Contemporary Performance InterActions

Series Editors

Elaine Aston

Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancashire, UK

Brian Singleton

Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Theatre's performative InterActions with the politics of sex, race and class, with questions of social and political justice, form the focus of the Contemporary Performance InterActions series. Performative InterActions are those that aspire to affect, contest or transform. International in scope, CPI publishes monographs and edited collections dedicated to the InterActions of contemporary practitioners, performances and theatres located in any world context.

More information about this series at http://​www.​palgrave.​com/​gp/​series/​14918Advisory board:

Khalid Amine (Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Morocco)

Bishnupriya Dutt (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)

Mark Fleishman (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Janelle Reinelt (University of Warwick, UK)

Freddie Rokem (Tel Aviv University, Israel)

Joanne Tompkins (University of Queensland, Australia)

Harvey Young (Northwestern University, USA)

Sarah Bartley

Performing Welfare

Applied Theatre, Unemployment, and Economies of Participation

1st ed. 2020

Sarah Bartley

University of Reading, Berkshire, UK

Contemporary Performance InterActions

ISBN 978-3-030-44853-0e-ISBN 978-3-030-44854-7

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44854-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

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Tangled Feet, One Million (2013) Promotion Image.Cover designed by Jey Malaiperuman.

Cover designed by Jey Malaiperuman.

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Acknowledgements

The caring, creative, and politically charged arts practices that intersect with the welfare state have been a constant source of inspiration throughout the writing of this monograph. I would like to thank Rebecca Adamson, Naomi Alexander, Kate Anderson, Alexander Augustus, Richard Barber, Katherine Chandler, Michael Chandler, Nathan Curry, Anna Herrmann, Chloe Jones, Kat Joyce, Jess Pearson, Emma Waslin, Sara Whybrew, and all of the participants I interviewed for their insights and for allowing me to reproduce them here. Further, I will always be grateful to Gillian Hewitson and the team at Newcastle Futures whose compassion for all those seeking work lit the touch paper for this research.

I am enormously thankful to Jen Harvie for helping to dig out the pockets of creative resistance amid the cruelty of austerity. I am indebted to her relentless interrogation of social and political inequalities and her unwavering support of me as a scholar. I am also hugely grateful to Caoimhe McAvinchey whose boundless knowledge of practice and enthusiasm to sit down and talk it all through continue to energise me as a researcher. You are both exceptional mentors and consistently model the importance of kind and critical scholarship in equal measure.

The wider research community in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University has been hugely stimulating to be a part of; in particular, I would like to thank Michael Shane Boyle, Amy Borsuk, Bridget Escolme, Maggie Inchley, Catherine Silverstone, Philip Watkinson, Martin Welton, Lois Weaver, Pen Woods, Martin Young, and Charlotte Young for their contributions to both my research process and my teaching practice. Your wit, activism, and research continue to be an inspiration. My thanks also to the School of English and Drama administrative team for their warmth and academic support.

I am also thankful to all my former colleagues at the University of Leeds. I am particularly grateful to Aylwyn Walsh for reading drafts of this work and for her inimitable comradeship and encouragement, Emma Bennett for her solidarity and stimulating curiosity about absolutely everything, and Kara McKechnie for keeping me together on even the longest of days in room 101.

There are many other colleagues whose reflections informed this book, most significantly Louise Owen and Jenny Hughes generously spent time with this project and developed my thinking by asking incisive questions and sharing generative conversations. Cat Fallow and Sarah Thomasson, for reading drafts of this work, offering stimulating ideas, and for never doubting it was worthwhile, you both helped with it all in immeasurable ways. I am indebted to the editorial team at Contemporary Theatre Review, Maria Delgado, Maggie Gale, Dominic Johnson, Bryce Lease, and Aoife Monks, from whom I have learned the importance of collegiality and generosity in scholarship during my time as editorial assistant. Thanks also to Selina Busby who set me on this path, Saul Hewish for being a mentor and a friend, Caoimhe Mader McGuinness for her camaraderie and comradeship, Sylvan Baker for always sending exciting things my way, Sue Mayo for her support and encouragement, and to my hero Lynne McCarthy who helped me along the journey, then, now, and hopefully always.

