Performing Welfare: Applied Theatre, Unemployment, and Economies of Participation [1st ed.] 9783030448530, 9783030448547

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CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE INTERACTIONS SERIES EDITORS: ELAINE ASTON · BRIAN SINGLETON

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

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/14918

Sarah Bartley

Performing Welfare Applied Theatre, Unemployment, and Economies of Participation

Sarah Bartley University of Reading Berkshire, UK

Contemporary Performance InterActions ISBN 978-3-030-44853-0    ISBN 978-3-030-44854-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44854-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Tangled Feet, One Million (2013) Promotion Image Cover designed by Jey Malaiperuman This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

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 v

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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.

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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 Action117 5 Biopolitics and the Unemployed Body in Applied Performance: Staging Labour, Disrupting Productivity, and Contesting Categorisation159 6 Gendered Unemployment, Social Reproduction, and Economies of Labour in Applied Performance203

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7 Conclusion: Reimagining Creative Acts Under Austerity247 Afterword255 Index261

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

A Dangerous Figure, ‘The Hanging CVs’ at Somerset House 2013. (Photograph courtesy of the artist) A Dangerous Figure submission page. (Photograph reproduced courtesy of the artist) A Dangerous Figure, a portrait of youth unemployment, Alexander Augustus and The Bite Back Movement (Photograph courtesy of the artist) One Million, Tangled Feet, Greenwich International Festival (2013). (Photograph courtesy of Nathan Curry) ‘Climbing the Career Ladder’, One Million, Tangled Feet, Greenwich International Festival (2013). (Photograph courtesy of Nathan Curry)

120 124 134 165 167

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Performing Welfare

It’s 2015 and I am in a community centre in Gateshead, a town situated in the North East of England. I have come to interview participants of MindFULL, an applied arts project delivered by Helix Arts and Tyneside Mind in which participants produced a film documenting the increasingly hostile processes encountered by disabled people who are trying to access state-administered financial support in the UK.  Two members of the group make me a cup of tea, pull three chairs into the corner of the room, and ask me if I liked their film, But I’m Here for Mental Health.1 The two participants talk animatedly for an hour about their experiences with chronic illness, unemployment, and the state welfare system; but mainly, they speak about the process of making But I’m Here for Mental Health: how it was joyful, how it was painful, how they wanted to show the hopelessness of fighting the system, how they intended to redress pervasive representations of benefit claimants as scroungers. Throughout our conversation the two keep returning to the anxiety that surrounded their participation in the arts project, encapsulated by the exasperated avowal: ‘well they’d say, “if you can sit there and tell your story, you can sit at a desk and do a job”’.2 The ‘they’ refers to the Department for Work and Pensions, the arm of government that oversees welfare provision in the UK; but it also resonates with a wider increase in public attention to activities undertaken by welfare claimants since 2010. The feeling of

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Bartley, Performing Welfare, Contemporary Performance InterActions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44854-7_1

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unease articulated by these participants lies at the heart of Performing Welfare. Arts projects engaging unemployed people are increasingly shaped by the challenges of representing demonised and surveilled subjects. Further, the ambiguous blurring of the boundaries between participation and labour within participatory arts projects is intensified by engaging the non-working subject, whose proximity to work—or anything that might resemble work—is policed and punitively regulated by the state and sections of the media. This book explores the uneasy terrain socially committed arts practices occupy when state systems of work and welfare are in flux and considers strategies that enable this unease to be navigated or deployed in useful ways for participants. I consider how projects can enable people to tell their stories in ways which do not expose them to disciplinary actions from the state and how arts practices premised on participation function in conditions where classifications of labour are so loaded. Between 2010 and 2018, levels of unemployment in the UK considerably expanded and contracted, hitting record highs of 2.57 million people in 2011 and reducing to 1.44  million people by the end of 2017.3 Concurrently the UK welfare system has been subject to its largest reform since its inception in 1942, contributing to changing understandings of (non-)work, significantly shifting the role of the state in supporting its citizens, and invoking an onslaught of negative depictions of dependency in both media and policy. Indeed, Philip Alston, United Nations Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, recently asserted: It might seem to some observers that the Department of Work and Pensions has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the nineteenth century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens, rather than seeking to respond creatively and compassionately to the real needs of those facing widespread economic insecurity in an age of deep and rapid transformation brought about by automation, zero-hour contracts and rapidly growing inequality.4

The unemployed figure is increasingly deployed by the state and the media in ways that resonate with Victorian notions of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. Benefit claimants are utilised as a divisive tool, a way to scapegoat the allegedly welfare-bloated state as partly culpable for this period of austerity.5 In the chapters that follow, I draw attention to the

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callous treatment of unemployed individuals and document applied and socially engaged performance that seeks to stage their experiences during a period of economic austerity and welfare retraction.6 I reflect on the implications of the erosion of social security for socially committed arts practices and examine how such performance intervenes in this shifting landscape. In particular, this project explores how representational strategies deployed in applied arts practice disrupt or reinforce negative constructions of marginalised people; concurrently, it exposes how participation in performance, particularly by individuals deemed unproductive, nuances rigid configurations of labour and therefore blurs the boundaries of work under a capitalist regime. Does the desire to promote participation in the arts resonate with a move towards active labour market policies and the accompanying mentality of the implicit value in doing, or rather, do representations of the unemployed figure in applied performance unsettle narrow understandings of productivity and labour? Further, I consider how the labour at play within applied performance— specifically, economies of participation, implications of remuneration, and definitions of productivity—offers resistant practices within a neoliberal labour market. The UK Welfare Reform Acts of 2012 and 2016 introduced a series of wide-reaching changes in state-provided social security. These reforms included significant reductions in social housing provision and destabilising changes to social rents, a series of re-categorisations in disability benefits, and increased conditionality around the obligations of claimants, leading to an intensification of financial sanctioning (i.e. stopping people’s benefit). Further, the Coalition and subsequent Conservative governments phased introduction of Universal Credit—an attempt to consolidate all working-age state benefits into a single payment—will reduce the financial support claimants receive by £3  billion a year by 2020–21.7 These changes and their cumulative severity in instigating financial cuts to benefits have left claimants in a position of acute precarity. In 2010–11 foodbank charity The Trussell Trust gave out 61,468 emergency food parcels, and by 2018–19 this figure had risen to 1,583,66888; between 2010 and 2016 there was a 54% increase in homelessness in England9, and the financial sanctioning of claimants nearly tripled during this period, topping two million people in 2013.10 This systematic removal of funds from state welfare means unemployed people, dismissed and precarised by

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the labour market, consequently find themselves dependent on state support that is itself increasingly insecure. This dispossession of the most vulnerable in UK society has been underpinned by an ideological assault on dependency and collective support; a pervasive scapegoating of the poor, the young, and the disabled; and an intensification of the discursive relationship between morality and work. The implications of these changes are significant for understandings of the erosion of the post-war UK welfare contract and also for universal understandings of how social security, state support, and dependency are constructed in neoliberal contexts. I was compelled to undertake this research by the intensification of negative representations of unemployment in political and popular discourse following the global economic recession of 2008 and the subsequent implementation of economic policies of austerity in the UK. The rapid rise in unemployment in the country brought the issue to the forefront of the political agenda, placing it at the centre of new public service commissioning models. These shifts generated money for arts projects engaging with unemployment. This resulted in unemployment not only being a possible situation of people participating in applied and socially committed arts practice, but the unemployed were increasingly recognised as a participant group in their own right. In my own practice as a freelance community artist, I was increasingly being invited to facilitate arts projects with unemployed individuals, particularly unemployed young people, which sought to initiate behavioural changes in order to make participants more employable. In my experience, these projects were predominantly focused on achieving individual change rather than interrogating any underlying historical, cultural, and structural reasons behind unemployment. Additionally, during the period examined in this book, I was employed by Newcastle City Council to work in partnership with Jobcentre Plus on a four-month research project in 2012 that explored provision for youth unemployment in the region and had two periods where I was unemployed and claiming unemployment benefits, in 2011 and 2013. Informed by my own experiences and the shifting social and political terrain of unemployment in the UK, I interrogate the relationship between socially committed performance and social policy to illuminate the consequences of this intersection for the politics of representation and practices of the social in performance. I focus on performances that are created by unemployed non-­ professional performers and arts schemes that directly engage unemployed participants. I interrogate the relationship between community, the

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individual, and the arts in a context where social systems of support are being dismantled. The practices I investigate are conceptually layered and heterogeneously realised. In order to attend to the richness of this kaleidoscopic arts landscape, I consider the overlapping and divergent fields of applied theatre, community arts, and participatory performance. Sally Mackey has noted the absence of applied and social theatre in discourse surrounding ‘the social turn’ in visual arts and participatory performance practices.11 This book in part redresses this absence. Further, while applied theatre, community arts, and participatory performance intersect and inform one another, each area interacts with the context and experience of unemployment in distinct ways. Applied theatre offers a body of scholarship that addresses the instrumentalisation of arts practices in service to social and political agendas. Prevalent discourses of inclusion/exclusion and collective/individual operating within community theatre provoke pertinent questions in practices addressing unemployment. Finally, the parallel emergence and emphasis on participation, in both the labour market and contemporary arts practice, evidences the utility of offering an analysis that holds unemployment and performance alongside one another. It is essential for socially committed performance practices, which are regularly concerned with creative production and active participation, to reflect on its relationship to the destabilising of social security contracts, the intensification of models of productivity, and the pervasive rhetoric of individual responsibility. My examination of the unique economies of participation that operate within socially committed performance—by which I mean models of participant remuneration, systems of production, and divergent funding strategies—asserts how this mode of performance might disrupt established organisations of labour and capital under neoliberalism. Such performance risks validating these hierarchical systems of power and yet it is uniquely positioned to critique them through the aesthetic strategies deployed by practitioners and participants and the collective production practices it can utilise.

