third way’ politics of New Labour were rooted in expanding personal responsibility and establishing the protection and promotion of neoliberal markets. Elected in 2010, the Coalition government further extended the responsibility of the citizen with the introduction of the Big Society, an initiative launched by David Cameron that appealed to volunteerism, community activation, and an amplified rhetoric of good citizenship in service to the contraction of the state and disinvestment in public services. Appealing to an increase of agency for the British people, Cameron stated in a speech dedicated to the initiative in Liverpool 2010, ‘You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society’ (2010). This affirms the focus of the policy on a smaller state, market expansion, and a narrative of personal responsibility. Community remains a key tenet in UK political discourse in the twenty-first century. These policies have spoken directly to participatory and community arts practice, even engaging such practices as strategies to support their implementation. However, as Lynne Hancock, Gerry Mooney, and Sarah Neal note, ‘community provides no opposition to, and can be employed to facilitate, neoliberal imaginaries of an alternative to state provided welfare’.44 A malleable political resource, community has been instrumentalised by successive governments since 1997; post-2010 this has been at the service of the withdrawal of the state from public provision.
Alexander identifies the exclusionary discourse of community and the increasing deployment of the term in service to ‘fixing people’; she outlines the potential for people’s theatre to function as a more open invitation to people in Brighton. This aligns with Joseph’s assertion of community as a potentially othering or oppressive force, which may be exploited to regulate citizens or establish value hierarchies.46 Further, Alexander’s comment points to the association of community theatre with an instrumentalisation of publicly funded arts projects by a political sphere that seeks to deploy community as a behavioural corrective. Despite this, the concurrent focus of Brighton People’s Theatre on developing people’s artistic sensibility by providing opportunities to ‘collaborate creatively’ aligns with foundational ideologies that have historically underpinned community arts practices. Elsewhere Alexander has noted that there is a ‘growing movement of people’s theatres in the UK and I’m interested in aligning with that—to be learning and supporting other practitioners who are working in this political way’.47 This further gestures towards the depoliticising of the language of community within the community arts movement as the term has increasingly been co-opted into problematic political discourse.The term community is so contested and so loaded and I don’t think that community is always a positive thing, I think community can be really restrictive. […] But I would say the values that I ascribe to in establishing the People’s Theatre really resonate with the broader community arts movement […]. What I’m really interested in is investing in people and their capacity theatrically and ability to collaborate creatively over the long haul. I’m really not interested in doing short term projects to fix people.45
A turn towards social objectives in arts projects can be undermined by the disingenuous engagement with community in public policy, which serves to destabilise engagements with the communal. Analysed alongside a particular focus on welfare provision, these shifts have emptied out notions of an all-encompassing social system of support and functioned to enable the recession of the state. This instrumentalisation of community in political discourse has shifted understandings of and practices within the community arts movement and thus requires scholars and practitioners to review the strategies that operate within such arts practice. As Brighton People’s Theatre demonstrate, despite a rhetorical shift away from community in response to political and economic co-opting, there is a renewed appetite for collaboration in this context, alongside a desire for civic participation through arts engagement and an acknowledgement of the benefits of affective arts projects.