My thinking and enthusiasm for this project was nourished by working with students, particularly those undergraduates on Collaborative Project and our partners at the Wakefield Youth Association, whose exploration of youth unemployment offered fresh perspectives and helped me to think through many of the arguments made here. Further, the MA Applied Theatre students at Leeds, Goldsmiths, and Central School of Speech and Drama always offered thoughtful and passionate discussions that challenged and solidified the ideas that fill these pages.

I am thankful to Elaine Aston and Brian Singleton for their time and support during the process of writing this monograph, particularly for the insightful, encouraging, and thoughtful feedback Elaine offered on the first draft of the manuscript which significantly expanded the reach of this project. Thanks also to the excellent editorial team I have worked with at Palgrave Macmillan, Tomas René, Vicky Bates, Shaun Vigil, Eileen Srebernik, and Jack Heeney. Your careful guidance, patience, and attention to detail have been a great help.

Parts of Chap. 6 were published in ‘Gendering Welfare Onstage: Acts of Reproductive Labour in Applied Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 29.3 (2019), and revised for publication here. Chapter 5 is derived, in part, from an article entitled ‘Hard Labour and Punitive Welfare: The Unemployed Body at Work in Participatory Performance’, Research in Drama Education, 22.1 (2017), pp. 62–75. I am appreciative of the permission given to republish this material here and for the astute feedback I received from the anonymous reviewers and editorial teams at both journals.

Much gratitude to my big brother David, who has been my generous patron since primary school. Thanks also to my parents Dave and Cynthia, growing up in school staff rooms and Jobcentre offices instilled in me the value of public service and civic work from the beginning. I hope you enjoy this product of your union.

Finally, to Sarah Mullan, thank you for always trying to make sense of me. You are a generous first editor, an insightful theatre companion, and a remarkable accomplice in everything. Your fierce care, furious kindness, and unerring support are absolutely unparalleled. This book is for you.

Praise for Performing Welfare

“Sarah Bartley’s insightful investigation brings current debates about applied theatre and participation into dialogue with discussions of welfare in neoliberal societies. Empathetic and engaging, this study asks challenging questions about theatrical representations of the unemployed, and considers how far theatre projects designed for people experiencing joblessness are enmeshed in iniquitous ideas about productivity and labour. This book addresses vital issues for our time, and positions Bartley as a distinctive and important voice that must be heard by students, scholars and theatre-makers.”

—Professor Helen Nicholson, Royal Holloway, University of London

“Performing Welfare dissects the vicious rhetoric, policy, and media and state practices of this era that violently punished so many of its most disadvantaged citizens. It then examines an array of applied theatre practices, from large-scale extravaganzas to intimate installations, that, by contrast, compassionately partnered with people who were unemployed to explore the true stories of their lives – their awful precarity, their ambitions, and their heartfelt dreams.

Sarah Bartley’s Performing Welfare is an urgently timely book of compassion, hope, and care by a writer paying forensic while sensitive attention to both social injustice in the age of austerity, and the poignant reparative potential of applied theatre.”

—Jen Harvie, Queen Mary University of London

Contents

1 Introduction:​ Performing Welfare 1

2 Arts and Employability:​ Migrating Discourses of Skills, Creativity, and Competition 41

3 An Aesthetics of Dependency:​ Models of Individual Responsibility and Practices of Collectivity in Community Performance 79

4 Visibility, Invisibility, and Anonymity:​ Materialising Communities and Navigating the State in Collective Action 117

5 Biopolitics and the Unemployed Body in Applied Performance:​ Staging Labour, Disrupting Productivity, and Contesting Categorisation 159

6 Gendered Unemployment, Social Reproduction, and Economies of Labour in Applied Performance 203

7 Conclusion:​ Reimagining Creative Acts Under Austerity 247

Afterword 255

Index 261

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 A Dangerous Figure, ‘The Hanging CVs’ at Somerset House 2013. (Photograph courtesy of the artist) 120

 

Fig. 4.2 A Dangerous Figure submission page. (Photograph reproduced courtesy of the artist) 124

 

Fig. 4.3 A Dangerous Figure, a portrait of youth unemployment, Alexander Augustus and The Bite Back Movement (Photograph courtesy of the artist) 134

 

Fig. 5.1 One Million, Tangled Feet, Greenwich International Festival (2013). (Photograph courtesy of Nathan Curry) 165

 

Fig. 5.2 ‘Climbing the Career Ladder’, One Million, Tangled Feet, Greenwich International Festival (2013). (Photograph courtesy of Nathan Curry) 167