Labour, Unemployment, and Performance Performing Welfare is explicitly aligned with Marxist feminist scholarship that seeks to disrupt the way in which work is valued, and thus the unemployed are devalued, at the outset of the twenty-first century. Operating within a Marxist framework that acknowledges social relations as central to the function of production, I highlight capitalist mechanisms of inequality

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and exploitation at play in the exchange of waged and unwaged labour. As Karl Marx identifies: if a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.12

The unemployed function as a regulating force under capitalist production. How such lives are deployed, dismissed and precarised, by the demands of neoliberal labour markets, which increasingly invoke this ‘disposable [post] industrial reserve army’, is the locus around which this study operates. Negative constructions of the unemployed emerge, in part, from the neoliberal subject’s uncritical relationship to the value of labour. Feminist political theorist Kathi Weeks rails against this depoliticisation of work: ‘[t]he value of work, along with its centrality to our lives, is one of the most stubbornly naturalised and apparently self-evident elements of modern and late, or post-modern, capitalist societies’.13 Locating an implicit value in work and its significance facilitates a deligitimisation of the unemployed people. Across the diverse landscape of applied theatre and socially engaged arts practices, there are projects that encompass narratives of instrumentality and concern themselves with the use of arts practice to upskill the subject and imbue them with a greater value in the neoliberal labour market; concurrently there are practices within these fields which operate at the fringes of productivity and labour and consequently challenge the naturalised value of work. Over the course of the book, I examine how moral and economic values affixed to the concept of work emerge in socially committed performances that represent the experiences of, and engage with, unemployed people. Weeks traces the growth of the labourist work ethic in the industrial period, identifying how it ‘constitute[d] the working class as a class, serving to render it legible’.14 Subsequently, after the middle of the twentieth century, work was characterised as a path to individual self-expression, self-reliance, agency, and creativity.15 Work was no longer about developing a collective identity but instead became tethered to the self. Operating alongside the implicit value attributed to work is the assumed value work

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bestows upon us, bound up as it now is with our identity. The detrimental impact here for unemployed people is clear; they are both denied access to the collective identity of the working class and also unable to signify their individual identity and value. My engagement with this area is inflected with Weeks’ assertion that work is not just championed through economic necessity and social responsibility, ‘it is widely understood as an individual moral practice and collective ethical obligation’.16 I explore how the unemployed are constituted as a collective, interrogate the ways in which this collective is rendered ‘legible’, and consider the social and political stakes of doing so. The UK Office for National Statistics utilises the following Labour Force Survey definition of unemployment in order to delineate between the working, economically inactive, and unemployed17: those without a job who have been actively seeking work in the past 4 weeks and are available to start work in the next 2 weeks. It also includes those who are out of work but have found a job and are waiting to start it in the next 2 weeks.18

This definition positions the subject as contractually connected to the state and—in drawing on this definition—I highlight how policy, legislation, and performance intersect and diverge in socially committed arts practice. Contrary to terms such as worklessness—which gained prevalence in government discourse post-2010 and is indicative of pathological and ideological constructions of the unemployed individual—unemployment recognises the impact of broader considerations of business cycles and economic conditions on the availability and obtainability of work in particular labour markets. The term exposes the existence of discourses that promote pathologies of worklessness while offering a more comprehensive understanding of the material conditions of the labour landscape. While I use this definition of unemployment, I also problematise its failure to account for non-working people engaged in forms of labour that are not economically rewarded. The understanding of labour deployed in Performing Welfare recognises a broad range of human activity including, but not limited to, waged work. Throughout the chapters that follow, I demonstrate the ambiguity of such classifications of labour and reflect on how applied performance might seek to radically illuminate that ambiguity. There are representations of modes of productivity operating beyond capitalist work regimes

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onstage, but how do such representations become acutely politicised when undertaken by individuals the state deems as non-working/non-­ productive? Drawing on theorisations of productivity that emerge in feminist, queer, and crip scholarship finds ways to trouble the parameters of state categorisations of labouring subjects.19 Indeed, Alison Kafer has identified resonances across queer and disabled subjects in relation to productivity, particularly noting ‘the mechanisms of state services certainly push one out of the logic of capital accumulation and onto the edges of labour and production’.20 Its application here encapsulates aspects of production and reproduction which this study unravels, particularly, in relation to reproductive labour and the diverse resistances to sanctioned forms of productivity engendered by marginalised young, racialised, gendered, or disabled subjects. Therefore, while I rely on a definition of unemployment that is anchored in the term ‘actively seeking work’, I problematise this definition and identify ways in which applied performance project might construct alternative models of labour and work that render the unemployed ‘productive’ beyond the parameters of a capitalist work regime. I am specifically invested in attending to the material implications and realities of labour and participation among acutely exploited groups in a neoliberal economy. Thinking through unemployment in tandem with performance is bolstered by the recognition of the position of theatre between leisure and work. A liminal position made even more germane in performance practice undertaken by individuals outside of established working structures. Nicholas Ridout posits the potential of theatre as ‘a place and practice where it might be possible to think disruptively about work and leisure’.21 Presenting the labour of the unemployed, through participants’ public performance, offers an extension of this ‘disruptive’ challenge. Particularly relevant is Ridout’s reflection on the nature of the ‘passionate amateur’, which he suggests illustrates the possibility of theatrical labour to unsettle the logic of new capitalism and our ‘subjugation to wage labor and the labor theory of value’.22 Ridout thus identifies the potential of theatre to engage in different forms of value exchange and conceives ‘passionate amateurs’ as ‘those who work together for the production of value for one another (for love, that is, rather than money) in ways that refuse […] the division of labor that obtains under capitalism as usual’.23 Such a description can be applied to much socially focused performance, which is often concerned with the production of values other than the financial, as participants and artists alike engage for passion or ‘love’ of the work. Reconstituting the

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passionate amateur through the lens of the unemployed participant amplifies conflicts surrounding labour, economies, and performance. Performance projects that seek to cultivate alternative modes of value illuminate ways in which the unemployed figure might be framed as a radical force in participatory performance. Performance occupies a distinctive position in its capacity to make practices of labour visible to publics. Increasingly, participatory arts practices are an arena which exposes or illuminates the dynamics of the labour in the work of artistic production. Theron Schmidt proposes a slippage occurring in contemporary arts and performance between ‘work’ (labour power) and ‘a work’ (the commodity produced and abstracted from labour).24 He identifies the problematic assertion that acts of labour sited in theatre and arts spaces can in some way reveal ‘real’ labour to viewers. Although many contemporary works concerned with labour suggest they are acknowledging and presenting the hidden labour in such spaces, they fall back on the representational modes inherent in the space (i.e. performance/aesthetic frames) and thus ‘real’ presentations of hidden labour dynamics remain illusive. As such, the frame of the theatre produces such labour as fabrication, as mimetic, as less concrete than it may appear. […] this abstraction produces a kind of non-productivity: No matter how much the stagehand sweeps the stage, he or she will not sweep the stage, but only show us sweeping the stage.25

Rather than presenting access to a ‘real’ unalienated labour, such ‘works’ about work render labour ‘non-productive’; while they fail to present this real labour, they succeed in making acutely apparent the labour of theatricality. Building on this, as unemployed people are implicitly identified as unproductive, how might aesthetically framing them as ‘at work’ unsettle or reaffirm perceptions of their productivity? There is a sense that audiences at cultural events ‘play at’, and indeed pay for, labour as part of their leisure experience. Adam Alston’s interrogation of when participation is ‘playing’ and when it is ‘labour’ underscores the complexity of the kinds of activity participants engage in. I consider whether this complexity intervenes in perceptions of the unemployed as non-productive subjects and further examine the boundary between creative participation and creative work.26 Alston appeals for greater attention to the implications of performing labour: ‘[w]e should also question what it means to “reveal” labour, particularly when that revealing is itself an

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aesthetic process’.27 In a period where labour status is deeply contested, performance must strive to develop a greater understanding of how it exposes labour and critically reflect on implications of the representations of labour it offers. Such questions are only intensified when considered in relation to the aesthetics of performances of unemployment.

Conceptualising Welfare and Performance: Dependency and Precarity Arts projects addressing unemployment have a profound interaction with the state, both in addressing prescribed social effects and responding to policy agendas and in engaging with the community politics of place and social responsibility of citizens. Dependence has increasingly been positioned as contrary to work in contemporary British political discourse. In 1997, at his first Labour Party Conference Speech, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair stated: ‘[t]he new welfare state must encourage work, not dependency’.28 Such rhetoric removes ‘dependency’ from its broader meaning of mutual support and stability and instead locates it as what sociologist Richard Sennett terms ‘social parasitism’.29 Sennett identifies how during new capitalism—a period of dematerialised, globally networked, and concurrently precarised neoliberalism—dependence has become both dislocated from considerations of care or community and reconstituted as a position of neediness of which individuals should be ashamed. Distinguishing the unemployed as other is an act of segregation enacted by governments, media, and working publics, in order to distance themselves from the shame attributed to worklessness and the individual failure it has come to signify. Alongside the retraction of formal systems of state support, the UK has seen a growth in informal networks of care (foodbanks, volunteer carers, childcare collectives). Such networks might be both a locus for resistance, where claimants can meet and organise modes of aesthetic and political opposition, and concurrently a practice of civic participation deployed in service of the creation and maintenance of economically active and productive citizens. As such, Performing Welfare examines both the communal potentials arts practice can envision and the material social systems within which participants are located. Previously, Shannon Jackson has prompted a consideration of the support systems in which relational or participatory performance is embedded, aiming ‘to place social systems in

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the foreground of analysis despite the fact they usually occupy the background of experience’.30 Jackson proposes such a foregrounding will, rather than echoing the ongoing binary discourse of efficacy versus aesthetic quality, provoke a heightened ‘awareness of our enmeshment in systems of support’.31 Similarly, I examine how the welfare state, and its erosion, is performed and experienced in socially committed arts practices. This prioritises the intersection of arts practice and social systems; rather than an emphasis on arguing for the value of specific aesthetic or social agendas, I examine what occurs when these fields overlap. I investigate the particular character of state sociality through the lens of the collective and collaborative practices. Jen Harvie explores how the welfare state might potentially incubate or challenge relational arts practice in the UK asking ‘how do these potentially socially democratic art practices and neoliberal capitalist ideologies produce, inform, challenge and/or undermine each other?’32 Such an investigation encourages a critique of the problematic economic and social relations that arts projects might engender and embed while also pointing to the potential of such arts practices to highlight the labour dynamics which proliferate in our contemporary context. In progressively precarious social and economic contexts, Jackson and Harvie illuminated the position of art and performance within models of social governance. While critiquing potential issues surrounding such relationally intentioned practice, both advocate for art forms which foster interdependence and collective support systems, be they state-led or otherwise, in contexts of receding social security. In its attentiveness to the social context and political structures, out of which art practices emerge, Performing Welfare locates itself in the theoretical lineage of Harvie and Jackson. Representations of welfare in socially committed arts practices offer an opportunity to interrogate notions of representation, dependence, and production among unemployed individuals and communities. Further, attending to arts projects engagement with unemployed participants illuminates how arts practice directly intervenes in, responds to, and reproduces welfare policy. As political theorist Isabell Lorey evidences, precarity is increasingly engendered by the state through the destruction of social security. This is justified by governments due to its apparent inevitability: ‘[i]n the course of the dismantling of the welfare state and the rights associated with it, a form of government is established that is based on the greatest possible insecurity, promoted by proclaiming the alleged absence of alternatives’.33 Welfare contracts are disintegrating and political reforms continue to