Modelling Individual Responsibility: Social Policy and the Spect-actor
The catastrophic failing of neoliberalism encapsulated by the economic crash has led to a doubling down on rhetoric and policies that promote privatisation and marketisation; deny structural problems in the organisation of the state while also reducing public provision; and above all hold up and demonise poor, marginalised, and disempowered people who in any way depend on state support. In relation to welfare, dependency has been reconceived as ‘statism’, while unemployment is framed as an individual behavioural failing rather than acknowledging labour prospects operating within the context of global economic crisis and, more broadly, a system of structural inequality and geographically contingent opportunities.the crafting and selling of a repackaged neo-liberal vision of welfare reform is an exercise in misdirection and revivification. The UK Coalition government discourse on social security, poverty and unemployment seeks to renew the validity of behavioural explanations for social problems and tie this to the supposed failure of ‘statist’ intervention under New Labour. Public attention is diverted from a failing neo-liberal model of political economy whilst long-standing elite preferences for the hallmarks of neo-liberalism […] are repackaged as bold new policy developments.48
In a period where the neoliberal model is faltering, the implementation of policies and legislation that further entrench its ideologies, and subsequently further increase inequality, has been made possible through the rhetorical performance of political discourse that misdirects public anger at fiscal austerity towards the most dispossessed. As linguistics scholar Norman Fairclough notes in his analysis of a series of Department for Work and Pensions White Papers, such language allows governments to construct a problem-solution model of policy in order to champion their particular policy preferences.49 It linguistically constructs a certain type of individual and their behaviours in order to disconnect their unemployment from the economic ecology operating regionally and globally. The availability of jobs and the particularities of local businesses (such as seasonal cycles) are thus removed from consideration. This makes it easier to introduce enforced attendance at state employability programmes and reduced financial support. These are seen as solutions to the problem of the scrounger.
In such a policy context, the performance form of Cardboard Citizens’ forum performance Benefit reinforced the problem-solution model that pervaded welfare discourse during this period. Boal states, ‘by taking the stage, the Spect-Actor is consciously performing a responsible act’.50 In Benefit the spect-actor assumed responsibility (in character) as the individual and so compounded the absolution of the state or business sector in employment rhetoric. Cardboard Citizens assert that the production sought to offer ‘observations of contemporary life to weave imaginative stories about the choices human make’; further, the company identify the forum structure they adopt as ‘invit[ing] participation through theatrical debate and audience-led problem-solving’.51 The characters are thus situated as making bad ‘choices’ that the audience can seek to correct with their collective ‘problem-solving’ skills. In his reflection on the discursive element of forum processes, Paul Dwyer asks, ‘to what extent does a given dramaturgical modeling of a particular social problem bind us to discursive regimes which allow only certain ways of thinking about and carrying forward the process of social change?’52 In the performance of Benefit , I saw the dramaturgical model presented to us only allowed audience members to alter the protagonists’ actions. The possibility that individual protagonists might not be able to suitably intervene and offer solutions to the multi-layered series of crises they were each facing was not considered. During the discursive aspect of the post-show forum, audiences may have felt a sense of solidarity around the issues raised, potentially drawing parallels between the characters and their own experiences. Yet, while this was collectively debated, I propose the formal structure of Benefit inadvertently supported a neoliberal framework of individual responsibility.
In his writing and practice, Boal consistently maintained that investigating oppressions through individual encounters and experiences can stimulate social critique and broader systemic change. While I accept the interdependence of the political and the personal, I found it difficult to negotiate in the performance form of Benefit . There is certainly value in providing the opportunity to destabilise the inevitability of individual oppressions; however, returning total agency to the individual fails to acknowledge the cultures of blame this unintentionally promotes or recognise the infrastructural problems that the individual cannot single-handedly dismantle. In the performance I saw, the audience chose to intervene in Craig and Chloe’s story. The couple’s narrative has their problematic relationship at its heart; hence, the interventions made during the forum were focused around the discussion of the couple’s deteriorating communication and ability to support one another in difficult economic circumstance. While the Joker facilitating the forum of the performance continued to direct spect-actor towards a consideration of the broader labour context of their experience, there was a reticence to make interventions exploring this aspect of the story. I suggest this was a reaction of avoidance to the structural complexity of what was being asked of individuals in relation to work and unemployment. Terry O’Leary, who jokered Benefit , commented that the format allowed audience members ‘to come onstage and […] use their life experiences to think of strategies to get a better outcome for our protagonist’.53 However, Benefit depicted, with great accuracy, the violence and inflexibility of the welfare system in the UK and the exhausting struggle of trying to obtain much needed state assistance. The characters’ decisions were not at fault but instead illuminated the flaws in the system.
