The entire set of Clean Break Theatre Company’s Spent (2016) is comprised of a red bench, a pushchair, and a costume rail from which cascade a mass of threatening brown envelopes. An ever-present burden of debt hangs over the play; as one of the characters, Denise, says, ‘I put the letter in the drawer. With all the others. This is not a letter to face today’.1 But as the payment demands pile up and the knocks at the door become more frequent, things start to spiral out of control. Spent is a 30-minute play, performed by three graduates of the Clean Break performance programme, that exposes three women’s encounters with debt, poverty, and financial dependency in a landscape of cuts to public services and social provision. The production’s set, in its portability and its stripped-back aesthetic, spoke poignantly to the austerity experienced by the women it depicted and was also indicative of a turn to low-cost productions and DIY aesthetics in an increasingly precarious cultural sector. Across its four-month tour, this set occupied universities, conferences in the criminal justice and cultural sectors, as well as training events in debt services and mental health provision.
In August of 2016, four months after Spent finished touring, I take my seat at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Other Place to see Joanne , another Clean Break production. The production has an austere aesthetic with five differently sized thick white picture frames hanging down on an otherwise empty stage. Professional performer Tanya Moodie occupies the stage alone, delivering five interlinked monologues, each penned by a different playwright, with upright fluorescent light tubes changing colour to indicate a change in character across the hour of the show.2 We meet Stella, the probation officer in touching distance of leaving the service; Grace, a single mother and policewoman trying to bend the justice system into a shape that accommodates complicated lives; desperately underpaid and overstretched hospital receptionist Kathleen who is at the very front of the frontline of the National Health Service; Alice, the manager of an understaffed hostel left plugging the gaps and musing on opportunities missed; and Becky, a buoyantly optimistic teacher, whose green at the gills enthusiasm ebbs away over the course of her monologue. All of them speaking to us about one woman, Joanne. Someone they each helped, or tried to help, but hopelessly pressurised public services are at breaking point and Joanne, it seems, has fallen through the cracks.
While programmed in the same year, these two Clean Break productions were not intended as paired or ‘sister’ productions. But as Anna Herrmann, now co-artistic director of Clean Break, notes, ‘in the climate that we were in at the time, and are in now, those were the stories that we were hearing; it was the impact of austerity and how that was effecting our Members particularly harshly as women’.3 Here I explore the impact of austerity on women, particularly reflecting on how gendered representations of unemployment emerge in performance and how performing women’s labour onstage (through both professional and participant performers) illuminates understandings of social reproduction, both within and beyond performance.4
In previous chapters, I examine projects and performances that focus on general experiences of unemployment and two specific instances of joblessness: youth unemployment and those claiming disability-related out of work support. Notably, during this same period, female unemployment also rose rapidly and failed to recover in line with male unemployment.5 Further, poor communication about rises in the female retirement age meant that an estimated 500,000 women were left unprepared for the delay in when they can afford to stop working6; women, and their relationship to the labour market, were more widely affected by changes to Lone Parent and Carers benefits7; and the Women’s Budget Group reported that women proportionally will have borne 86% of government cuts induced by austerity policies by 2020.8 This has been a profoundly difficult time for women in the UK in regard to their relationship to work and welfare, yet I argue that, while youth and disability unemployment have been marked as significant trends in both the labour market response to the recession of 2008 and also representations of that response, the idiosyncrasies of women’s experience of unemployment during this period have not gained as much attention in policy or performance.
I identify how female unemployment appears differently on stage in a way that deprioritises the seeking of paid work and instead focuses on the role of women as reproductive labourers. A dominant narrative of women’s growing success in the workplace, and a persistent focus on gender wage gaps in discussions of women and work, elides the persistence of ideas around the gendering of domestic and care labour and fails to acknowledge the continued struggle of underpaid, precarised, or unemployed women in the UK during the same period. The Women’s Budget Group identified the surge in such employment circumstances. In nuancing the data around increased employment to explore the quality of employment women were engaged in, they noted that up to 80% of the growth in the female workforce between 2010 and 2014 was in part-time work.9 Indeed, sociologist Alison Wolf asserts that a focus on the victories of ‘elite women’ to measure the success of all women in the workplace serves to fragment notions of sisterhood as high-powered successful women share more commonalities with their male counterparts than with women in mid-/low-level (un)employment.10
Consequently, a troubling popular liberal feminist focus on the percentage of women in boardrooms and growing success in the labour market occludes the continued debasement of unpaid female labour which is external to, and yet underpins, capitalist economic systems. As activist collective Feminist Fightback states, ‘at the moment it appears that a liberal individualist form of feminism, easily appropriated by and absorbed into capitalism, has won out, leaving the gendered division of labour in the home fundamentally unchallenged within dominant feminist discourses and movements’.11 In such a context, representations of unemployed women in participatory performance have the potential to illuminate the gendered division of labour in the public sphere. However, I also question whether there is a lack of conscious highlighting of the gendered experience of welfare in such arts practice and posit that, in such instances, socially committed performance might be complicit in the construction of domesticity as gendered in our contemporary culture.
I begin by outlining how the welfare system has historically gendered, and continues to gender, citizens arguing that as a functional state apparatus it also inflects our understanding of gendered divisions of labour. I then illuminate how such gendered divisions can be traced through representations of reproductive labour and female unemployment onstage. My analysis is rooted in the practice of Clean Break, examining two productions—Spent (2016) and Joanne (2015–16)—alongside a reflection on their organisational structures. I then provide a counterpoint to the presentation of women as reproductive labourers through an investigation of Birmingham-based company Women & Theatre and their 2016 production Starting Out, which is a notable exception in that it explicitly identifies the gendered position of women entering the world of work. Finally, I consider the economies of participation at play in applied performance, exploring how the work involved in creating such performance might be constituted as reproductive labour, or more specifically care work, and thus how that might affect the value structures embedded in this form of performance. Throughout my analysis, I engage with female reproductive labour and women’s unpaid care work, drawing on Joan Tronto’s scholarship around care and democracy. Tronto posits that investigating the ‘assignment of care responsibilities describes a different way to think about political life. It casts politics in terms of action (who does what), rather than distribution (who gets what). It describes how public and private life should interact’.12 Examining representations of unemployed women onstage reveals applied theatre’s capacity to both perform acts of care and, as a discipline, embody a care-full practice that unsettles traditional forms of value but also locates applied theatre itself as a precariously placed practice.