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erode the rights of those on benefits, asserting that social security is no longer secure; as Lorey suggests, ‘precaritization is not an exception, it is rather the rule’.34 Lorey posits precarity as a nascent form of what Michel Foucault has termed ‘governmentality’, which works to produce economically and socially vulnerable citizens who are unreservedly responsive to the needs of the market.35 Insecurity is therefore an elected strategy of control, a political choice, and one which has been electorally successful in the UK, with the Conservative Party re-elected in national elections in 2015, 2017, and 2019 on manifestos that championed austerity policies. Significantly, Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, reported after a visit to the UK in 2018: The Government paints a picture of austerity in which everyone has tightened their belt together but, […] while the bottom 20 per cent of earners will have lost on average 10 per cent of their income by 2021–2022 as a result of these changes, top earners have actually come out ahead. This is compounded by cuts to public spending, including on housing and education, that have hit the lowest-income households the hardest, and in England amount to cuts of 16 per cent or £1,450 per person.36

In the UK, austerity has been deployed to disinvest in the poorest in our society, to encourage the shift of public services into private ownership, and enable the transfer of wealth to an increasingly small elite. In conjunction with the economic and social precarity identified by Lorey, I also consider the material and embodied vulnerability of distinct communities. Judith Butler posits the concept of ‘precarious life’ in a post-9/11 American context of censorship and violence.37 Two central tenets of Butler’s conception of ‘precarious life’ are that humans are implicitly interdependent and vulnerable and that some are more exposed to that vulnerability than others. These articulations of differently vulnerable individuals and interdependent communities are vital to my consideration of social security and discourses of community arts practice. Foundational to this project is Butler’s acknowledgement of ‘normative schemes of intelligibility [that] establish what will and will not be human, what will be a liveable life, what will be a grievable death’.38 I identify how and where these ‘normative schemes’ operate in and around the context of participatory arts practice. Such a consideration reflects the material and

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embodied vulnerability of the unemployed in a contemporary UK context, where people are being corporeally impacted by welfare reforms. While precarity can be perceived and employed as a deeply negative entity, Lorey and Butler also identify it as a space of possibility, a banner under which disparate communities can potentially gather and deploy ‘precarity as activism’.39 Lorey proposes that the current state of precarity has the potential to unify a multiplicity of social and economic positions, promoting new forms of resistance that emphasise horizontal rather than hierarchical organising to create ‘a new form of democracy’.40 Similarly, Butler advocates for the power of the precarious in ‘organizing themselves without hierarchy, and so exemplifying the principles of equal treatment that they are demanding of public institutions’.41 Precarity then might operate as a mode through which to engender solidarity, a way to build relations across social and economic divisions, and a mechanism to expose the oppressive organisation of wage labour under capitalism. Arts practice explicitly engaging with precarity might unsettle the traditional organisation of hierarchies through a privileging of the non-worker, or heightening an awareness of precarious labour contexts affecting both the publics who witness them and the participants who perform them. Tavia Nyong’o advocates for a critical engagement with precarity that recognises the impact and intersection of race, gender, and capital on encounters with vulnerability. Nyong’o articulates that acknowledging common vulnerabilities shared across different subjects offers a potential move towards solidarity and ‘collective and distributed agency’; however, he cautions that in order to achieve such networks of support, ‘those who proceed under its sign must remain scrupulously attentive to the constitutive and uneven distribution of that vulnerability’.42 Developing Butler’s persistent engagement with the precarity as layered and unequally encountered, such an application insists that we remain mindful of the ways in which academics and activists often position precarity. Nyong’o calls for a broadening out of the critical focus on those, often highly educated, entrepreneurial and flexible subjects who increasingly inhabit the world of art and performance, while: the coeval precarity of other women’s lives consigned to “life-times of disposability” elsewhere in the production cycle of global capitalism, as well as the grounding of precarity in the domestic and unwaged servitude […] will be correspondingly neglected.43

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In establishing the experience of the unemployed across society more broadly, rather than purely focusing on trends in the arts industry, I seek, in part, to address the lack of critical attention on experiences of insecurity at the margins. While the geographical parameters of this study limit its focus to the UK, I direct particular attention to unemployed people who are cast by the state as ultimately more ‘disposable’ and acutely exposed to punishing contemporary welfare reforms. I am committed to exploring such lives through the framework of performance and thus advocating for the utility of some ‘artworlds’ over others as a way to examine ‘life times of disposability’. Therefore, through invoking the term precarity, this book seeks to examine the consonance between socially and economically insecure individuals and arts practice.44

The Welfare State and Socially Committed Arts Practice: A History Performing Welfare asserts the intertwined ideologies and histories of social welfare and socially committed arts provision. In 1946 the National Insurance Act, the cornerstone of the UK welfare state, was implemented and The Arts Council of Great Britain was founded. These coinciding events, indicative of a post-World War II appeal to social equality and cultural accessibility, stand as symbolic of the parallel histories of welfare and arts provision which sought to cultivate communities of co-dependency, mutual support, creativity, and cultural democracy. In this section, I trace historical shifts in welfare ideologies alongside the emergence of employment as an important signifier of effective social arts practice. The reforms, policies, and arts agendas I outline here form the social and cultural backdrop of the research undertaken in this book and are indicative of the progressively worsening economic and material hardships faced by individuals reliant on destabilising state systems of support. Jenny Hughes has previously traced the lineages of applied theatre and Victorian workhouse entertainments, excavating ‘fledgling social theatres of the nineteenth century’ and drawing attention to potential historical lineages of applied performance in Christian discourses bound up with social regulation of citizens’ utility.45 Hughes illuminates how these workhouse entertainments resonate with twenty-first-century cultures of welfare, drawing fruitful parallels between these latent histories and contemporary theatre projects which ‘might both work with and against

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(neo)liberal welfare regimes that require individuals to take responsibility for lifting themselves out of pernicious networks of economic inequality’.46 The characteristics of self-improvement, individual responsibility, and social support within applied theatre’s histories are threaded throughout my analysis of contemporary examples. In the UK, state intervention into the provision of economic and social support for its citizens emerged at the outset of the twentieth century when the government adopted an increased level of responsibility for providing pensions, unemployment insurance, healthcare, and a range of other economic systems of support. Despite emerging out of a number of disparate schemes of support and assistance that had developed over the first half of the twentieth century, the foundation of the welfare state is largely attributed to the 1942 ‘The Social Insurance and Allied Services Report’ produced by William Beveridge and commonly known as the Beveridge Report.47 In September 1944 the White Paper on Social Insurance set out the government’s response to the Beveridge Report; subsequently the National Insurance Act 1946 established the first comprehensive social security system in the UK.48 This act formed the blueprint for the welfare state and is merited with founding the National Health Service and implementation of a coherent universal social security system in the UK.  A range of benefits (sickness benefit, unemployment benefit, retirement pension) were made available to all those of a working age who made weekly contributions. Significantly, this contributions-­ based model did not offer unemployment provision for those with disabilities, non-working or married women, or the elderly who had not accrued contributions.49 The National Assistance Act 1948 further broadened social security to all, even if one had not previously made National Insurance contributions.50 This established a universal and comprehensive system of state support that acknowledged the equal right of all citizens to freedom from poverty. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, this system worked reasonably effectively, though at times contentiously, with leading political parties seeking to further develop and amend provision in order to offer citizens protection from the abject poverty experienced during the interwar years.51 Towards the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, the post-war welfare contract was exposed to growing scrutiny. As the economy began to stagnate and inflation grew, the UK was rendered increasingly precarious in a global market unsure of the nation’s financial security. As economic historian Jim Tomlinson notes, the 1970s were a turning point for economic

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policy in post-war Britain.52 This period of economic ‘stagflation’, coupled with a marked increase in unemployment, led to the UK government borrow from the International Monetary Fund in order to meet public spending needs.53 This resulted in a challenge to the legitimacy of a Keynesian economic policy, a fiscal model that sought to offer full and extensive social and economic protection to all citizens. The subsequent change in attitudes to welfare was amplified over the following decades by the emergence of neoliberal ideology and its accompanying economic policies. Concurrently, the 1960s and 1970s saw socially committed, non-­ hierarchical, and culturally embedded collaborative arts practices thrive, most clearly encapsulated by the blossoming of the Community Arts Movement—a shifting co-operative of artists and organisations broadly making work that attended to similar ideologies and practices. Alison Jeffers and Gerri Moriarty have vividly documented these practices, drawing the temporal parameters of the Community Arts Movement as 1968–86 to indicate a period of intense interest in collaborative practices and cultural democracy.54 Community arts practices across this period were regularly committed to experimentation, in form and content; cultural engagement and a desire to embed artistic practice within communities; and finding new modes of accessible creative play. Further, as Jeffers’ historical tracing of the Community Arts Movement in particular attests, there were strong links between community arts practice and the broader UK labour movement during this period. Most notably, the artistic practices utilised in economically vulnerable and disenfranchised coalfield communities, and other industrial communities encountering high unemployment and a lack of state investment.55 However, by the mid-1980s the social, cultural, and economic landscape of the UK had dramatically changed and the once burgeoning Community Arts Movement was struggling to define its fluid ideological underpinnings and navigate a scant funding landscape. State welfare models were similarly besieged; from the 1980s onwards, social security systems across Europe were criticised for the region’s slow economic growth and poor productivity. Protections embedded in welfare contracts were reframed as expensive social insurance measures. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979 marked a significant shift in approaches to unemployment, work, and state welfare. This was underpinned by a slowing of post-war financial growth leading to periods of recession, an increasingly post-industrial labour market and subsequent high levels of unemployment, and an ageing population resulting in an increasing social welfare and pension bill.