On 2 June 2015, the production was live-streamed and the audience elected to forum Patrick’s story, which had in the main performance followed the difficulties he faced navigating the complex welfare systems as someone with mental health issues and a disability benefit claimant. The response on Twitter illuminates the tension embedded within this performance style, with Pilot TV who were facilitating the live-stream asking at the interval: ‘#BenefitPlayLive Would you have done anything different? Are these situations familiar?’54 Responses garnered included: ‘could Patrick speak to Chloe in the drs waiting room? Could this connection be developed?’; ‘Patrick should research on the Internet to tell doctor about the need of having the specialist support’; ‘perhaps Patrick should be getting medical diagnosis in order to apply for incapacity benefit’.55 These well-meaning interventions still sought to attribute responsibility to the individual, which was particularly difficult in relation to the character of Patrick given that he had a number of complex needs that may emerge as obstacles to obtaining the correct support. As one respondent replied, ‘Interesting to see people’s understanding of mental illness, “why doesn’t he ask for help” #ifonlyitwerethatsimple’.56 The representation of Patrick was carefully constructed by Cardboard Citizens, who attempted to recreate his disorientated experience of the world by characters speaking in muddled up sentences when addressing him. This perplexing language served to disorient the audience and so gave insight into how Patrick encountered the world. However, the forum format then rendered Patrick’s attempts to engage with the benefit system insufficient, suggestions from participants indicating that he should do more to seek help for himself.
Chandler notes a need to gather as a group of individuals affected by this and share approaches to navigating the systems depicted in the play and encountered in reality. The piece did elicit an emotive response from audiences, and it spoke with relevance to the pressures brought about by welfare reforms.58 Indeed, in a discourse so saturated with negative language, Cardboard Citizens’ stimulation of debate provides a useful arena for discussion. However, in eliciting the help of the audience to solve these characters’ situations, Benefit indicates the potential for some established strategies of community performance to fail to attend to the structural context in which that individual exists.[t]hat’s been one of the challenges of this play […] the issues that are being presented […] have been brought about by an external system which we as individuals don’t feel we can do much about. But that’s also the point: OK these systems are really difficult, what do we need to do to help navigate them […] so we can get the best possible outcomes?57
In utilising a forum approach, Benefit constructs the same model Fairclough identified in the design of the policy document: a problem-solution model; but watching Benefit I felt incapable of offering an active solution to any of the characters’ problems. Therefore, it is the form of the performance which enacts Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, ‘when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for what a person or a people risks striving’.59 Benefit depicts the affective and unrelenting attachments we can hold to actions or ideologies that actually encumber our desires. That is, Benefit performed the very discourse values it sought to challenge, it hoped to empower the unemployed, and yet it inadvertently positioned them, as many policy documents do, as at fault for their situation. As such, the performance raises some key questions around the terminology of transformation, which Helen Nicholson has posed: ‘If the motive is individual or personal transformation, is this something which is done to the participants, with them, or by them? Whose values and interests does the transformation serve?’60 Cardboard Citizens are explicit that their work seeks to challenge the welfare system; however, the practice remains focused on cultivating the personal transformation of the individual. Such a transformation inadvertently serves the ends of the state through an attribution of responsibility and culpability to the individual. Similarly, socially engaged and participatory projects aimed at the unemployed, that primarily aim to develop the soft skills of participants, fail to problematise underlying dysfunctions within the welfare system. Such projects further redirect attention from the structural causes of social problems. It is therefore imperative to be alert to the individualised language of social policy seeping into socially engaged performance and instead strive for practice that identifies collective and relational responses.