Women and Welfare
It is crucial to understand why, given the difficult context for women in relation to welfare and the labour market during this period, there is a lack of overt representations of women’s unemployment. As part of this work, it is important to critique the demographic strategies deployed by the state, which pervade policy, and reflect on how they might influence the way we represent citizens’ experiences in performance. We must nuance homogenised cohorts of, for example, youth unemployment and adopt other modes of categorisation such as gender, class, race, or age to consider how these factors may influence individuals’ encounters with the welfare state.
There is a substantial amount of feminist literature which investigates the implications of the welfare system as a gendering structure13; however, Diane Sainsbury notes the lack of intersection between mainstream sociological analysis of welfare regimes and feminist scholarship: ‘[t]he units of analysis in the mainstream literature have been the individual or various collectives—classes, occupational groups, generations or households. Seldom have these gender-neutral units been broken down by sex’.14 This echoes a failing, highlighted by the Women’s Budget Group, occurring in the adoption of austerity policy: ‘[t]he distributional analysis produced alongside the 2016 Budget fails to adequately analyse the impact on women and men, either as individuals or across different types of households, despite having been shown methods that are straightforward to use’.15 Successive Labour, Coalition, and Conservative governments have failed to adequately address the impact of gender in relation to welfare.
The domestic labour debate that emerged in the late 1960s argued that labour practices were complicit in the reproduction of gender difference and subsequent divisions of power. Throughout the 1970s there was a feminist movement instigated by activists such as Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Leopoldina Fortunati, all leaders in the Wages for Housework campaign, against the assumed inevitability of unpaid reproductive work and domestic labour. The private sphere thus became a contested site of anti-capitalist struggle. My focus is on the role of the public sphere, in this instance the welfare state, in underpinning such gendered divisions of labour both historically and in the early twenty-first century.
That is, to access unemployment insurance individuals had to pay into the scheme through a tax on their waged work. As such beneficiaries were to be waged workers rather than, as happened with the provision of healthcare, their status as citizens standing as sufficient qualification.18 Such a definition meant that many women would be excluded from accessing this form of state support given their common position as unpaid domestic labourers.That decision to base social security arrangements firmly on the contributory principle provided the crucial mechanism for structuring the scheme along the lines of gender, and for ensuring that the sex-structured labour market with its marginal position for women, particularly in relation to industrial production, was to be faithfully reflected within the new social security scheme.17
While the labour of the unmarried woman is recognised, a woman, once married, would have other ‘vital work’ to do; however, this reproductive work remained unpaid and insecure. The reproductive labour of childbirth and motherhood, in the context of World War II, is recognised and linked to nationhood and the maintenance of the British population. However, while such work is acknowledged, the Beveridge Report further entrenched women’s status as dependents. The ‘new economic status’ married women acquired expected them to remove themselves from the labour market and actively removed them from the social security scheme as individual contributors. Instead, their husband’s contribution would serve both of them; thus, a woman’s access to support would be bound to her husband. If married women did seek to continue working, their rights and contributions would not be carried into the marriage; rather, their record of previous contributions would be entirely erased.20 Further, these deviant women would have their future contributions capped, consequently ensuring their continued dependence on their male partner. In the domestic labour debate, Silvia Federici decried the ‘patriarchy of the wage’; social feminists critiquing the introduction of welfare reform in 1946 may well decry the patriarchy of the benefit.Most married women have worked at some gainful occupation before marriage; most who have done so give up that occupation on marriage or soon after; all women by marriage acquire a new economic and social status, with risks and rights different from those of the unmarried. On marriage a woman gains a legal right to maintenance by her husband as a first line of defence against risks which fall directly on the solitary woman; she undertakes at the same time to perform vital unpaid service […]. In the next thirty years housewives as mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race and of the British ideal in the world.19
This serves to reconstitute women as domestic labourers and, potentially, as dependents. As the Fawcett Society highlight, such an intervention by the state restricts the autonomy of women and the decisions available to them. Informal care support was valued at £55 billion by the National Audit Office in 2011; this constitutes five times the cost of formal social care services.23 This indicates the significant contribution of unpaid carers that underpins the economy and paid labour market.If, as the evidence suggests, second earners—mostly women—are priced out of the labour market by this change alone, placed alongside other reductions to the support available to working families this policy will reinforce the highly regressive breadwinner/homemaker model of family life. Such a move diminishes both women’s economic autonomy and their potential to engage in public life, including in positions of power and influence.22
As Skeggs notes the construction of the working-class woman through educational courses around care rendered these women manageable, a deployment of soft governmentality, whilst also ensuring the ongoing production of working(-class) bodies, or ‘cheap labour’. Given that the examples I am investigating operate in what could be understood as occupying the same sphere of community education, it is imperative to examine what these representations of female unemployment are, to use Skeggs’ term, ‘inciting’ in those who engage with them. Do they recreate the same regulation of people as the care courses that Skeggs analyses, constituting women in socially reproductive roles, or do they allow us to critique how labour is valued in contemporary systems of capital?working-class women were always seen to be both a problem and a solution to national crisis in social order, […] a form of education, namely ‘caring courses’, was developed. These courses were produced to incite working-class women to do and take pleasure in domestic duty, enabling the regulation of themselves, the working-class family and also provide an available pool of cheap labour.26
Staging Women’s Work
The criminal justice frame is one way of understanding and interpreting our work, but the women’s lives don’t exist solely in that frame. Their journeys, those we’re trying to tell the stories of, are often journeys of poverty, racism, mental health issues, addiction, poor relationships, and adverse child experiences; and criminal justice is often the outcome of these more complex and layered experiences that precede it. All our work addresses the intersectionality of different issues.28
I deprivilege the framing of Clean Break’s work through a criminal justice lens to instead prioritise their representations of poverty and unemployment in a context of austerity. Indeed, Herrmann identifies that ‘the trajectory of poverty and austerity, although heightened in Joanne and Spent because of austerity at that time, has been a resonant theme through a lot of the Company’s earlier work’.29 By reconsidering the practice of a long-established organisation through a different set of critical lenses, poverty and labour as opposed to criminal justice, this chapter seeks to expose new understandings of Clean Break’s work.