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This led to a reduction of state support and a reattribution of responsibility to the citizen. Increased social fragmentation proliferated due to the breakdown of industries, affecting whole communities and sending them into economic turmoil. Mass unemployment and resulting financial hardship reframed the debate surrounding policy, and cultural policy, permanently. Conservative employment policy in the 1980s adopted a benefit control model, bringing a more strategic, financially driven, and active labour market policy approach to the fore.56 This culminated in the Social Security Act 1989, which amended the law to bind financial support for the unemployed to claimants’ ability to evidence their attempted participation in the labour market. Where ‘availability to work’ had previously been the key indicator of eligibility to claim benefit, the term ‘actively seeking work’ was inserted into the law, denoting an ideological shift in what the state required of claimants: Where it has been determined that a person is to be deemed in accordance with regulations to be actively seeking employed earner’s employment in any week, the question of his actually doing so in that week may be subsequently determined on a review of the determination as to his deemed doing so.57

The intensive determination of activity became primary, marking a turn towards participation in labour markets as ‘actively seeking employment’ became the central focus on which conditionality was evaluated and, therefore, on which access to financial support was achieved. Against a debilitated economic and employment backdrop, a financial argument for the arts emerged as significant. John Myerscough’s 1988 report The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain marked an ideological step change as he demonstrated for the first time in the UK that public funding of the arts had a direct correlation to increased spending and job creation, leading to enhanced wealth.58 As cultural researcher Michelle Reeves notes: The Report set the stage for a generation of impact studies, and other analyses […] which sought to document and argue the case for the role of the arts and creative industries as important agents for economic development and urban renewal, and begin to measure this impact in quantitative terms.59

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The first to engage with economic discourse, the report repositioned the arts in terms of investment, multipliers, and indicators, thus shifting vocabularies in the field from the aesthetic and social to the economic, appealing to the sensibilities of the burgeoning neoliberal order. Employment was a central tenet of this argument for the arts: evidence of job creation throughout the sector was a powerful signifier of the importance of the industry in a context of receding industrial employment. The narrative of the arts as a valuable employer has since threaded through cultural policy from Myerscough to the present day. New Labour came to power in 1997 with a landslide victory underpinned by their Third Way ideology, an attempted synthesis of market-­ oriented economic approaches and communitarian social and cultural policies. Their policy approach was characterised by efforts to achieve social equality, increase representation and community cohesion, and promote economic prosperity in a globalised marketplace. Inflected by these plural objectives, the government installed their flagship employment policy New Deal as soon as they took office. The policy was considered highly successful, bringing unemployment below one million for the first time in 25 years by March 2001.60 New Deal targeted groups who were deemed as having multiple obstacles to accessing the labour market; there were specific strands for young people, lone parents, disabled people, those who were classified as long-term unemployed, and people over 50. This programme is indicative of the wide-reaching and targeted support offered by New Labour; however, underpinned by the Third Way ideology, New Deal also emphasised a rebalancing of ‘rights and responsibilities’. Where previously as a citizen you had a right to social security, New Labour further engrained rhetoric that asserted claimants had to demonstrate themselves responsible to the state in order to earn their benefit. Aligned with this, and directly building on the policies of the previous Conservative government, New Labour established the Jobseeker’s Allowance and accompanying Jobseeker’s Agreement. This agreement introduced financial sanctions of varying severity that could be imposed on claimants who refused ‘suitable’ employment, failed to actively seek work, or became unavailable for work. Towards the end of the New Labour government, the Welfare Reform Act 2009 signified a further drive towards workfare schemes and a push for a tougher sanctioning process.61 This Act was the culmination of the decade-long emphasis on responsibility over right by New Labour. An ideological stance subsequently advanced by both the Coalition and Conservative governments.

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From the outset, Labour leader Tony Blair made apparent his aim to put the arts to work as part of his government’s cultural strategy.62 Characteristic of New Labour’s policy initiatives was the reframing of arts and culture through a rhetoric of social inclusion.63 Social inclusion policies sought to tackle deep rooted and interdependent modes of exclusion such as high levels of unemployment, crime, ill-health, and poor education.64 The publication of François Matarasso’s ‘Use or Ornament’ in 1997 provided a methodological approach for examining social impact in the arts and arguing beyond the financial for ‘economics in its deeper sense’.65 Seven of the 50 social impacts of participation in the arts outlined by Matarasso were directly related to employment/employability; if soft skills development is included, this adds a further four.66 This spoke to the appetite for marrying social inclusion and economic productivity within a Third Way Model and identified the arts value within such a framework. Alongside this, the government established 18 Policy Action Teams (PATs) to research and implement solutions in specific areas of social exclusion. Having begun to demonstrate and document its social impact, PAT 10 was established in order to explore how best to utilise arts, sport, and leisure to challenge poverty. In 1999, the PAT 10 report concluded that arts, sports, cultural, and recreational activity ‘can contribute to neighbourhood renewal and make a real difference to health, crime, employment and education in deprived communities’.67 Within the same year, the Scottish Arts Council found ‘art plays a critical part in empowering communities, providing jobs, skills and training’.68 The arts were thus recognised as successful providers of skills, training, and employability provision. In addition to aligning with discourses of social inclusion throughout the New Labour years, the arts and cultural sector maintained a focus on productivity and employment provision. The inception of the Creative Industries in the UK coincided with New Labour coming to power.69 The Creative Industries Task Force was conceived in 1997, working across government departments it sought to evaluate and strategise performance throughout the creative industries in order to maximise effectiveness. Producing Creative Industries: 1998 Mapping Document and later repeating the evaluation in 2001, the Creative Industries Task Force signalled its focus on statistical analysis of employment in the sector, thereby providing a justification for the arts that was reliant on its capacity for job creation. This served to further entwine the value of arts practice with the promise of employment.

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When the Coalition government came to power in 2010 (and later the Conservatives in 2015), they introduced increased conditionality for those claiming unemployment benefits, and subsequent increase in sanctioning, implemented through the new Claimant Commitment.70 This has resulted in a more punitive and disciplinary system of welfare. In 2016 the government introduced a four-year freeze across Jobseeker’s Allowance, Employment Support Allowance, and Universal Credit, meaning that they would not rise in line with inflation and resulting in a 6.5% real terms cut in financial support.71 An increased vulnerability to economic hardship and financial crisis for those relying on state assistance has characterised welfare reform introduced by governments since 2010. In part this has been due to the faltering and costly introduction of Universal Credit, the most ambitious attempt at a system and culture change within the state welfare structure. Universal Credit aims to assimilate all six working-age benefits and intends to revolutionise the manner in which people encounter unemployment and receive financial support from the state.72 Further, it intends to enable claimants to roll on and off benefit if they undertook short-term or zero-hour contracts. Universal Credit was due to be nationally in operation by 2017; however, beset by system and IT failures, it has been rescheduled seven times and is forecast to be fully rolled out by 2022 at a cost of £15.8 billion.73 Further, cuts to Universal Credit by the treasury in 2016 mean the benefit will be significantly less than its predecessor with 1.2  million families on Universal Credit set to receive an average reduction of £41 a week in financial support.74 This shift not only affects the unemployed but the working poor with 1.3 million working families currently entitled to support in the tax credit system no longer entitled to any in-work support, leaving them on average £42 a week worse off.75 Additionally, claimants have to wait five weeks between applying for Universal Credit and receiving any financial support. The Advanced Payment facility enables claimants to access a government loan from the point of making their claim; however, this often leaves people with little money left once their government loan repayment is deducted each month. MPs launched an inquiry in 2017 into the roll out of the service as claimants faced lengthy delays in payments, resulting as Labour MP Frank Field states ‘claimants falling into debt and rent arrears, caused health problems and led to many having to rely on food banks’.76 The system has been widely condemned across the political parties, the charity sector, support services, and by the United Nations due to it regularly

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leading to increased social, economic, and physical precarity for those dependent on it. Alongside these financial changes, there has been a shift in the delivery of employment support with the Coalition government launching their five billion pound flagship welfare-to-work scheme in June 2011. The Work Programme was a mandatory work and employability scheme targeted at the long-term unemployed that outsourced contracts for employment support to a combination of private, public, and third sector organisations. Participants in the Work Programme are evaluated and agencies supporting them are funded through a payment-by-results scheme which, as I go onto discuss in Chap. 2, has led to a significant disparity in the quality and amount of support people receive. Between June 2011 and December 2015, only 28.5% of people (503,106) on the Work Programme were supported into a job.77 The Work Programme ran between 2011 and 2017 and was the central vehicle for unemployment provision over the period of research.78 The economic recession of 2008 and decade of austerity measures have brought the financial argument for the value of the arts back into focus. Scything cuts and the promotion of mixed economy funding models throughout the sector have engendered the need to revisit the dialogue of investment and return in justifying public spending on the arts. In a keynote speech at the British Museum in April 2014, Conservative MP, and then Culture Secretary, Maria Miller called for the Arts to present its case as a valuable economic powerhouse: I come to you today and ask you to help me reframe the argument: to hammer home the value of culture to our economy […] some simply want money and silence from Government, but in an age of austerity, when times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture’s economic impact.79

This Conservative tactic of demanding a financial justification in a fiscally fragile Britain echoes the period in which Myerscough was writing in 1988. Arts Council England responded to this call by commissioning the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) to write an independent report examining the macroeconomic contribution of arts in Britain.80 The CEBR report returned to and refreshed the economic arguments of the 1980s; once again there was a strong emphasis on job creation as a benefit of supporting the Creative Industries. In July 2018 the

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Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced that 1 in every 11 jobs in the UK was now in the creative industries.81 These parallel histories demonstrate the UK government’s shifting relationship to welfare, collective support, and dependency; concurrently, the arts sector has encountered new discourses of instrumentalisation which seek to emphasise the social and economic utility of arts practice. The period investigated in the chapters which follow marks an acute acceleration of the destruction of the welfare state under an economic policy of austerity. However, this programme of social support has been progressively eroded since the UK’s economic difficulties in the 1970s and deindustrialisation in the 1980s; more widely, the last 40  years have been marked by a neoliberal economic model which persistently undermines social security systems and ideologies. The utility of focusing on the welfare state as an object of study rests in its implicit link to the financial, labour, and social structures which operate in the UK.

Working Through Performing Welfare The unemployed are not a homogenous group. It is pertinent to demarcate the diverse experiences of individual claimants and the different types of benefits people access. Particularly as the effects of austerity have been disproportionately felt by young people, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and disabled people. In the UK youth unemployment (classified as 16–24-year-olds who are not in education or employment) rapidly increased after the global economic crash of 2008; at the same time, young people were increasingly excluded from accessing state welfare.82 Exploring youth unemployment is central to developing an understanding of the representational strategies deployed by the state and arts organisations given the prominence of this growing cohort and the specificities of their claimant status between 2010 and 2018. I also investigate representations of people claiming Employment Support Allowance (ESA). ESA is available to people who are unemployed due to illness or disability. Changes in ESA have been a key area of welfare reform since 2012, garnering significant media and political attention.83 Given the deeply contested representations of ESA claimants, and their experience as characteristic of this period of reform, it is pertinent to consider how these individuals are engaging with, and being represented in, performance. Beyond state-­ delineated cohorts, it is important to perceive unemployment in relation to other identity markers. Race and gender (examined in Chaps. 4 and 6,

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respectively) have a significant impact on individuals’ experiences of the labour market, and consequently their encounters with unemployment. I underscore the impact of different identity markers on individuals’ participation in labour markets and arts provision. While attending to the specificities of these particular cohorts or identity groups, I also address broader changes to conditionality for those receiving Jobseeker’s Allowance and other more generic state benefits. Examining these wider shifts enables an exploration of how the state reconstituted its relationship to work, welfare, and the individual during this time. I have sought to capture the breadth of arts practice being undertaken in urban contexts across the UK; however, due to my London location and relationship to geographically sited community arts ecologies, the main examples I examine are located in England, specifically in Birmingham, Brighton, London, and Tyneside.84 I particularly focus on London and the North East, where unemployment has been persistently high throughout the period this research examines. The North East was the region with the highest unemployment rate (7% as of February 2017), London stood as the third highest (5.5% as of February 2017) in the UK.85 The time period investigated (2010–18) has been delineated by the introduction of severe and far-reaching economic policies of austerity in the UK since 2010, the growth in unemployment with rates peaking at 8.4% in 2011, and the introduction of significant welfare reforms in 2012 and 2016.86 In 2018 at the Conservative Party Conference, then UK Prime Minister Theresa May shimmied onstage to ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’ and declared ‘austerity is over and [the public’s] hard work has paid off’.87 Despite this claim, the damaging disinvestment in the UK’s poorest communities is ongoing and public services continue to be forced into catastrophic saving measures. These eight years therefore mark a significant period in the UK during which social provision and collective support were under sustained attack. At the same time, the perception of the welfare claimant has become increasingly stigmatised and individualised. While this book examines the particular dismantling of the welfare state in the UK during this period, it is more broadly concerned with intersections between state constructions of dependency and ideologies of applied performance, strategies of making visible marginalised subjects, the resonances of policy rhetoric and performance practices, and the implications of staging (non-) productivity in socially committed performance. As Performing Welfare foregrounds critical considerations of representation and practices of labour, the book is organized into five chapters,