Performing an Aesthetics of Dependency: Shared Narratives and Staging Systems of Support
State language that seeks to reattribute responsibility for employment to the individual undermines ‘dependency’ and promotes a language centred around ‘empowerment’. Given the resonance and recurrence of such terminologies in community performance, it is important to reflect on how practitioners working in this area might foster or undermine experiences of ‘dependency’ and ‘empowerment’ and how such terminology intersects with government rhetoric.Government discourse becomes a central tool in legitimising and enacting this transaction; in a supply-side economic system, where the government no longer makes guarantees of financial support, ‘welfare’ must be cast in a negative evaluative frame, where receiving it becomes ‘dependency’ and removing it becomes ‘empowerment’.61
Dependency has been consistently recognised as negative in welfare policy since the early 1990s, with this negativity intensifying after the formation of the Coalition government in 2010.62 Alongside promoting greater conditionality around claiming benefit, the persistent debasing of dependency has fractured the positive framing of communal risk embraced by the Beveridge Report. As I gestured to in the Introduction to this book, sociologist Richard Sennett argues for the resistance of this neoliberal tendency to view dependence as a kind of ‘social parasitism’.63 Indeed he advocates for us to adopt a more optimistic conception of it because undermining dependence ‘erodes mutual trust and commitment, and the lack of these social bonds threatens the workings of any collective enterprise’.64 Such an erosion of trust has occurred through the linguistic corruption of dependence in contemporary political discourse. As Sennett notes, ‘“We” has become an act of self-protection’, wherein subjects differentiate themselves from the other, an act of rejection and distancing, in this case, utilised in political rhetoric to seed the false dichotomy between those who contribute to the state and those who take from it.65
Both performances addressed here allude powerfully to the vilification of dependency and the toxic discourse that has grown up around benefit claimants. Throughout Benefit there is a recurrent linguistic motif, ‘did you hear the one about…?’, a question that punctuates the performance, each time with a different tale of someone who was sanctioned or had their benefit entirely stopped as a result of the inhumane bureaucracy of the benefit system. ‘Did you hear the one about the blind woman who was injured on her way to the jobcentre and had to go to hospital? She was sanctioned for missing her [disability benefit] appointment’.66 These snippets of speech, framed as gossip, imitate right-wing media rhetoric which regularly reports on instances of benefit fraud or stories where people have received what they deem to be over-generous support from the state. Indicative examples include the Telegraph, ‘Family on benefits move into £2 million home’,67 and the Daily Mail, ‘The “single” mother-of-six on benefits, the £2.5 million Belgravia mansion she wants you to pay for’.68 By adopting the same linguistic framing of ‘did you hear the one about’, implicit in such media reports, Benefit constructs a counternarrative to the one that is explored in the popular right-wing press, one which is focused on shaming the violence of the bureaucratic system rather than the perceived ‘failures’ of an individual claimant.
Similarly, Tighten Our Belts invokes formal aesthetics of storytelling that illuminate the ways in which claimants are required to constantly offer narratives of their life and work history in order to access financial and social support. The production had several sections where participants stood and read off scripts on music stands. They read stories of characters’ different encounters with the welfare system, occasionally including dialogue but primarily utilising monologues. As they read, performers switched between first and third person and so performed the act of storytelling .69 The mode of presentation brings into focus the constant repetition of narratives required of claimants but also the way in which we hear the stories of people who are claiming benefit; that is, in its use of first- and third-person narratives, Tighten Our Belts highlights the prevalence of stories taken out of context, removed from their original speaker, and the absence of claimants voices in public discourse. Through this formal strategy, the performance offers a more textured understanding of the circulation of discourses that orbit people claiming benefits.
The use of a framework where the performers were cast as storytellers rather than people presenting autobiographies therefore operated to create a detachment between performer and the story they were performing. It also enabled individuals to adopt the more powerful role of storyteller rather than subject, distinguishing Tighten Our Belts from modes of community performance that rely on participants to articulate their personal narrative in order to create impact. Instead, the act of storytelling in the performance signifies participants seizing control of the discourse that surrounds austerity and facilitates an occlusion of performers’ specific difficulties with the benefit system while illuminating the struggles individuals are facing across the UK.It was based on experiences people had or stories people had heard. But what I really didn’t want to do was put people onstage and say, “just spill your guts, tell us your story, tell us how hard your life is”. […] I did not want there to be that kind of transaction that is like “pity us” […]. I wanted to create some distance between the actual people and the stories being told on stage, so all of the characters are fictional and the telling of the characters in the third person was a way of creating a little bit of safety and distance between the performers and the characters.71
This performed rupture in the production required the audience to acknowledge that these are not just actors, are not just stories, but lived realities. Further, it requires practitioners to reflect on their expectations of participants: the representational labour required of participants when we ask them to perform their stories and the stories of others in similar situations.Ken: I’m sorry, I can’t do this.