Written by Katherine Chandler and directed by Imogen Ashby, Clean Break’s 2016 production Spent followed three women—Denise, Nat, and Sam—as they attempt to navigate a bewildering and unrelenting world of temporary housing, domestic violence, and spiralling bills. All three characters have dependents of a sort—a brother, a partner, a child—and there are acts of unpaid care undertaken by these characters threaded throughout. Spent was the company’s final graduate touring production, a model that ran 2012–16, where graduates of the Clean Break performance course collaborate with a writer on a short production and an accompanying workshop. Over the last four years, the company have toured seven short plays to 26 venues reaching 3935 people, predominantly from non-traditional theatre audiences.30 Spent toured England and was performed at a number of universities and conferences.31 It was primarily aimed at service providers and support services that operate in areas addressing issues raised in the play and included a workshop that offered an opportunity to further explore the experiences of the characters. The cast comprised of Michelle Hamilton, Eleanor Byrne, and Lydia, who are graduates of the Performance Level 2 course Clean Break offer.32
Indicative of the tension between care and austerity, this shopping list is a recurrent motif throughout the play, and turns into a constant calculation, an always impossible sum:denise: I’ve got 75p in my pocket and a list that tells me I need bread, milk, bog roll and bananas.35
Denise’s character consistently conducts these calculations around this list of essentials and in relation to her daughter whom she is trying to feed. Gradually the list decreases as Denise is forced to do the work of reducing these four essentials to two:denise: Forty-nine pence and the 75p that’s in my pocket.
Bread, milk, bog roll and bananas.
She’s hungry.36
Throughout the play, Denise makes these constant calculations, shifting between what she can afford and what is absolutely necessary for the continued subsistence of both her and her daughter. Marx conceptualises labour power as ‘a capacity of a living individual; its production presupposed his existence; and therefore the production of labour is dependent upon the worker’s reproduction of himself, upon the worker’s maintenance’.38 In her ostensibly non-labouring status, Denise struggles to ensure her own and her daughter’s reproduction through provision of food and shelter. This character continually tries to establish the value of their lives in a context of austerity in which rhetoric around ‘generations of worklessness’ serves to render such people worthless.39 Alongside unsettling notions around value, with her persistence in the reproduction of the non-labourer, the representation of Denise is indicative of feminist critiques of Marxist conceptions of ‘reproduction’. As Silvia Federici argues, Marx’s analysis fails to differentiate between ‘commodity production and the reproduction of the workforce’, that is, to produce and maintain a workforce, they must be fed, washed, cared for, and sheltered.40 Such critiques drew attention to the gendered stratification of labour and gave rise to the domestic labour debate, which I referred to above, in the late 1960s. Denise’s calculation in the play, then, can be read through two subversive frames: initially as the inversion of Marx’s cycle of reproduction of the labourer, in her base calculation of benefit payment and food provision, we witness the acute struggle involved in reproducing the non-labourer; further, in the performance of this constant calculation, we see, even prior to preparation, the labour of obtaining food in a context of austerity. As such there is a demonstration of the reproductive work of an unemployed woman, perpetually ‘working out’ these figures.denise: For a second I think if I stare at it for long enough it might double. Like I’m Dynamo or something.
[…]
Milk 75p, Bread 55p that’s £1.30.
I look at the money.
Dynamo.
[…]
No Bananas. Not today I tells her.37
The character of Nat bringing food to this old woman is indicative of the informal collective networks of care which are emerging across the UK in an effort to deal with situations of desperate poverty. Alongside the rapid rise in foodbank usage in the UK, the Food Foundation reported that in 2014 ‘5.6% of people aged 15 or over in the UK reported struggling to get enough food to eat and a further 4.5% reported that, at least once, they went a full day without anything to eat’.42 This figure amounts to 8.4 million people. As Kayleigh Garthwaite has noted, ‘Foodbanks have become political capital’, a mode for political parties, depending on their perspective, to either criticise the poor or champion acts of community provision.43 On his visit to the UK, United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston noted the disconnect between government rhetoric and the huge numbers of people going hungry in the country in 2018.44 The character of Nat highlights the reality of food poverty in the UK and stands as representative of practices of going without so others can eat. Save the Children have found 61% of parents in poverty have cut back on food, with 26% having skipped meals over the past 12 months, and 12% had cut back on food for themselves so their children have enough to eat.45 This moment in Spent is therefore a double performance, in that we are watching the participant actor perform the scene but also witnessing the character’s performance of not needing food undertaken by people in poverty, or as Nat terms it ‘but I have to pretend they’re for me and I’m full’. As an organisation, Clean Break themselves are part of a cycle of food redistribution. As with Brighton People’s Theatre who I discussed in Chap. 3, they receive free food from Fair Share to provide lunch every day for their participants onsite. Clean Break’s practice of sharing food has varied, but during the period explored in this chapter, students on the education programme were made a hot lunch onsite and this collective meal was a significant part of the day for staff and students to gather and eat together. This was a way to both instil a sense of collectivity and ensure everyone has a substantial meal when accessing programmes at the company. Acknowledging the myriad of ways in which Clean Break represent food poverty and also are part of the system which fights it further highlights the intensifying labour involved in accessing food in 2016.nat: The old woman. She’s skin and bone. Her ring is loose on her finger like its hula hooping.
So I takes her some chips.
But I have to pretend they’re for me and I’m full.
She knows what I’m doing. She tells me she don’t eat. I tells her she has to eat, there’s places she can go to get food, I been there myself. I say she’ll starve to death.41
Spent , alongside other representations of female unemployment, depicts struggles which Federici highlights ‘are being fought by women who, against all odds, are reproducing their families regardless of the value the market places on their lives, valourizing their existence, reproducing them for their own sake, even when the capitalists declare their uselessness as labor power’.46 In doing so, Clean Break are able to call attention to these women and enable a platform for their stories to be shared and valued beyond the ideals of the market or the welfare state. Indeed, when held against the homogenising constraints of the historical construction of women in welfare discourse, Spent offers representations of deviant women: all unmarried, one a single mother, one an elderly homeless woman, and none of them either working or settled in the family model of male breadwinner/female homemaker. Yet, these women are framed positively, depicted toiling to reproduce their families (brothers, partners, children) and mark their value even when others construe them as worthless.
Embodiment and Social Reproduction
In her demand for the recognition of domestic labour as contributing to the foundation of capitalist production, Federici notes ‘the reproduction of labour power involves a far broader range of activities than the consumption of commodities, since food must be prepared, clothes have to be washed, bodies have to be stroked and cared for’.47 I now turn to the last clause of Federici’s statement and utilise Tronto’s conceptualisation of care to argue that gendered acts of tactility and deployments of the body in depiction of the unemployed onstage underscore the continued division labour, even the labour of non-working subjects.
This attests to the damage to people’s lives and worryingly highlights that many of the reforms are still in the process of being implemented, with their effects yet to be fully felt. As she rattles through this bleak collection of experiences, the three performers in the first row slacken and diminish, gradually deteriorating and becoming more exhausted, physicalising the detrimental impact, and punishing experience of such reforms. In the script the stage direction reads:Since 2010, two and a quarter million people have had their money stopped for 4 weeks or more.
Just stopped.
How do you live without money?
[…]
Everyone we have interviewed for this show has said this is just the start. The cuts are only just starting to be felt.