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arranged into three distinct sections: language, image, and embodiment. Broadly, these three sections examine how performance draws attention to neoliberal shifts in language describing the unemployed, documents and analyses the proliferation of often negative images of the unemployed, and exposes the necropolitical forms of governance operating within the welfare state. My methodological framework draws on a hybrid of strategies of performance analysis predominantly guided by cultural materialism and critical discourse analysis. This project synthesises a diverse range of material across performance practices and social and cultural policy; therefore, it is informed by research practices in theatre and performance studies, economics, and political science. Cultural materialism is central to my methodological approach given the Marxist underpinnings of this project and its concern with constructions of labour and unemployment in policy and performance.88 Marx, in his identification of the relation between material production and cultural experience, recognises the socially constitutive nature of material life. My engagement with cultural materialism is guided by Harvie’s assertion of ‘culture as always enmeshed in social, material and historical conditions; contributing to the production of ideologies; and therefore important to consider in the construction of social relations, especially hierarchies of class’.89 Harvie’s emphasis on the ‘production of ideologies’ and socially stratified power relations resonates with important areas of investigation in this research. Therefore, I utilise Harvie’s work as a model through which to interrogate the politics of labour in contemporary performance and explore the social, political, and cultural implications of participatory arts projects. Further, my research adopts Ric Knowles’ approach of ‘historicising the here and now’, documenting the plurality of representations emerging around unemployment between 2010 and 2018.90 In so doing, it challenges the stability of dominant narratives of welfare provision that may appear significant in future histories of the period.91 My intention to highlight, document, and provoke instances of ‘dissident’ practices within socially engaged and applied arts uses the methodological framework of cultural materialism to anchor and activate my critique of the distribution of power in labour markets, social policy, and performance. Utilising a cultural materialist approach engenders a space for oppositional intervention and illuminates how such representations function within neoliberal modes of governance. Alongside cultural materialism, I use critical discourse analysis to engage with linguistic, visual, and embodied texts deployed by different

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stakeholders in relation to unemployment. Social semiotician Theo van Leeuwen notes, critical discourse analysis has ‘moved beyond language, taking on board that discourses are often multimodally realised, not only through text and talk but also through other modes of communication such as images’.92 Therefore, alongside close readings of policy and articulations of state and artist agendas, my interrogation of imagery and embodied performance is also informed by critical discourse analysis. This approach is fundamentally concerned with tracing how discourse is formulated through social and cultural practices while asserting that discourse also produces social relationships. I am concerned with the dialogic construction of discourses around unemployment, investigating where arts practice is ideologically and practically inflected by dominant discourses and also where it might hold the potential to reconstitute prevalent representations of the unemployed. At its core critical discourse, analysis is concerned with what Ruth Wodak and Michael Mayer have termed ‘de-mystifying’ the distribution of power, hegemonic ideologies, and institutional structures through promoting close evaluations of the semiotic encounters that enact and articulate these outcomes.93 As linguist Jane Mulderrig states, it is ‘[a] form of intervention in social practices and social relationships’, which hopes to highlight and challenge social inequalities.94 This desire to expose social inequalities and identify how such inequalities are enacted threads throughout this book; I aim to underscore latent ideologies that serve to naturalise, neutralise, and maintain unequal power relations. Applied performance is implicitly concerned with engaging groups to co-produce representations of their context; it is therefore necessary to reflect how such projects co-create discourses and to consider the effect of the linguistic frames practitioners construct on participants. The critical methodologies of this project therefore focus on neoliberal labour systems and state welfare through a materially informed and semiotic analysis of policy documents, performance practices, and media representations, in order to understand how various elements function together to construct identities of unemployed individuals. Chapter 2 explores shifting agendas in arts funding and engages with growing debates around potentially exploitative and exclusionary working conditions in the arts sector. I analyse public service policies and strategic arts funding in order to map out the marketisation of state services over the past decade and identify the arts sector’s increasing investment in cultural commissioning. In particular, I explore how arts organisations have

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engaged with both state-funded welfare-to-work schemes and a renewed government emphasis on apprenticeships since 2010. I focus on two nationally funded arts-based employability projects, the Creative Employment Programme (2013–15) and Talent Match (2014–). Through examining the potential instrumentalisation and linguistic co-optation of arts practice in the service of employability agendas, I consider how the economic vocabularies of state-sanctioned discourse can effectively contaminate ideologies of community which may exist in socially engaged performance. However, I also highlight the desire across arts organisations to make positive interventions in employment practices including rejecting the monetisation of learners, cultivating community practice, and encouraging collaborative working. Chapter 3 tracks contested notions of community in political rhetoric and models of social welfare through an analysis of increased individualism, eroding networks of dependency, and moments of collective action. I argue that shifts in discourse and policy impact on community arts practice and thus provoke a need to reconsider how community is politicised, presented, and encountered within such projects. Underpinned by Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, the chapter considers 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.95 I explore two performances—Cardboard Citizens’ Benefit (2015) and Brighton People’s Theatre’s Tighten Our Belts (2016)—to argue that the strategies and accompanying performance vocabularies deployed in these productions interpolated different understandings of responsibility and community in relation to the unemployed figure. This chapter draws on emerging scholarship addressing care in performance and stresses the importance of reflecting on how formal approaches to community practice foster networks of dependency and collective accountability in performance.96 Further, I undertake a performance analysis of policy that identifies how certain policy agendas might be enacted onstage and also where we might usefully examine performance practices alongside policy documents in order to see where these two fields conflate and conflict. Chapter 4 focuses on The Bite Back Movement’s A Dangerous Figure (2013), the only visual arts project examined in the book, to explore how artistic representations of unemployment utilise tactics of visibility and invisibility in order for participants to negotiate policy, social

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constructions of shame, and a context of civil unrest. Exploring the hypervisibility of young claimants—particularly young Black people and people of colour—after the economic collapse of 2008 and the England Riots of 2011, this chapter identifies the complexities attached to appearing unemployed. I engage with the construction of threat in relation to images of youth, race, and the ‘underclass’, both highlighting the demonisation of these groups and utilising that demonisation as an affective strategy to activate change. My discussion is rooted in queer and feminist articulations of navigating violent arenas of representation, drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification, Peggy Phelan’s nuancing of visibility, alongside an interrogation of Jacques Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’.97 By holding Rancière, Phelan, and Muñoz together, I tease out the complexities of, and paradoxes within, visibility and invisibility in arts practice with marginalised or stigmatised communities. In Chap. 5, I examine how the welfare system is underpinned by the concept of biopolitics—the governance of life processes and populations— in order to expose the acute contention between the living body of the unemployed individual and the legal status of the benefit claimant. Drawing on two examples, Tangled Feet’s One Million (2013) and Helix Arts’ MindFULL (2013), I propose that applied performance deploys bodily strategies that disrupt the construction of the unemployed in political rhetoric and unsettle rigid definitions of labour in neoliberal work regimes. In particular, I consider three different intersections of productivity, the body, and labour: (1) the radical potential of reanimating unemployed bodies as productive in performance, (2) the problematic valorisation of labour in participatory arts practice, and (3) how depictions of unproductive bodies that reject, and are rejected by, reductive state definitions of labour might present new models of resistance in arts practice. Although participatory performance risks unquestioningly valorising labour, a self-reflexive approach to performing labour is uniquely positioned to critique it through the powerful aesthetic and symbolic tools it accesses. Chapter 6 recognises that representations of, and encounters with, unemployment remain overtly gendered. I examine Spent (2016) and Joanne (2016) by Clean Break Theatre Company, alongside the work of Woman and Theatre, to reflect on key issues in feminist performance examining austerity, work, and welfare. I draw on Silvia Federici’s writing on social reproduction to read representations of women’s unemployment onstage alongside understandings of labour beyond waged work. In

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tracking the remuneration of participants, I highlight economies of participation and document developing strategies to navigate state welfare systems and pay participants while not causing disruption to people’s benefits. I utilise this specific context to ask: Does applied performance as a discipline echo or disrupt the value systems attributed to waged labour and unwaged acts of care or reproduction? This chapter asserts applied performance’s capacity to both perform acts of care and, as a discipline, embody a care-­full practice which unsettles traditional forms of exchange but also locates applied performance itself as a precariously placed practice. By looking at applied and socially committed performances of unemployment, Performing Welfare examines economies of participation and reveals how such projects might reconstitute notions of work and non-­ work. It reflects on the material realities of labour and participation among exploited groups under later capitalism and within applied performance. Further, given my particular focus on welfare reform, this research underscores the relationship between government policy and arts practice, where the two coalesce and conflict and how both participants and artists are inflected by this relationship. Finally, in engaging with unemployed individuals, it offers an urgent perspective on practices of visibility and invisibility being deployed in socially committed performance practices with marginalised subjects.