Beat. Cast exchange glances.
Ken: I’m sorry, it’s just too much.
Jane: What do you mean?
Ben walks up stage in between Jane and Ken as the house lights come up 30% on audience.
Ken: I don’t want to do this anymore.
Jane: Ken! Come on.
Ben: What are you doing? (To Jane) He just wants to be the centre /of attention.
Jane: He wants to be the star of /the show.
Kaz: Come on Ken, what are you /doing?!
Alan: What about the audience?
Jane: This is the actual show you know, you can’t just stop when you feel like it.
Ken: I just don’t want the audience to see me like this. I’m sick of being skint. I’m sick of being on benefits. I’m sick of the government.72
The house lights then went up on the audience and we were posed the following questions: ‘Would you mind just putting your hand up if you’ve ever found it difficult to get a job?’ ‘Has anyone in the audience ever been worried about money? Could you put your hand up if so?’ ‘Could you put your hand up if you ever felt overwhelmed by everything and wanted to stop?’ The majority of the audience raised their hands in response to all three questions, publicly displaying these collectively shared anxieties. To which Ken responded,Ken: Revolution! Yeah, I think that’s what we need! But seriously, you think we’re going to start a revolution in the Brighton Dome Studio?!
Looks at audience.
Somehow I don’t think so!
Liz: But it’s not like a show is going to start a revolution anyway.
Ken: So what’s the point in doing it?
Richard: I bet there are people in the audience who understand how you feel.73
Ken acknowledged the replenishing experience of recognition that occurs when the audience share his experience. With this Ken returned to his character monologue, an unemployed participant struggling in the context of austerity telling the story of an unemployed man struggling in the context of austerity. Tighten Our Belts indicates where Brighton People’s Theatre locate the significance of community creativity, not in the presentation of particular participants’ stories or in starting a revolution beyond the performance space but in cultivating recognition between performers and audience. As Nicholson argues in her discussion of the relational ontology of applied theatre, there is a value in ‘shift[ing] the register from applying theatre to constructing order (or meaning) on the world ‘out there’ to focusing attention on performative action in the here and now’.75 Tighten Our Belts offers a social critique beyond the site of the performance; however, it is also concerned with the relationship that develops between audience and participant at the moment of performance. This is both a social and a political strategy that encourages us all, as Ken does, to realise we are not ‘alone in [our] feelings’.Ken: (Looking at audience, realising he is not alone in his feelings) Right. OK. (Taking it in and slowly changing his mind) Thank you, thank you, I needed that.74
My encounter with Benefit was early in the run where perhaps the Joker was still grappling with the particularly difficult nature of forum of this play’s thematic focus. During our interview, Chandler suggested that, beyond the live-stream, Patrick’s story was most often chosen by audiences to explore in the forum, which enabled the forum of this character’s story to develop more expansively. Notably, rather than making an intervention as Patrick, spect-actors adopted a range of other supporting roles around the character. This approach was borne out of the particular challenge of assuming the role of Patrick given his complex mental health issues. By casting spect-actors in roles such as Patrick’s support worker, friend, or colleague, the audience identified the need for socially diverse community responses to the issues he encountered. The crucial role of under-threat voluntary organisations and support services such as Citizens Advice and Legal Aid in helping people was therefore brought into sharp focus. Additionally, as one reviewer noted, when such suggestions were offered from the audience, the Joker was keen to ensure that they referred to actual services that operated in the locality.76 This brought a greater awareness of such services and usefully generated a crowdsourced knowledge of provision in the area. The expansion of possible social actors in the forum encouraged a more nuanced response to welfare recipients than presented by an established model of inhabiting the role of the protagonist. It made a firm case for dependency or, rather, for the communities of responsibility we have to adopt supporting roles in such situations.
