1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910483672303321

Autore

Bartley Sarah

Titolo

Performing Welfare : Applied Theatre, Unemployment, and Economies of Participation / / by Sarah Bartley

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2020

ISBN

3-030-44854-1

Edizione

[1st ed. 2020.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (272 pages) : illustrations

Collana

Contemporary Performance InterActions, , 2634-5870

Disciplina

792.0941

301

Soggetti

Theater

Performing arts

Contemporary Theatre

National/Regional Theatre and Performance

Applied Theatre

Performing Arts

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

1. Introduction: Performing Welfare -- 2. Arts and Employability: Migrating Discourses of Skills, Creativity, and Competition -- 3. An Aesthetics of Dependency: Reflecting a Rhetoric of Individualism and Promoting Practices of Collectivity in Community Performance -- 4. Visibility, Invisibility and Anonymity: Materialising Communities and Navigating the State in Collective Action -- 5. Biopolitics and The Unemployed Body in Applied Performance: Staging Labour, Disrupting Productivity, and Contesting Categorisation -- 6. Female Unemployment, Social Reproduction and Economies of Labour in Applied Performance -- 7. Conclusion: Reimagining Creative Acts Under Austerity.

Sommario/riassunto

This book explores what happens to socially committed performance when state systems of social security are dismantled. Since 2010, a punishing programme of economic austerity and a seismic overhaul of the Welfare State in the United Kingdom has been accompanied by an ideological assault on dependency; a pervasive scapegoating of the



poor, young, and disabled; and an intensification of the discursive relationship between morality and work. This book considers the artistic, material, and ideological consequences of such shifts for applied and socially engaged performance. Performing Welfare reveals how such arts practices might reconstitute notions of work and labour in socially constructive ways. It focuses on the political potential of participation during a period in which classifications of labour and productivity are intensely contested. It examines the migration of discourses from state policy to the cultural sector; narratives of community and aesthetics of dependency; the paradoxes of visibility in creative projects with stigmatised participants; the implicit relationship of participatory performance to neoliberal productivity; and, the parallels between gendered divisions of labour, social reproduction, and applied performance. It will appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in applied and socially engaged performance, participation, community, representation, the welfare state, social policy, labour, and unemployment. .