Notes 1. But I’m Here for Mental Health notably preceded Ken Loach’s much heralded 2016 film drama I, Daniel Blake that also represented the disability benefits process in the same area of Tyneside. 2. MindFULL participant interview with the author, Gateshead, 11 August 2015. 3. Office for National Statistics, ‘UK Labour Market Statistics: Dec 2011’, WebArchive, December 2011, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labourmarket-statistics/december-2011/statistical-bulletin.html (accessed 10 March 2017); Office for National Statistics, ‘UK Labour Market: Jan 2018’, ONS, January 2018, https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/ bulletins/uklabourmarket/january2018#unemployment (accessed 2 February 2018). 4. Philip Alston, ‘Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, United Nations Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human

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Rights, United Nations General Assembly, 23 April 2019, https://undocs. org/A/HRC/41/39/Add.1 (accessed 22 May 2019). 5. Michel Faber, ‘Poverty in Britain: Parasites and Piety’, Guardian, 8 October 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/ oct/08/deserving-poor-cameron-speech-victorians (accessed 10 May 2017). 6. The programme of austerity currently in place in the UK is a group of economic policies that aim to tackle the budget deficit through successive cuts to public spending and tax benefits, reduction in social security, redundancies across public services, and raises in taxes. 7. David Finch, ‘Universal Challenge: Making a Success of Universal Credit’, Resolution Foundation, May 2016, p. 7. 8. The Trussell Trust, ‘End of Year Stats’, The Trussell Trust, https://www. trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/end-year-stats/ (accessed 20 May 2019). 9. Department for Communities and Local Government, ‘Statutory Homelessness, January to March 2016, and Homelessness Prevention and Relief 2015/16: England’, 30 June 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/533099/ Statutory_Homelessness_and_Prevention_and_Relief_Statistical_Release_ January_to_March_2016.pdf (accessed 1 May 2017). Between 2001 and 2009, the average annual figure stood at 675,000. 10. Christina Beatty, Mike Foden, Lindsey McCarthy, and Kesia Reeve, ‘Benefit Sanctions and Homelessness: A Scoping Report’, Centre for Regional, Economic, and Social Research in Collaboration with Crisis, March 2015, http://socialwelfare.bl.uk/subject-areas/services-activity/ poverty-benefits/crisis/1723562015_SanctionsReport_FINAL.pdf (accessed 1 May 2017). 11. Sally Mackey, ‘Applied Theatre and Practice as Research: Polyphonic Conversations’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 21, no. 4 (2016): 478–491 (483). 12. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 784. 13. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Marxism, Feminism, Antiwork Politics and Post Work Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011), 43. 14. Ibid., 59. 15. Ibid., 51. 16. Ibid., 11. 17. The Labour Force Survey was introduced when Britain became part of the European Community in 1972 and has been gathering comprehensive data on labour market changes ever since. The terms of the Labour Force

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Survey are internationally agreed and contribute to the International Labour Organization’s data collection. 18. Office for National Statistics, ‘Unemployment’, ONS, https://www.ons. gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment (accessed 13 June 2015). 19. David T.  Mitchell and Sharon L.  Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (University of Michigan Press, 2015). 20. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 40. 21. Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 4. 22. Ibid., 83. 23. Ibid., 15. 24. Theron Schmidt, ‘Troublesome Professionals: On the Speculative Reality of Theatrical Labour’, Performance Research 18, no. 2 (2013): 15–26. 25. Ibid., p. 22. 26. Adam Alston, ‘Performing Labour in Look Left Look Right’s Above and Beyond’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20, no. 1 (2015): 50–61 (50). 27. Ibid., 60. 28. Tony Blair, Labour Party Annual Conference, Brighton, 30 September 1997. 29. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (London: W.W. Norton, 1998). 30. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 6. 31. Ibid., 45. 32. Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4. 33. Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. by Aileen Derieg (London: Verso, 2015), 2. 34. Ibid., 1. 35. Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, in contrast with a disciplinary approach to sovereign power, is concerned with the management of populations through a range of less invasive strategies and insidiously asserts control in collaboration with the actions of the self-governing citizens. 36. Alston, 15. 37. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004). 38. Ibid., 146.

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39. Judith Butler, ‘Foreword’, in Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. by Aileen Derieg (London: Verso, 2015), x. 40. Lorey, 109. 41. Judith Butler in ‘Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović’, TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 163–177 (168). 42. ‘Introduction: Situating Precarity Between the Body and the Commons’, Women and Performance, Special Issue, ‘Precarious Situations: Race, Gender and Globality’ 23, no. 2 (2013): 157–161 (158). 43. Ibid. 44. Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider, ‘Introduction’, Precarity and Performance Special Issue, TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 6. 45. Jenny Hughes, ‘A Pre-History of Applied Theatre: Work, House, Perform’, in Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. by Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 41. 46. Ibid. 47. William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (The Beveridge Report) (London, 1942). 48. HM Government, ‘National Insurance Act 1946’, Legislation.gov.uk, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1965/49/schedule/1/crossheading/the-national-insurance-act-1946 (accessed 12 October 2014). 49. For more information, see Jameel Hampton, Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy (Bristol: Polity Press, 2016). Additionally, I explore the specific relationship between women, work, and welfare policy in Chap. 6. 50. HM Government, ‘National Assistance Act 1948’, Legislation.gov.uk, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/11-12/29/contents (accessed 12 October 2014). 51. From its implementation, Conservative and Labour parties adopted differing views on the provision, and indeed, members from within each party regularly clashed on policies related to the welfare contract. For further information, see Robert Page, Revisiting the Welfare State (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2007), 54–56. 52. Jim Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 55. 53. Ibid. 54. Particularly, see Alison Jeffers, ‘The Community Arts Movement 1968–1986’, in Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art: The British Community Arts Movement, ed. by Alison Jeffers and Gerri Moriarty, 35–63 (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2017). 55. Ibid. 56. David Price, The Office of Hope (London: Policy Studies Institute, 2000), 236–257.

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57. HM Government, Social Security Act 1989, Legislation.gov.uk, http:// www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/24/contents (accessed 12 June 2015). 58. John Myerscough, The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1988). 59. Reeves, 8. 60. John van Reenen, ‘No More Skivvy Schemes? Active Labour Market Policies and The British New Deal for the Young Unemployed in Context’, The Institute for Fiscal Studies, 5 May 2001, https://www.ifs.org.uk/ wps/wp0109.pdf (accessed 10 October 2014). 61. HM Government, The Welfare Reform Act 2009, Department for Work and Pensions, 2009, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/24/ contents (accessed 10 October 2014). 62. Labour Party Manifesto 1997, ‘New Labour Because Britain Deserves Better’, http://labourmanifesto.com/1997/1997-labour-manifesto. shtml (accessed 12 May 2016). 63. There were a number of reports seeking to examine this fertile new area; see Charles Landry, ‘The Social Impact of the Arts’ (Stroud: Comedia, 1993); Susan Galloway, ‘Changing Lives—The Social Impact of the Arts’ (Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 1995); Charles Landry and François Matarasso, The Art of Regeneration: Urban Renewal Through Cultural Activity (London: Social Policy Summary 8, March 1996); François Matarasso, Defining Values: Evaluating Arts Programmes, Social Impact of the Arts Working Paper 1, (Stroud: Comedia, 1996). 64. Social Exclusion Unit, ‘Bringing Britain Together: A National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal’, Cabinet Office, January 2001, http://dera. ioe.ac.uk/9947/1/National_strategy_for_neighbourhood_renewal_-_ Policy_Action_Team_audit.pdf (accessed 12 May 2016). 65. François Matarasso, Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts (Stroud: Comedia, 1997), vi. 66. Matarasso, Use or Ornament?, 1. 67. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ‘Policy Action Team 10: Report to the Social Exclusion Unit—Arts and Sport’ (London: DCMS, 1999). 68. Alan Kay, ‘Art and Community Development: The Role the Arts Have in Regenerating Communities’, Community Development Journal 35, no. 4 (2000): 414–424. 69. Creative Industries was defined by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in 2001 as ‘those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’. ‘Creative Industries: A Mapping Document’, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS: London, 2001), 4.

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70. ‘Your Claimant Commitment’, Department for Work and Pensions, 11 April 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/universalcredit-and-your-claimant-commitment-quick-guide/universal-credit-andyour-claimant-commitment (accessed 23 May 2016). 71. Andrew Hood and Agnes Norris Keiller, ‘A Survey of the UK Benefit System’, Institute for Fiscal Studies, November 2016, https://www.ifs. org.uk/bns/bn13.pdf (accessed 15 December 2016). 72. There is currently a staged roll out of Universal Benefit across the UK. It will eventually combine Jobseeker’s Allowance, income-related employment and support allowance, income support, working tax credit, child tax credit, and housing benefit. 73. Rajeev Syal and Rowena Mason, ‘Labour Says Universal Credit Will Take 495 Years to Roll Out as Costs Rise £3bn’, Guardian, 25 June 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/25/labour-says-universal-credit-will-take-495-years-to-roll-out-as-costs-rise-3bn (accessed 12 April 2016). 74. Finch, ‘Universal Challenge: Making a Success of Universal Credit’, 7. 75. Ibid. 76. Frank Field, ‘Universal Credit Rollout: Inquiry Re-Launched’, 21 February 2017, https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-az/commons-select/work-and-pensions-committee/news-parliament-2015/universal-credit-re-launch-16-17/ (accessed 23 March 2017). 77. ‘Work Programme: Background and Statistics’, Briefing Paper, Number 6340, 21 March 2016, House of Commons Library, file:///C:/Users/ lew582/Downloads/SN06340.pdf (20 April 2017). 78. The government is preparing to close the programme in 2017, which will be replaced by a new Work and Health Programme targeting ‘harder-to-­ reach’ clients. 79. Maria Miller, ‘Testing Times: Fighting Culture’s Corner in an Age of Austerity’, 24 April 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ testing-times-fighting-cultures-corner-in-an-age-of-austerity (accessed 4 November 2014). 80. ‘The Contribution of the Arts and Culture to the National Economy’, Centre for Economic Business Research (London: CEBR, 2013). 81. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ‘DCMS Sectors Economic Estimates 2017: Employment’, gov.uk, 18 July 2018, https://www.gov. uk/government/statistics/dcms-sectors-economic-estimates-2017-employment (accessed 30 March 2019). 82. Office for National Statistics, ‘Labour Market Statistics, November 2011’, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http:// www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/novem-

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ber-2011/statistical-bulletin.html (accessed 14 May 2016). This policy of exclusion was announced in 2015 and was implemented in April 2017. 83. ‘Mortality Statistics: Out of Work Working Age Benefit Claimants’, Department for Work and Pensions, August 2015, https://www.gov.uk/ government/statistics/mortality-statistics-esa-ib-and-sda-claimants (accessed 15 September 2015). 84. This book recognises the different labour cycles, transport and business infrastructures, and employment opportunities available in urban and rural contexts. The Office for National Statistics reported in 2011 that there was a significant difference in rural/urban areas, estimating an unemployment rate of 8.6% in urban areas compared to 5.2% in rural areas. See Tim Pateman, ‘Rural and Urban Areas: Comparing Lives Using Rural/Urban Classifications’, Regional Trends 43, no. 1 (2011): 11–86 (31). 85. Office for National Statistics, ‘Regional Labour Market Statistics in the UK: Feb 2017’, ONS, 15 February 2017, https://www.ons.gov.uk/ employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/regionallabourmarket/feb2017#unemployment (accessed 27 February 2017). 86. UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), ‘The Labour Market Story: The UK Following Recession’, July 2014, https://www. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/344439/The_Labour_Market_Stor y-_The_UK_Following_ Recession.pdf (accessed 1 December 2016). 87. Theresa May, Conservative Party Conference Speech, Birmingham, October 2018. 88. Marx, 21. 89. Harvie, Fair Play, 16. 90. Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 13. 91. Ibid., 17. 92. Theo van Leeuwen, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. by K. Brown, vol. 3 (2006): 290–294 (292). 93. Wodak and Meyer ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’. In this way it resonates with Pierre Bourdieu’s work on how discourse markets and ideas of legitimate language act as enforcers of power dynamics in the social sphere. See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 94. Jane Mulderrig, Norman Fairclough, and Ruth Wodak, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, in Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, ed. by Teun Van Dijk (London: Sage, 2011), 357–379 (358). 95. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

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96. See, for example, James Thompson, ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Care’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20, no. 4 (2015): 430–441; Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011). 97. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993); José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004).