Chandler suggested that in performing these situations, audiences left the theatre keen to help. One audience member commented, ‘[t]he show made me want to involve myself in collective action as I see the issues which were pointed up in the show as collective rather than individual’.77 Patrick’s story had the potential to highlight the value in demonstrating the struggle of the constellation of individuals attached to the particular oppression of a protagonist in forum theatre in order to inspire a collective response. Anthropologist Sonia Hamel writing on forum theatre interventions with homeless people in Montreal is particularly helpful here given her focus on the plurality of positions in encountering such oppressions. As Hamel notes, ‘the identification and theatrical embodiment of oppressive territory which involves more than one “oppressed” can partially overcome the dichotomous oppressed and oppressor without forfeiting the socio-political agenda which defines Theatre of the Oppressed’.78 Welfare, as with the instance of homelessness that Hamel examines, constitutes a vast system of different organisations, services, and provision that people must traverse, often alongside other members of their community or family. Performance that recognises the complexity of these situations beyond a simple dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed can begin to identify the numerous ways in which this systemic oppression affects us all. Such performance can hope to unite communities in challenging expansive mechanisms of state domination.
In a similar act of recognition of the support services that are bound up in welfare reform, Tighten Our Belts (unlike the majority of performances addressing the effects of austerity) includes stories of service providers and charity workers struggling to cope with the fallout of austerity policies. The performance’s depiction of a Jobcentre Plus worker is of someone suffering from acute anxiety, deeply affected by the work they do, and struggling to enforce increasingly punitive claimant contracts. This is the only performance I give sustained analysis to in this book that elects to include this perspective. In doing so, Tighten Our Belts usefully provokes us to holistically consider the wider effects of such reform and acknowledge those people delivering the system who are struggling. While not working with the Jobcentre, Brighton People’s Theatre’s strong relationship with BUCFP enabled them the scope to cultivate strong forms of intersubjective reliance that enacted community cohesion across workers at the centre, volunteers, and service users. Particularly when engaging unemployed communities, this performance of reliance could be potently positioned to critique negative social policy representations of dependency.
Both Benefit and Tighten Our Belts draw on an aesthetics of storytelling to highlight the discourse that circulates around welfare claimants and to advocate for instances of relationality and dependency between cast and audience in performance. Tighten Our Belts in particular considers how community theatre practice might rely on the practice of autobiography in the creation of content and offers alternative modes of storytelling that provide participants with safety, distance, and agency, whereas Benefit demonstrates how established practices might shift to responsively embrace and perform important structures of support and, further, identify the specificities of services operating in particular localities. Both performances allow room for the importance of social systems of support to emerge and highlight the challenges facing individuals who work as part of these systems. Thus, while critiquing the structural flaws of the welfare system, these productions also advocate for and underscore the contribution made by those working within it. In representing a breadth of experience, these performances avoid drawing lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, invoking a move back to a collective model of shared responsibility.