And there is so much we didn’t tell you about.
We didn’t tell you about Selasi, who, like 3000 other people who worked for the council, lost his job when the service he worked for was cut.
We didn’t tell you about Alex, a single mum, stuck in a bedsit with a one-year-old who has just started to crawl, in a hotel in central Brighton that you the tax payer spends £350 a week on.
We didn’t tell you about Aaron, who has been feeling suicidal since he was assessed as being fit for work after his work capability assessment.
We didn’t tell you about Sharon …
We didn’t tell you about…
We didn’t tell you…
People vote for it. People fucking vote for it.48
Stillness. Slowly, very slowly, [the performers] begin to fracture, tiny, almost imperceptible cuts are being made to their body by an invisible hand. They begin as slight, small and unpredictable blows to the back of the knee, the ankle, the waist. They hit hard, with force and they crumple a little. They find the strength to build themselves back up and stand strong before another hits them, slightly bigger, somewhere else on their body, having a bigger impact on their ability to stand tall.
The others are watching them intensely and start to step forward into the spotlights with them as the fractures build in strength and force. They start to catch them as they crumple and fall and help to rebuild them, stacking their bodies upright, helping them to stand tall again before another fracture hits.49
That these performers are catching their counterparts, supporting them while thrown into darkness, is indicative of the invisible labour of care and reproduction which persists as a largely female role. Further, it connotes that the most disenfranchised people in society are often left to support one another, rather than being helped by those with greater resources. Tronto argues that examining these care relationships exposes inequalities; similarly, in this moment Tighten Our Belts reveals a disparity in what labour is expected and of whom. It is vital to utilise a gendered lens when creating and analysing this applied practice; otherwise, such work risks merely mirroring or re-establishing prescriptive gendered experiences of labour and unemployment.By analysing care relationships in society, we are able to cast into stark relief where structures of power and privilege exist in society. Because questions of care are so concrete, an analysis of who cares for whom and what reveals possible inequalities much more clearly than do other forms of analysis.50
- denise:
I don’t know no-one here to ask.
- daughter:
A man what carried my pushchair up the stairs.
- denise:
I don’t know him.
- daughter:
He got sugar.
- denise:
He’s not my friend, he just lives in the house, in a room like us.
- daughter:
I seen you with him.
He give you money.51
Hardy is here referring to the specific neo-developmentalist context of Argentina; however, she also aligns this analysis with ‘the ways in which sex work is constituted in neoliberalism’.54 The inference in Spent that Denise is supplementing her state benefits with sex work points to the function of this alternative labour as social reproduction, supporting both her and her child. Indeed in Hardy’s study, ‘reproductive responsibilities, particularly providing for children, were the most commonly cited reason for women working in the industry’.55 In this instance, the reproductive nature of the labour is tripled: sex work itself can be construed as reproductive in its intimate acts of care for other bodies, and such labour enables the provision for the maintenance of children (future labourers); finally, sex work can be seen as a way to generate income where the disinvestment of the state has induced poverty. The ‘unemployed’ but working woman’s body is thus rendered socially productive despite its occlusion from formal networks of paid labour and state support.sex workers provide multiple subsidies to the state. First, sex workers relieve the burden on the state (and therefore capital) for providing sufficient and remunerative employment. In this case, sex work can be understood as a para-capitalist economic strategy on which both state and capital rely to ensure the social reproduction of those locked out of formal spheres of production. Second, sex workers provide essential socially reproductive labour for their children and other dependents.53
However, the regular deployment of the figure of the sex worker in the performance of unemployed women risks rendering the poor female body as inevitably reverting to that mode of production. That is, in the recurrence of this trope, there is an occlusion of other approaches women undertake to seek work; beyond this, there is a potential acceptance of the failure of social security to provide adequate support. Finally, this utilisation of sex work as a symbolic marker in performance can undermine the labour of sex workers, often presenting an unnuanced representation of women undertaking this kind of work. Analysing depictions of the social reproductive labour undertaken by unemployed women onstage provides a new perspective on the way unemployment is gendered. Arts practitioners must be alert to the way such representations speak to what is expected of women, and their bodies, in times of austerity and consider ways in which participatory arts practice might expose or impose these expectations.
Reproductive Labour and Access to Representation
Reproductive labour also operates in relation to how arts organisations might engage women in participatory projects. There is a potential for women, in the case of this research, those women relying on the benefit system, to have a greater number of caring responsibilities than their male counterparts. In 2013, the Office for National Statistics reported 57.7% of unpaid carers were women; this figure does not include caring for young children. How might such caring responsibilities impede participation in arts projects and, consequently, impact the ability of people to reproduce representations of their experience?56
Joanne was produced by Clean Break at Soho Theatre in October 2015. It was later revived for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Making Mischief Festival, where I saw it in August 2016. The show comprised of five monologues written by five female playwrights: Deborah Bruce, Theresa Ikoko, Laura Lomas, Chino Odimba, and Ursula Rani Sarma. Each monologue depicted a different public sector worker (a policewoman, a teacher, a probation officer, a medical receptionist, a hostel worker), but all five of these characters were performed by Tanya Moodie.57 As I outlined above, in each monologue Moodie adopted a discrete character and yet they were all bound together by their interaction with Joanne, a woman newly released from prison and seeking help and guidance from a range of different services to piece her life back together. The audience never meet Joanne but, in a narrative device similar to J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (1945), they perceive her through these female workers recounting their own encounters with her. As with Priestley’s play, what emerges is a failure of support where the absent protagonist requires it as these women who are all driven and well-meaning but, facing their own personal challenges and embedded in strained public services, fail to help Joanne. First produced as the UK stood on the brink of introducing the mass social welfare reform that materialised post-World War II, An Inspector Calls is a critique of failing social responsibility as individualism, and more broadly the middle class drive to capitalism, consumes the characters. Joanne appears in 2015, just as that post-war social contract has cycled through a lifespan and is disintegrating, and depicts a society returned to the same social, cultural, and state deficiencies as Priestley had identified 70 years prior.
This book examines performance that is participatory and/or applied and consequently occludes performances such as Joanne given that the production falls under the ‘Artistic’ strand of Clean Break’s work and consequently works with a professional actor, creatives, and venue rather than embedding itself in a specific community or engaging with a set of participants.58 However, I am including it as I want to consider how, as a production, Joanne functions in relation to the applied aspect (the Education strand) of Clean Break’s work. The series of monologues thematically addressed the invisibility of poor and marginalised women in swamped public services. This invisibility was further emphasised in the formal structure of the monologues which meant the audience never witnessed Joanne who was rendered materially invisible onstage, only viewed through the perception of others. While this was the thematic focus of the show, it is also structurally realised in the casting of a professional actor in the role of Joanne, a character written by professional writers who had undertaken research with Clean Break participants but now effectively, in the play’s formal approach, wrote these participants off the stage. These divergent casting practices at play at Clean Break, of participants in Spent and professionals in Joanne , speaks to larger arguments about who gets to access different types of performance and the value ascribed to certain types of female labour in performance. Further, an investigation of these two areas reveals a potential construction of applied performance as a mode of social reproduction while ‘Artistic’ work stands as part of regular modes of (paid) production.