References Adam Alston, ‘Performing Labour in Look Left Look Right’s Above and Beyond’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20, no. 1 (2015): 50–61. Philip Alston, ‘Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, United Nations Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, United Nations General Assembly, 23 April 2019, https://undocs.org/A/ HRC/41/39/Add.1 (accessed 22 May 2019). Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011). Christina Beatty, Mike Foden, Lindsey McCarthy, and Kesia Reeve, ‘Benefit Sanctions and Homelessness: A Scoping Report’, Centre for Regional, Economic, and Social Research in Collaboration with Crisis, March 2015, http://socialwelfare.bl.uk/subject-areas/ser vices-activity/pover ty-benefits/crisis/1723562015_SanctionsReport_FINAL.pdf (accessed 1 May 2017). Centre for Economic Business Research, ‘The Contribution of the Arts and Culture to the National Economy’ (London: CEBR, 2013). William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (The Beveridge Report) (London: HMSO, 1942). Tony Blair, Labour Party Annual Conference, Brighton, 30 September 1997. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004). Judith Butler, ‘Foreword’, in Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. by Aileen Derieg (London: Verso, 2015). Department for Communities and Local Government, ‘Statutory Homelessness, January to March 2016, and Homelessness Prevention and Relief 2015/16: England’, 30 June 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/533099/Statutory_Homelessness_and_ Prevention_and_Relief_Statistical_Release_January_to_March_2016.pdf (accessed 1 May 2017).

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Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ‘Policy Action Team 10: Report to the Social Exclusion Unit—Arts and Sport’ (London: DCMS, 1999). Creative Industries was Defined by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, ‘Creative Industries: A Mapping Document’ (London: DCMS, 2001). Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ‘DCMS Sectors Economic Estimates 2017: Employment’, gov.uk, 18 July 2018, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/dcms-sectors-economic-estimates-2017-employment (accessed 30 March 2019). Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Mortality Statistics: Out of Work Working Age Benefit Claimants’, August 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/mortality-statistics-esa-ib-and-sda-claimants (accessed 15 September 2015). Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Your Claimant Commitment’, 11 April 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/universal-credit-andyour-claimant-commitment-quick-guide/universal-credit-and-your-claimantcommitment (accessed 23 May 2016). Michel Faber, ‘Poverty in Britain: Parasites and Piety’, Guardian, 8 October 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/08/deservingpoor-cameron-speech-victorians (accessed 10 May 2017). Frank Field, ‘Universal Credit Rollout: Inquiry Re-Launched’, 21 February 2017, https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/work-and-pensions-committee/news-parliament-2015/universal-credit-re-launch-16-17/ (accessed 23 March 2017). David Finch, ‘Universal Challenge: Making a Success of Universal Credit’, Resolution Foundation, May 2016. Susan Galloway, ‘Changing Lives—The Social Impact of the Arts’ (Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 1995). Jameel Hampton, Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy (Bristol: Polity Press, 2016). Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). HM Government, ‘National Insurance Act 1946’, Legislation.gov.uk, http:// www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1965/49/schedule/1/crossheading/thenational-insurance-act-1946 (accessed 12 October 2014). HM Government, ‘National Assistance Act 1948’, Legislation.gov.uk, http:// www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/11-12/29/contents (accessed 12 October 2014). HM Government, ‘Social Security Act 1989’, Legislation.gov.uk, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/24/contents (accessed 12 June 2015). HM Government, ‘The Welfare Reform Act 2009’, Department for Work and Pensions, 2009, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/24/contents (accessed 10 October 2014).

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House of Commons Library, ‘Work Programme: Background and Statistics’, Briefing Paper, Number 6340, 21 March 2016, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06340/ (accessed 20 April 2017). Andrew Hood and Agnes Norris Keiller, ‘A Survey of the UK Benefit System’, Institute for Fiscal Studies, November 2016, https://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/ bn13.pdf (accessed 15 December 2016). Jenny Hughes, ‘A Pre-History of Applied Theatre: Work, House, Perform’, in Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. by Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York and London: Routledge, 2013). Alison Jeffers, ‘The Community Arts Movement 1968–1986’, in Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art: The British Community Arts Movement, ed. by Alison Jeffers and Gerri Moriarty (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2017). Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Alan Kay, ‘Art and Community Development: The Role the Arts Have in Regenerating Communities’, Community Development Journal 35, no. 4 (2000): 414–424. Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Theo van Leeuwen, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. by K. Brown, Oxford: Elsevier, vol. 3 (2006): 290–294. Labour Party Manifesto 1997, ‘New Labour Because Britain Deserves Better’, http://labourmanifesto.com/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml (accessed 12 May 2016). Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. by Aileen Derieg (London: Verso, 2015). Charles Landry and François Matarasso, The Art of Regeneration: Urban Renewal Through Cultural Activity (London: Social Policy Summary 8, March 1996). MindFULL participant interview with the author, Gateshead, 11 August 2015. Sally Mackey, ‘Applied Theatre and Practice as Research: Polyphonic Conversations’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 21, no. 4 (2016): 478–491 (483). Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 784. François Matarasso, Defining Values: Evaluating Arts Programmes, Social Impact of the Arts Working Paper 1 (Stroud: Comedia, 1996). François Matarasso, Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts (Stroud: Comedia, 1997). Theresa May, Conservative Party Conference Speech, Birmingham, October 2018.

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Maria Miller, ‘Testing Times: Fighting Culture’s Corner in an Age of Austerity’, 24 April 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/testing-timesfighting-cultures-corner-in-an-age-of-austerity (accessed 4 November 2014). David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Jane Mulderrig, Norman Fairclough, and Ruth Wodak, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, in Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, ed. by Teun Van Dijk (London: Sage, 2011), 357–379. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). John Myerscough, The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1988). Tavia Nyong’o, ‘Introduction: Situating Precarity Between the Body and the Commons’, Women and Performance, Special Issue, ‘Precarious Situations: Race, Gender and Globality’ 23, no. 2 (2013): 157–161. Office for National Statistics, ‘Labour Market Statistics, November 2011’, http:// webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov. uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/november-2011/statistical-bulletin.html (accessed 14 May 2016). Office for National Statistics, ‘UK Labour Market Statistics: Dec 2011’, WebArchive, December 2011, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/ http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/december-2011/ statistical-bulletin.html (accessed 10 March 2017). Office for National Statistics, ‘Regional Labour Market Statistics in the UK: Feb 2017’, ONS, 15 February 2017, https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/regionallabourmarket/feb2017#unemployment (accessed 27 February 2017). Office for National Statistics, ‘UK Labour Market: Jan 2018’, ONS, January 2018, https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/ employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/ january2018#unemployment (accessed 2 February 2018). Office for National Statistics, ‘Unemployment’, ONS, https://www.ons.gov.uk/ employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment (accessed 13 June 2015). Tim Pateman, ‘Rural and Urban Areas: Comparing Lives Using Rural/Urban Classifications’, Regional Trends 43, no. 1 (2011): 11–86. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). David Price, The Office of Hope (London: Policy Studies Institute, 2000), 236–257. Jasbir Puar, ‘Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, and Ana Vujanović’, TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 163–177.

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Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). John van Reenen, ‘No More Skivvy Schemes? Active Labour Market Policies and The British New Deal for the Young Unemployed in Context’, The Institute for Fiscal Studies, 5 May 2001, https://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp0109.pdf (accessed 10 October 2014). Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider, ‘Introduction’, Precarity and Performance Special Issue, TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): pp. 5–9. Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). Theron Schmidt, ‘Troublesome Professionals: On the Speculative Reality of Theatrical Labour’, Performance Research 18, no. 2 (2013): 15–26. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (London: W.W. Norton, 1998). Social Exclusion Unit, ‘Bringing Britain Together: A National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal’, Cabinet Office, January 2001, http://dera.ioe.ac. uk/9947/1/National_strategy_for_neighbourhood_renewal_-_Policy_ Action_Team_audit.pdf (accessed 12 May 2016). Rajeev Syal and Rowena Mason, ‘Labour Says Universal Credit Will Take 495 Years to Roll Out as Costs Rise £3bn’, Guardian, 25 June 2015, https://www. theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/25/labour-says-universal-credit-willtake-495-years-to-roll-out-as-costs-rise-3bn (accessed 12 April 2016). James Thompson, ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Care’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20, no. 4 (2015): 430–441. Jim Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000). The Trussell Trust, ‘End of Year Stats’, The Trussell Trust, https://www.trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/end-year-stats/ (accessed 20 May 2019). UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), ‘The Labour Market Story: The UK Following Recession’, July 2014, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/344439/The_ Labour_Market_Story-_The_UK_Following_Recession.pdf (accessed 1 December 2016). Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Marxism, Feminism, Antiwork Politics and Post Work Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011).

CHAPTER 2

Arts and Employability: Migrating Discourses of Skills, Creativity, and Competition

You might imagine that working as a freelance community artist and undertaking a research project for Newcastle City Council on youth employment would be very different experiences. However, there were for me a number of unexpected confluences and overlaps. Most clearly, in the shared languages we used to talk about the people we worked with: how we would identify those that needed support; how we might work with them; and how in helping them we might capture or measure the value of the work we did. This chapter specifically examines artsbased employment interventions in order to interrogate the implications of shifts in social policy discourse, the growth of cultural commissioning, and the marketisation of public services for socially committed arts practices. Applied performance scholarship has offered extensive critiques of instrumentalisation over the past decade,1 as Michael Balfour warned in 2009, ‘[a]pplied theatre needs to be conscious of its orientation within a complex political and social web, and while it may not always be able to extricate itself from it, at least it needs to be conscious of the implications of inertia or struggle’.2 Here I explore the language used within social policy, employment interventions in the arts sector, and applied theatre practice in order to understand the implications of competing discourses within such a complex and shifting field of arts and social provision. I focus on two government-funded arts-based employability projects, the Creative Employment Programme (CEP) (2013–15) and Talent © The Author(s) 2020 S. Bartley, Performing Welfare, Contemporary Performance InterActions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44854-7_2

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Match (2014–). Specifically, I reflect on South Tyneside Council’s implementation of the CEP and Immediate Theatre’s delivery of Talent Match in London. I deploy Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework of analysis that examines the text (‘a spoken or written language’), the discourse practice (‘the production and interpretation of text’), and the social practice (the social and cultural events which surround the discourse).3 I examine the languages and patterns deployed in texts and assert the interdependency of these rhetorical shifts with the social and artistic practices they operate within. I begin by identifying macro shifts in public service provision and arts funding in the UK, proposing that such shifts are bound up with the migration of language between these two discrete fields. I then explore the appearance of artistically inflected terminology in state employment policy as the government seeks more ‘creative’ solutions to unemployment. Analysis of such arts-­based interventions is vital, as cultural policy scholar Kate Oakley states, ‘[u]nless the creative industries can find way of addressing their own labour market problems and thus develop a more inclusive and representative workforce, the sense of the cultural sectors as a source of progressive political alternatives will begin to seem absurd’.4 Finally, I argue that this interchangeable language results in new practices emerging both in employability programmes and arts practice. I acknowledge that discourses are not isolated but instead exist enmeshed in a discursive network acting on and acted upon by one another; they are never static but are instead an infinitely shifting and complex. Therefore, I interrogate the dialogic relationship between the differing ideological discourses of arts practice and social policy. I consider instances where arts practice shifts the way unemployed individuals are conceived of in discourse and, equally, where employability rhetoric modifies the practice of an arts organisation.