Creating an Ensemble, Forging a Collective
Goode’s solo piece was itself a feat of storytelling. It wove together a carefully crafted third-person narrative to create a bleak exploration of multiple contemporary encounters with masculinity. That this production contributed to the form and execution of Tighten Our Belts is an indicator of the significance of seeing performance with participatory groups if we are asking them to produce their own creative work. Alexander was keen that Brighton People’s Theatre improved access to the arts, both in terms of making and seeing performance. In supporting participants to share encounters with performances they collectively attended, the project nurtured a communal artistic vocabulary whilst concurrently providing time and opportunity for friendships to emerge. Further, in offering access to diverse performance styles, these group theatre trips made a significant contribution to the ability of the company to engender supportive relationships of care and produce high-quality performances. As a model of community arts practice, incorporating access to a season of theatre which participants attend together enables them to develop as artists but also points to the importance of the social and relational aspect of watching performance together. This exposes the potential of networks of sociality that operate beyond the drama workshop and evidences the significance of building communities beyond what might be understood as the central ‘work’ of a project.We would go and see a show and we would talk about it afterwards. And the one that had the biggest impact on them was Chris Goode’s Men in the Cities which we went to see together and Maddy Costa ran one of her Theatre Dialogue clubs afterwards and the People’s Theatre was half of the dialogue club! […] They were just absolutely buzzing after that night, chatting chatting chatting about it, and we got kicked out of the bar at the end of the night and we stood around the studio theatre in the freezing cold because people were really energised by what they’d seen and talking about how to apply that to what we’re doing.79
Tighten Our Belts was an ensemble performance; none of the cast left the stage throughout the hour-long piece. Additionally, there were several choreographed group movement pieces and songs throughout the performance that involved the whole ensemble working in unison. The performers’ demonstration of unity and interdependence throughout marked a stark contrast to the stories of isolation they were relaying. As Jonothan Neelands states in his call for a ‘new left politics’ of applied theatre, ‘[t]hrough the formal and public process of becoming a collective of artistic actors there is the possibility of discovering the process of becoming social actors freely engaging in civic dialogic democracy’.80 Particularly when considered in relation to unemployment, and the discourses of community and the individual outlined in this chapter, Tighten Our Belts’ public performance of an artistic collective appeals for social engagement in civic democracy. Neelands goes on to assert ‘the experience of the ensemble might provide participants with a second order identity as citizens struggling together, on a civic stage, to create and continuously challenge and modify ideas of the “common good”’.81 Tighten Our Belts offered a depiction of ‘citizens struggling together’, and it was this performed togetherness, in line with their conception as a people’s theatre, which reclaimed the stage as a civic space and disrupted dominant perceptions of the ‘common good’. This production reconceived ‘the common good’ in its performance, resisting the deployment of community by the state as a corrective and instead enacting authentic forms of community support through a celebration of dependency.
The use of a violent rhetoric of othering to stigmatise unemployed individuals is pervasive. In this context it is important to examine distinctions of the self and the other that might emerge between participant and audience community performance practices. Asserting how community performance practice might provide ways to understand the divisive and degrading discourse of neoliberal individualism as a ‘common fate’ is central to the analysis undertaken in this chapter; individuals are differently exposed to the violence of such policies, but their proliferation is universally damaging. Pausing to reflect on the discourses of othering that can orbit participants in community performance therefore illuminates the potential for a rhetoric of community to underpin persistent social and economic inequalities; yet highlighting instances of community performance practice that engenders a collapsing of the binary between self and other identifies fertile opportunities to support the emergence of communities of resistance.Violence is often the marker of the boundaries of a community, defining the separation of self and other. Some of the most powerful expressions of a community are often experienced when there has been a major injustice inflicted on a group of people, who consequently develop a sense of their common fate.82
By dissolving the distinction between the participant-performer and the audience—each complicit, responsible, and subjugated by discourses of individual blame—the performance sought to affirm a shared identity of ‘citizens struggling together’. Indeed, Tighten Our Belts includes a scene where a performer stepped forward, eyes confronting the audience, with a placard reading ‘Are you ok with this?’ Over the course of the scene, one by one other performers join her, each with several of their own placards attesting to their encounters with policies of austerity. The scene contained no spoken dialogue and was only accompanied by music. They dropped their placards to the ground to reveal the next devastating statement, one actor’s placards read: ‘I’ve been looking for work for six years’; ‘I just can’t’; ‘See a future for me’. This stark use of language and DIY aesthetic was particularly affecting, with people’s stories reduced to simple statements, their silence on stage attesting to the voicelessness of the dispossessed under austerity governance. A key affect of the scene was to alert the audience to our shared responsibility to engage in and understand the plight of those affected by austerity even if we ourselves are not. One performer, Richard, is a volunteer at BUCFP and his placards read: ‘I’ve never had a benefit’; ‘I have a good pension’; ‘But now I understand what it’s like’. In including Richard’s voice, his statements which locate him in a generation who have been protected by Beveridge’s welfare model, the performance enacted the need for those in positions of privilege to try and understand those suffering under austerity, to put their powerful voices alongside people who were struggling.