Joanne presents challenges to applied theatre practitioners and socially engaged performance academics as the absence of the play’s protagonist mirrors the absence of those suffering under the consequences of austerity from our stages. It performs that absence in the lone presence of Moodie on a sparse stage, populated only with empty frames. These frames further accentuate the lack of representation of these women and their hidden labour. A central area of research for this book is: how can artists represent the unemployed if they are reticent to appear? Yet a consideration of Joanne , alongside the intensifying conditionality and labour demands of claiming benefit, reveals a further problem: how can unemployed women find the time, energy, and support to appear onstage given the strain they are under induced by the welfare system?
The difficulty in practitioners building relationships with these particular participants due to gendered caregiving roles, with the exception of Beth Osnes’ 2014 monograph Theatre for Women’s Participation in Sustainable Development, has not been widely discussed in scholarship. Osnes is concerned with obstacles to participation that women in the global south might face and how versions of Western feminism and discourses of development might intersect with these difficulties. What scholarship has not attended to is how the particularities of women’s position as unpaid labours might affect their representation on stage in applied theatre practice. I would suggest that this leads to an absence in nuanced representation of these voices in participatory performance.
Single parents are a cohort who are acutely suffering under government austerity policies and a group that participatory arts should seek to engage in order to challenge negative perceptions of them. This recognises that practitioners cannot flatten out the differences between unemployed constituents, who are a heterogeneous group and may themselves hold a number of prejudices against other individuals within that group. With regard to the implications of reproductive labour on women’s participation in arts projects, the performed absence of representations of poor women onstage in Joanne reveals the continuing stigmatisation of unemployed women and also attests to the potential obstacles companies must traverse in order to ensure these women are able to represent their stories in participatory performance.on average, single parent households are expected to lose 7.6 per cent of their income […] by 2020/21 as a result of the combined tax, pay and welfare reforms. This compares with an average loss of 1.2 per cent (£500) for couples with children.59
Applied Performance as Social Reproduction
Applied performance is often embedded and enmeshed in caring structures, populated by supportive workers who engage in professional or personal acts of care. Beyond the individual or organisational acts of care that occur within applied performance contexts, the practice itself, and its accompanying economic characteristics, can be conceptualised as a type of social reproduction and a labour of care. This has become increasingly clear given the growing number of arts organisations providing previously state-administered social services. As I discussed with reference to the Open Public Services agenda in Chap. 2, the expansion of cultural commissioning has been contentious at a time when the state is trying to reduce the responsibility it holds for social reproduction.60 Conceptualising applied performance as care work contributes to reveal its unique position within debates around labour, responsibility, and value. Does applied performance as a discipline echo or disrupt the value systems attributed to waged labour and unwaged acts of care or reproduction?
Such a definition aptly describes the nature of Clean Break’s work, which attends to cultivating supportive relationships between those involved in a project, while also attesting to the fundamental value of caring relationships in the stories they tell. I build on Thompson in recognising the affective value of applying frameworks of care to such projects in order to emphasise the ‘mutual activities of sharing, support, co-working and relational solidarity within a framework of artistry or creative endeavour’.63 Further, given the particular field of performance and austerity, I consider how economies of care operate within applied practice.a set of values realised in a relational process that emphasise engagements between individuals or groups over time. It is one that might consist of small creative encounters or large-scale exhibitions, but it is always one that notices inter-human relations in both the creation and the display of art projects.62
Clean Break are deeply embedded in the community within which they work; the performance that the company produce as part of the Education strand of their performances will often tour to service users, or rather those individuals who themselves face issues raised by the piece. In this respect, applied performance can align with ethicist Carol Gilligan’s definition of caring which ‘requires paying attention, seeing, listening and responding with respect. […] Care is a relational ethic, grounded in a premise of interdependence. But it is not selfless’.64 Performances such as Spent give room to represent the difficulties of a community back to itself, to witness and respond to the needs of the women ‘with respect’. It is a kind of community care, which is underpinned by the relationality and interdependence of care in that it is about fostering the development of multiple people, across and beyond, the group. However, in doing so ‘it is not selfless’; the work Clean Break produce is infused with a social justice agenda, above anything else, to fiercely fight for the needs of their participants. In this sense, their practice is never selfless but in fact always seeking something, namely, positive change for the women they represent; therefore, the acts of care are distributed by the community which seeks to reproduce, support, and care for itself.
Spent facilitates the training of industry professionals, and so the performance is at the service of those professional care workers. I posit then that the participants undertake a kind of reproductive labour which allows the care worker to improve their own working practice. Herrmann explained that the decision to tour Spent to service providers was led by the desire to bring about change in the system and the practice of professionals.65 In choosing to market the piece instead to service providers, Clean Break demonstrate a sensibility for the community that they serve. In this instance, these three interwoven stories of domestic abuse, debt, and homelessness enact a more valuable function when shared with service providers. That is, they seek to engender a deeper understanding of the struggles these women face and so cultivate more informed provision of care from workers who will encounter women in similar positions in their daily work.
