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Performing Welfare

Applied Theatre, Unemployment, and Economies of Participation

Palgrave Macmillan

Authors:

  • Explores performance practices that address the intersection of youth, race, disability, and gender with unemployment between 2010-2018
  • Focuses on performances that are created by unemployed non-professional performers
  • Interrogates the relationship between community, the individual, and the arts

Part of the book series: Contemporary Performance InterActions (CPI)

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About this book

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.      


Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Reading, Berkshire, UK

    Sarah Bartley

About the author

Sarah Bartley is a Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her research examines the intersections of work, participation, and performance at play within socially engaged and applied theatre practices. She has previously published in Contemporary Theatre Review and Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access