Tighten Our Belts was an attempt to activate audiences. Even if it was only being held in the performance space of the Brighton Dome, there was an affective response to the placards. The performer holding the ‘Are you ok with this?’ placard held it still as all the other performers cycled through their placards—evidencing their anger, distress, and grief—then she dropped it to reveal another reading ‘Like I said’, and then another, ‘Are you ok with this?’ This served as an invitation and elicited a number of impassioned responses from the audience, the most vocal of whom shouted ‘No they’re fucking fascists! I’m sorry but they are’. The performers paused momentarily appearing shocked by this intervention; sitting behind the man who shouted it, he seemed a little shocked himself. At the rehearsal I attended a few weeks prior to the show, there had been some discussion about audience participation, but this centred around ensuring the performers paused for clapping or reflecting on whether the audience would put their hands up when asked if they had been in debt before.83 They had instead provoked a number of raw responses from audience members. The placards, with their DIY aesthetic, were a simple invitation, and this is what audience participation can provide when faced with a seemingly insurmountable system of governance. As Kershaw notes, drawing on a number of examples of practice, ‘collective witnessing can productively extend the limits of community in individualising democracies’.84 It is the collectivity that Brighton People’s Theatre foster which enables the expansion of community in a project addressing the deeply individualistic labour market. In its evocative content and relational presentation, Tighten Our Belts offered new ways to conceive of audience participation where a genuine dialogue of support was created.
Conclusion
I have tracked contested notions of community in political rhetoric and models of social welfare through an analysis of increased individualism, eroding networks of dependency, and the potential for collective action. Shifts in discourse and policy impact on community performance practice and thus provoke a need to reconsider how community is politicised, presented, and encountered in performance practices. Community performance might be usefully read through Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism; in the very forms deployed, there is potential to foster divisive interpolations of community that reassert ideologies of individual responsibility. Further, applying Fairclough’s problem-solution reading of welfare rhetoric to the formal strategies of forum theatre illuminates how performance can model policy in its practice. The forum theatre strategies utilised in Benefit are inadvertently complicit with the pathologising of unemployment in social policy. In such a context, we need to identify and trace how certain policy agendas might emerge in performance and indeed how performance might resist such agendas.
However, community performance can also cultivate a positive aesthetics of dependency, which appeals to the communal and invokes a feeling of shared responsibility. Community performance can directly engage with the narrative aesthetics of governments and the media in order to draw attention to and repurpose such linguistic frameworks to produce representations of experiences of unemployment. Both performances examined here depict the toxic discourse surrounding welfare and utilise performance strategies—Benefit parodying tabloid gossip and Tighten Our Belts use of first- and third-person accounts—that specifically engage with this linguistic denigration. With the latter also encouraging a reflection on the politics of participant storytelling within community performance, gesturing to a need for such practice itself to refuse to be reduced to personal stories which potentially expose individual people. Further, community performance can enact and represent support networks and systems of care onstage by presenting a tangible understanding of the realities of existing structures of communal support and illuminating the gaps, stresses, and strains on such provision. As evident in Benefit, reorienting the spect-actor is an opportunity to illuminate the vital role of support agencies, health workers, and companions in helping people navigate an increasingly difficult social security system. Situating these figures in real local services serves to signpost audiences to the support available in their area. But also, beyond representation of support networks, such concrete notions of communality materialise in the artistic ensemble that is affirmed in the performance of Tighten Our Belts. Finally, community performance can collapse binaries between spectator and participant and, in doing so, recognise our interdependent exposure to pervasive, destabilising, and violent state policies that seek to stigmatise citizens in the service of creating division. The dismantling of social systems of support alongside the instrumentalisation of community in UK neoliberal political discourse and policy demands attention from performance scholars and community arts practitioners in order to ensure artistic approaches that can imagine new forms of relational practice, which remain effective even in such contexts.