Spent was therefore presented as a ‘package’ for the training of staff working in relevant sectors; it was performance as a way to replenish the practice of ‘frontline’ practitioners working in social care and in support positions. Therefore, in creating a space of collegial discussion and sharing, the performance provides a kind of care work for care workers. This is in contrast to the production of Joanne which utilised a single professional actor to provide a performance which served as a leisure activity for its paying audience. Joanne therefore attends more readily to Nicholas Ridout’s discussion of theatre in post-industrial modernity as one in which ‘one group of people spend their leisure time sitting in the dark to watch others spend their working time under lights pretending to be other people’.67 In contrast, Spent is two groups of people at work, both audience and performers, in the institutional strip lighting of classroom or community hall, and although the performers are indeed pretending to be other people, there is an aspect of authenticity in their identification as women ‘affected by the Criminal Justice System’. There is a clear distinction between the aesthetic and objectives of these two productions. While Joanne mirrors the cycle of capital, Spent engages in a kind of reproduction of labour that supports this economic cycle whilst remaining distinct from it. The performers are working to provide for the continued professional development of their audience; that is, the aims of the production are to address the situation facing women in austerity and to improve the responses of these service workers’ ability to respond to situations and persons. Spent contributes to the ‘reproduction’ of such workers through the training and discussion promoted in the workshops. That is, the participants involved in Spent are undertaking a form of reproductive labour in that they are tending to the development, maintaining, and nuancing of the quality of work which the attendees are able to provide. This structure and mode of delivery within applied performance is not unique to Clean Break; it is a sector-wide practice which sees a number of companies providing training opportunities across, in particular, the public sector. We must therefore recognise the reproductive labour of applied performance and value the contribution it makes to public services.available as a training package to book for conferences, seminars and staff training during February and March 2016. The play is performed by women affected by the Criminal Justice System and focuses on the theme of women, austerity and debt. The package is for frontline staff, managers, volunteers, advice workers, support staff and others who want to improve their practice; it uses the play as a stimulus for discussion and critical reflection, and is designed to help you reflect on and identify successful strategies to support women facing issues of debt and poverty.66
The service providers in this situation felt the piece criticised their practice; in actuality, it was an attempt to acknowledge larger structural struggles these individuals were dealing with and attempt to collaborate on ways to navigate these difficulties. In this sense I would argue that Spent , while it was engaged in a form of reproductive labour that may have the potential to reinforce the continuation of the worker in service to capital, helped to create the space of ‘political care work’ to which Tronto refers. It enables a reflection on how care is distributed and enacted in society. Further, it demonstrates how applied performance can operate to bring the labour of reproduction out from the private and into the public sphere. This is ‘reproduction’ enacted in a societal forum and so disrupts the occlusion and subsequent devaluation of it as a vital form of labour.A lot of people in the audience felt a little bit frustrated because they felt we were saying that their jobs weren’t being fulfilled. Because essentially we’re saying the solution isn’t good enough because there’s too many people in this situation. It was tough, there was a twist within the workshop where someone eventually said “oh I get it”, and then everyone else sort of got it too. But it took all the way up until maybe 30 minutes into the workshop, and we were really pushing through.69
Care-Full Economies of Participation and Reproduction
In relation to the participant performers in Spent , their status as unemployed and accessing welfare support prevented the performers from being paid a wage, this short period of work would have had significantly detrimental implications that would have on their finances in the longer term. The complexity of explaining the situation of Clean Break performers to Jobcentre Plus (JCP) led the company to instead provide payment in bursaries. For the Spent tour, Clean Break allocated, in addition to travel and sustenance costs, £400 for each performer.71 This amount was not given to participants as money, rather one participant received a tablet, another a contribution towards a college course she wanted to engage in.72 Currently involvement in any paid work will negatively impact your benefit; if that work is over 16 hours, you will not be able to claim Jobseeker’s Allowance. As such, a three-month part-time contract with a theatre organisation which has irregular hours will have a detrimental impact on benefit payments and likely be too complex to navigate within the current system. This may lead to payments being stopped and a participant being ineligible to reapply for benefit until after the tour has finished. Additionally, this application for benefit could take up to six weeks to process before any funds reach the claimant, therefore leaving them without financial support for a prolonged period.What’s interesting about employment is that to employ people who are on benefits messes up their benefit. […][B]ecause actually to come off benefits to go back on the benefit sometimes means that, because of the system, there might be two months where they don’t get any benefit or any bursary or any money and we just can’t be the reason why they lose money, that’s just not part of what we do.70
Herrmann identifies this practice of payment is far broader than Spent . Since she began working with Clean Break in 2002, across their body of participatory practice, the company has found navigating systems of ad-hoc remuneration extremely challenging for participant performers who are accessing state benefits.
We have had a long and quite difficult journey finding a way to reward work, because unpaid work, and the idea of unpaid work, can undermine what we are aiming to do in terms of empowerment as financial independence is a key part of that. So we’re really conscious of not exploiting women’s experience by expecting them to move from being students into touring and especially when we’re in environments where we’re being paid for the output, which is what happens when we go on tour. It does feel very conflicted.
As Herrmann outlines, part of Clean Break’s agenda is to support women to move out of the benefit system and obtain financial independence; however, navigating systems to pay participants is deeply complex. Between 2008 and 2019, Clean Break have used a range of methods to try and recognise the labour undertaken by participant performers without putting people at risk of infringing their Jobseeker’s Agreement or benefit support in any way. These approaches have included a training fee, vouchers, and a bursary scheme, all of which have had their own limitations and, as state systems have changed, have had to be revised in response to best practice advice. The conflicted experience of an applied performance company being paid but unable to pass on such payment to its participant performers identifies an endemic broader challenge for applied practitioners collaborating with performers on benefits in the current welfare landscape. As I discussed in Chap. 5, the majority of the companies I have spoken with throughout this research have identified this as an increasingly pressing issue for the field to address: how can such work appropriately redistribute payment for performance practices? Further, where does the labour of such practice sit in relation to work, education, and training and how does that define the way people’s labour is classified and remunerated?
was really stressful for our Members, really stressful and it got to the point where a number of them said “I’ll just do it”, but again they’re working and they want to move out of that system but it’s just too stressful. And they say they’ll do it voluntarily don’t pay me.74
While Clean Break has currently identified a way to pay its performers, as of 2019 the present benefit system (and specifically Universal Credit) here can be understood as contributing to an economic devaluing of the labour of participant performers. This rigid and punitive system thus presents obstacles to professionalisation of these women through their engagement in paid labour. Further, it provokes high levels of anxiety among people claiming benefits and those services supporting them, as Herrmann notes, ‘because the stakes are so high, and you just don’t know anymore what the future holds, whether they will get their benefits back again, or how long it will take, or any of those issues’.75 This requires urgent consideration and linked up conversations across applied performance in order to identify how participants’ labour is being categorised and share best practice for acknowledging and rewarding it.
Such material considerations are crucial to practice that seeks to enable participation and support participants; this is particularly acute with performances that deal with unemployment and austerity. Within the confines of an inflexible welfare system and a rigid labour structure, the opaque modes of payment within Spent could contribute to a devaluing of the kind of reproductive labour which such applied performance projects engage in. Working with unemployed participants causes these ideals of waged and non-waged to collide and demands creative solutions to remuneration such as those offered by Clean Break. The company found different value systems to trade in; however, they were unable to publicise how they sought to value the work the women undertook as part of the production. Given that the participants at Clean Break have predominantly had experience of the criminal justice sector, there are further difficulties in offering financial payment for the work. That is, concerns around how such a transaction might be perceived and presented by the media could leave Clean Break open to criticism.77 While I think the role of waged participation is ambiguous, I urge practitioners to consider how we can publicly assert the value of the labour participants engage in and reflect on how that is entwined with notions of the waged and the non-waged.[d]ecisions about accessibility […] are not mundane organisational matters, but crucial ethical propositions. In being taken in reference to the ethics of care, they will imbue the project with an affective sense of the importance of mutual respect and regard.76
Beyond the participants and the creative work that Clean Break are engaged in, there is a value placed on care in the structural organisation of the company itself. There is a desire and drive among practitioners to support women’s participation, and when companies have the capacity and awareness to provide comprehensive provision, they allow these stories to be shared. For example, between April 2013 and March 2014, Clean Break spent £37,643 on Student Support.78 Clean Break has two student support workers (their salaries are not included in the figure I quoted above) who focus on providing help for participants in a range of different areas. Given the particular remit of Clean Break to engage participants who have encountered the criminal justice and/or mental health system, there is a focus within this service on assisting students with issues related to probation and challenging/offending behaviour. However, they attend to a range of issues that affect women more broadly, particularly those relying on the welfare system and clients who may have complex lives. Prior to joining any of the programmes Clean Break offer, there is a two-stage assessment process which instigates the holistic process of care offered by the organisation. In the initial assessment, women work with the student support team to identify their suitability for engaging with the company and inform them of any additional emotional, learning, or medical needs they may have. In the second stage of assessment, participants detail specific issues which they might need help with such as debts, finance, employment, and mental health, alongside which they set out their reasons for involvement and aspirations such as network, self-esteem, confidence, and getting qualifications. Therefore, alongside funding for travel and childcare, Clean Break offers a range of support that enables women’s involvement.79
In Chap. 2, I considered the implications of cultural commissioning and the open public services agenda on applied arts organisations’ delivery of employability programmes; the quotation above demonstrates how, beyond such overt instances of companies tendering for public service contracts, arts organisations are filling the gaps of social security provision. In a context where women’s services are being defunded and deprioritised by the Conservative government, organisations like Clean Break are utilising arts funding to provide housing, debt, and benefit support for vulnerable women. They are also providing a safe, women-only space, in which to facilitate their service users’ engagement with other providers who offer specialist assistance in a range of different areas.Our Student Support Team has been meeting increased need (particularly in housing, debts and benefits) as a result of austerity, cuts and changes to public and frontline services has been a key focus of the year as well as working in partnership with a range of arts and support agencies which share our aims and a commitment to working with vulnerable women.82
Funding and Value in Women’s Participatory Performance
Finally, I want to reflect on how applied performance might share some similarities with the systemic underfunding of care work and consequently make such performance implicitly precarious in the current hostile funding landscape. Further, and more specific to the companies analysed in this chapter, in 2012 the Women’s Resource Centre found: ‘70% of women’s organisations felt that being women-only made it more difficult to access funding’; ‘52% of women’s organisations have been forced to reduce their service provision’; ‘95% of respondents face funding cuts or a funding crisis in the next year and 25% said that further cuts would result in closure’.83 But what might some of the impacts be on women-focused/women-led performance, particularly when such performance intersects with social provision, and how might such conditions contribute to a subsequent scarcity of representations of unemployed women onstage?
Women & Theatre emerged out of a workshop funded by Workers Educational Association in 1983. Building on the work undertaken in these sessions, Janice Connolly, Polly Wright, Jo Broadwood, and Sue Learwood established the company in 1984 in order to devise and produce performance that was relevant to women’s experiences. Based in Birmingham, the company predominantly make and produce performance in the West Midlands. Woman & Theatre remain a female-led organisation, with Connolly continuing as artistic director; however, they also work with men and male organisations. The company are supported by a range of funders including ACE, Birmingham City Council, Children in Need, and a number of smaller charities and trusts.
Women & Theatre’s production Starting Out was developed in association with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and ran at the theatre 12–15 October 2016 and then transferred to the Hackney Showroom, London, between 19 and 22 October 2016. The production was a kind of ‘sister or niece’ piece to Women & Theatre’s earlier production of For the Past 30 Years (2014), which celebrated the organisation’s 30-year anniversary through an investigation of the areas they work in (health, education, community, probation) and women’s shifting experiences of employment in these areas during this period.84 Both shows took a monologue format, similar to that adopted by Clean Break in Joanne , with each production commissioning five female writers to produce a 15-minute monologue. Directed by Caroline Wilkes, Starting Out was written by Janice Connolly, Charlene James, Lorna Laidlaw, Manjeet Mann, and Susie Sillett and depicted the difficulties young women were facing entering the labour market. As Sillett states, ‘it’s about the vulnerability of young women starting out in today’s employment world’.85 These depictions of vulnerability expose experiences of exploitative apprenticeships, financial struggles, discrimination against young people, mental health issues, and the balancing of paid labour with caring responsibilities.
Similar to my discussion of Joanne , the characters we witness in Starting Out are indicative of the participants whom we cannot see onstage. So, while female participants may contribute to the research and development of the performance, in this instance participation does not constitute the performance of onstage labour. This, again, raises questions around who has access to representational labour in performance. The co-opting of participants’ stories may well be called into question; however, as Women & Theatre identify in the quotation above, there is a satisfaction to being heard. Further, although the young cast, Jalleh Alizadeh, Phoebe Brown, Katerina Demetraki, Luanda Holness, and Rosalyn Norford, were professional actors, as part of this generation, they all expressed a tacit understanding of labour market struggles. As Norford commented, ‘[i]t’s like hearing the words that have been going through your head in your own life at points said back to you’.88 The co-production of these stories with young women who recognise this position of precarity allows that to resonate more deeply with audiences.W&T is experienced at developing new theatre from research using a respectful conversational approach. Participants benefit from the opportunity to talk and reflect knowing that they are contributing to a production’s development. They are invited to attend a rehearsed reading, enabling their further input.87
This struggle to cultivate enough revenue to produce women-focused work around employment returns to the notion of cohorts that I identified at the outset of this chapter. Historically, where women have been identified as a specific group in the labour market, it has been a part of a project to exclude them from particular benefits or to differently value the labour that they engage in. As I outlined at the outset of this chapter, the Women’s Budget Group are campaigning for the government to include gender-disaggregated effects of labour market policy in their review of unemployment. As Pearson notes, working without a clearly defined and specifically identified ‘obvious target group’ or ‘beneficiaries’ makes projects financially difficult to produce. This drive towards specific ‘beneficiaries’ is something that has emerged out of the reproductive role which applied performance has been increasingly assigned. Consequently, state identification of the specificities of female unemployment could promote the emergence of artistic responses to the position of women in the labour market and potentially cultivate funding for projects which attend to these needs, thus financially enabling more performance work to take place in this area.We find this kind of work harder to fundraise for compared to our work with disadvantaged young people where there’s an obvious target group. Whereas with this I think although we’ve worked with specific groups with the research you can’t always gauge who exactly the audience will be and the beneficiaries in that way. In some ways we also invest some of our reserves in projects like this.89
The production was funded by Arts Council England, Sir Barry Jackson Trust, John Feeney Charitable Trust, and the Unity Theatre Trust. However, Pearson’s comments are further supported by statements in the company’s interim report to ACE: ‘[u]nfortunately, despite numerous fundraising applications submitted, and accessing freelance T&F [trusts and foundations] fundraising expertise, we were unable to secure the levels of T&F income that we hoped’.90 The report then goes on to detail how Women & Theatre will ensure the success of the production whilst working within a revised budget (the company initially costed the production at £65,053 but revised this to £55,439).91 This reduction in expenditure was achieved through the company not fully re-charging for the time spent on the project by core staff members, casting an intern in one of the roles, finding a low-cost rehearsal space, and utilising in-kind support from Birmingham Repertory Theatre.92 These responses of crowdsourcing support, making-do, and relying on unpaid or invisible labour are commonalities across applied performance. The support from the Birmingham Repertory included marketing support and covered the staffing costs of a producer, a dramaturg, and a technician and amounted to a financial equivalent of £11,918. This is an indicative example of larger, building-based theatres in the UK facilitating the work of arts organisations based in the community and investing time and capital in the production of performance work they believe to be valuable. Further, the Trades Union Congress also supported the company, booking them to perform at their Annual Women’s Conference in March 2017. This demonstrates how arts companies might cultivate networks of support beyond performance and trusts and instead seek to engage with organisations that are politically aligned with the work they produce, particularly if the state is not officially recognising the gendered implications of their programme of financial cuts. These informal networks of support and investments in reproductive labour to make a project or performance happen are indicative of the kind of labour which I have discussed in this chapter, and they situate applied performance in a discourse of care.
The introduction of gender-disaggregated data could increase the number and quality of representations of female unemployment in performance, but as I identify above, there are more worrying systemic problems surrounding the defunding of women’s organisations since 2010. In many ways Clean Break has grown significantly over the past nine years: fostering partnerships with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Soho Theatre, and the Donmar Warehouse and cultivating links with educational institutions such as City and Islington College; and over 2015–16, the organisation saw an 18% increase in the number of women they engaged.93 This expansion has been underpinned by a strong relationship with Arts Council England, where they hold National Portfolio Organisation status and have been successful recipients of Catalyst funding.94 However, in the 2015–16 financial year, the organisation reported a shortfall in their fundraising target.95 This funding gap is primarily due to cuts in the organisation’s statutory funding from both Camden Council and Big Lottery. Camden Council’s removal of funding is indicative of broader cuts to local authority funding of the arts, which have had a devastating effect on provision, with Arts Council England reporting a 19% cut to arts funding across London boroughs between 2010 and 2015.96 In responding to the shortfall, the organisation made a number of additional funding bids and drew upon their organisational reserves. Documentation from the Finance Committee indicates the acutely difficult conversations such a financial context provokes. For example, the committee discussed the possibility of the current funding landscape to require them to introduce cuts in the education programme between January and March 2017, including a postponement of the graduate tour and a reduction in staffing and provision.97
The proximity of applied performance companies to organisations delivering support services through the state or charity sectors results in government cuts to such services more acutely affecting this strand of performance. Indeed, as Herrmann points to, a number of applied performance organisations are bound up in service delivery, and working with individuals who are accessing a range of support systems. The combination of arts cuts and reductions in social services thus exposes the increased precarity of such performance practice. ACE announced that between 2011 and 2014 they spent £14 million on ‘bail out’ grants for arts organisations that were in financial crisis.99 This was spread across 55 theatres, galleries, music, dance, and literature organisations. These organisations had to demonstrate they were at immediate and serious financial risk and that their provision was irreplaceable. We need to acknowledge the value of the work such arts organisations undertake and the projects they produce, even if that value is not recognised by market forces.We work closely with support services who were struggling and we knew of that experience very much from the sector that we are part of because we aren’t just part of the theatre sector, we are part of the voluntary sector and support sector too. We were living very much with the cuts and the experience of the cuts as service providers as well.98
Conclusion
Throughout this book I have evidenced how depictions of unemployment onstage can make visible performances of labour that have otherwise been occluded or devalued and so consequently unsettle dominant conceptions of work. I have utilised gender as a critical lens in this chapter to explore the absence of depictions of female jobseekers in performance. This has exposed the consistent representation of unemployed women as engaged in acts of reproductive labour rather than focused on job-seeking activities. In drawing attention to this trend, I have underscored how such representations are entwined with the historical lineage of devaluing women’s reproductive labour and a failure to acknowledge the contribution such labour makes to the maintenance of capitalist economies. Read through the framework of gendered labour; each of the performances examined here has the potential to offer a critique of the way in which women are positioned by the UK benefit system. It is crucial that scholarship and practitioners are able to make explicit the implications of gender in performance that is concerned with navigating systems of social welfare. Further, my exploration of organisational structures and economies of applied performance illuminates parallels between unpaid care labour often associated with women and the caring/care-full work of feminist arts practitioners. Returning to Spent and focusing on its intended audience of service providers reveals how performance concerned with social development can itself function a kind of reproductive labour. Alongside this, I have evidenced the financial investment feminist theatre companies are making to build support systems into their practice which enable women’s ongoing participation. Finally, I engaged with the funding of Woman and Theatre to reflect on how feminist networks of support and attitudes of make-do and mend are deployed across women’s theatre companies operating in a context of cuts and austerity. This analysis of organisational practices demonstrates the broader capacity of applied arts practice to create structures of care for participants beyond performance.
This chapter has sought to make visible the financial precarity and social productivity of both women’s labour and applied performance work in order to locate each as valuable and in need of increased support and attention. Feminist Fightback asserts that ‘[a]ny feminist response to the austerity measures and their deeply gendered implications will, however, necessitate a re-focus on the home and the socially reproductive labour that takes place within it’.100 In navigating the landscape of austerity, applied practice has the potential to equip participants, practitioners, and scholars with the tools for this refocusing on the importance of social reproduction. Concurrently applied performance is itself a mode of that same reproduction, a practice infused with care and attention for participants often occluded from such relational networked support but also an undervalued aspect of the economic ecology of performance and society. This demands scholarship attend to the reproductive labour of applied arts practice and positions that practice as well placed to highlight the importance of care work within capitalist modes of exchange.