Shifting Policy Landscapes: Open Public Services and Cultural Commissioning Policy advisor David Freud’s 2007 independent report to Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity, marked a new direction for a more corporately minded welfare system, laying the foundations for a series of overt private-public partnerships in this area.5 In the UK, Freud was a leading voice in advocating for

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outsourcing employment services to private agencies and voluntary organisations during the New Labour era. Reviewing the subsequent proliferation of collaborations between the state, private companies, and third sector organisations in delivering welfare provision, journalist Nick Mathiason has suggested that New Labour implemented ‘a revolution every bit as far reaching as the privatisation of nationalised industries under Margaret Thatcher’.6 This mode of market competition embedded within what had historically been state-delivered services was further cultivated by the Coalition government, which stated in the 2011 Open Public Services White Paper: the principles of open public services will switch the default from one where the state provides the service itself to one where the state commissions the service from a range of diverse providers.7

The state, rather than delivering services, reframes itself as the ‘commissioner’ of outsourced contracts, encouraging competition between private, public, and third sector providers.8 This invoking of competition and market economies, where the best results for the best price yield the greatest uptake, has become endemic across public service provision.9 The redistribution of public services has provoked a growth of cultural commissioning, wherein arts and culture organisations bid for and are contracted to provide mental health provision, adult health and social care, offender rehabilitation projects, and employment support provision.10 The Cultural Commissioning Programme (CCP) (2013–16), an ACE-funded project, articulated that ‘a high proportion of arts and cultural organisations say they pursue social outcomes, a far smaller proportion are applying to non-art public funders’.11 Arts Council England’s (ACE’s) funding of the CCP aimed to foster better relationships between the arts sector and public services.12 A central objective of CCP was to translate the value of arts practice into a discourse public service commissioners could understand, enabling the arts to readily fit into this model of provision. It utilised a three-pronged strategy to work with arts and cultural organisations across England to help them better engage in public sector commissioning, with public service commissioners to help them understand the potential of arts and culture to deliver their outcomes, and with policy makers and stakeholders nationally.13

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But what are the practical and ideological implications of rendering different practices legible to one another? Linguistics scholars Lilie Chouliaraki and Fairclough propose that the interaction of discrete discourses can develop into an interruption, where one discourse ‘colonises’ another.14 This becomes a strategy of dialectic appropriation or potentially invasion, wherein discourses originate in one field and migrate to another. There is a risk that in the transition one discourse becomes dominant and in doing so substitutes or deletes forms of social practice that were bound to the initial discourse. Therefore, arts practitioners delivering projects in public service settings must be reflective as to the dynamics at play in the language exchange and consider the potential implications of shifting the discourse of your practice to align with a different set of agendas or contexts. Such considerations resonate with the linguistic framing of applied theatre practice, a pressing concern since the turn of the twenty-first century, where a stream of increasing and diversifying funding, as Balfour notes, ‘infects the ways in which applied theatre defines and talks about itself’.15 In the CCP evaluation, there is a clear intent to promote hybridised discourses which enable public service commissioners to identify how arts practice can ‘deliver their [social] outcomes’.16 The language throughout this evaluation report casts the commissioner as the agentic party. The arts practitioner is framed in the responsive role of service provider, required to demonstrate how their practice can fit the brief of particular projects sent out to tender. The central recommendations made in the evaluation are raising awareness and changing attitudes about the arts and cultural sector, building provider capacity and knowledge, market engagement and relationship building with the arts and cultural sector, improving procurement processes to engage and support the arts and culture sector, and improving monitoring and evaluation approaches to support arts and cultural organisations.17 As these recommendations indicate (excepting the advised changes to procurement processes), the CCP remains focused on shifting how arts organisations frame their practice in relation to commissioning priorities, cultivate stronger relationships with public service providers, and build frameworks to monitor their ‘outputs’ in ways that are legible to commissioners. Given that arts budgets are under such strain, both in terms of significant cuts to arts council funding and local authority budgets,18 a key aim

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of CCP was to establish whether involvement in cultural commissioning could diversify income streams for arts organisations, enabling them greater access to a broader range of funding.19 However, as the public purse continues to dwindle, a CCP report identifies, ‘there is a danger of commissioners retrenching and focusing on more traditional service models rather than exploring and co-designing new services in collaboration with the arts and cultural sector’.20 So while the Open Public Services strategy presents opportunities for arts organisations, it is accompanied by a pressure to provide tangible evidence that demonstrates the social efficacy of artistic approaches. Given the lack of public money available to the arts, they are placed in direct competition with education, health, and social care services, who are themselves facing increasingly diminishing budgets. While the CEP and Talent Match are not directly engaged with cultural commissioning, the marketisation of state services alongside ACE’s emphasis on arts organisations tendering for social service contracts has profoundly inflected discussions around the arts’ role in social provision.

Approaches to Employability Talent Match (2014–) is a five-year strategic programme funded by Big Lottery, investing £108 million in 21 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs).21 The programme aims to support unemployed 16–24-year-olds living in 21 youth unemployment ‘hotspots’, areas identified as having particularly high proportions of young people not in employment, education, or training. The programme set out to support young people classified as hard to engage, primarily those who were not accessing any support services or had been out of work for over a year.22 Talent Match London received a significant proportion of the national funding (£9,944,800) and was the only LEP in which a theatre company was included as a partnership organisation.23 London Youth was the lead partner in the London consortium, indicating an emphasis on youth-led interventions, a common characteristic of and continued ambition for Talent Match. Through cultivating local collaborations, Talent Match aimed to improve the provision and support available to young people with most partnerships offering a range of one-to-one job search support, enterprise and business training, advice around skills training and education institutions, and guidance around available volunteering opportunities.

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Immediate Theatre was the only performance-based organisation in the partnership. Located in the borough of Hackney, Immediate Theatre was established in 1996 to make creative and artistic work with young people ‘especially those at risk of marginalisation or exclusion’.24 Artistic Director Jo Carter founded the company with the aim to ‘make theatre where I lived, helping people to explore the process of change in a safe environment’.25 Consequently, Immediate Theatre have always been deeply embedded within their community. Their website outlines four company aims, the third being ‘[t]o improve employability for young people and create pathways to employment in the arts’.26 This focus on employment has threaded throughout company’s repertoire of projects.27 Immediate Theatre delivered the Talent Match programme between 2014 and 2018, building on their experience of similar employability provision and utilising the company’s connections in Hackney, an area with high levels of unemployment, to engage young people in that borough.28 Their programme consisted of one-to-one support with CV writing and job searches as well as group sessions on interview skills. This approach was underpinned by a youth work approach to supporting young people to navigate complex issues. In addition to this targeted support, the participants met weekly as a group and worked towards creating several performances focused on their experiences of looking for work and using the Jobcentre.29 Alongside projects such as Talent Match, where the emphasis is on the participant’s individual development, the arts sector facilitates broader employment interventions directly involved in job creation. The Creative Employment Programme, 2013–15, a £15 million scheme funded by Arts Council England and co-ordinated by Creative and Cultural Skills, aimed to support the creation of apprenticeships, internships, and traineeships, for unemployed 16–24-year-olds. This programme sought to shift recruitment practices and so broaden the ways in which the arts industry could engage potential employees. As Catherine Large, then CEO of Creative and Cultural Skills, stated, the programme’s goal was to get organisations talking to and working with Jobcentres, FE Colleges, local enterprise partnerships, Universities, Work Programme Providers and other youth services. This type of partnership working is vital if we want to take this opportunity to change recruitment culture in this industry in the long term.30

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This indicates a desire to engage directly with government-driven employability strategies. Over the two-year period of the programme, the CEP facilitated the creation of around 4500 employment opportunities, made up of approximately 1650 apprenticeships, 1450 paid internships, and 1400 traineeships.31 I particularly focus on the delivery of the CEP by South Tyneside Council that ran between July 2013 and November 2015, supporting 45 apprentices and interns during that period. Situated in North East England, South Tyneside is a borough in Tyne and Wear in which the unemployment rate is higher than the national average; for young people, this is a particularly acute problem.32 The CEP in the area was a collaboration between cultural organisations, administered and co-ordinated by South Tyneside Council and overseen by a consortium of partners. This consortium was made up of Customs House Theatre, Souter Lighthouse (National Trust), South Tyneside Council (Events Team and Libraries Service), and museums Bede’s World, Arbeia, and South Shields Museum. These cultural venues hosted apprentices and interns who worked alongside Gateshead College to obtain supporting qualifications. The CEP was thus supplemented by South Tyneside Adult Education, who accessed funding to deliver the apprenticeship qualifications at Gateshead College. The Council could also access additional funding from the Department for Work and Pensions who provided £2275, if a Young Person was eligible for the Youth Contract, or the National Apprenticeship Service Employer Incentive (£1500) if they were not.33 In total, the CEP brought £499,535 into the region over two years through education, employment, and CEP funding. This allowed South Tyneside Council to provide a ‘no cost programme’, which temporarily built capacity in the region’s arts labour market.34 Talent Match and the CEP sought to make tacit interventions in the employment status of young people by deploying arts practices to develop participants’ employability and through providing viable routes into the creative industries. Examining these interventions together demonstrates the diverse responses to government active labour market agendas happening across arts practice in the UK. This identifies thematic similarities that emerge across approaches to unemployment in the arts concerning the discursive, financial, ideological, and practical relationships between social policy and the arts sector.

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Incentives and Outputs: Monetising Claimants, Supporting Participants Launched in June 2011, the Work Programme, the Coalition’s flagship welfare-to-work scheme, was a mandatory work and employability scheme targeted at the long-term unemployed that outsourced contracts for employment support to a combination of private, public, and third sector organisations. This programme constituted the most significant iteration of the open public service agenda in employment policy and has been the touchstone for much open public services ideology and practice since its inception. Further, the Work Programme was lauded by the DWP as ‘at the leading edge of wider government commissioning of payment-for-­ results public services’.35 Payment-for-results markets are compelled by a heightened sense of risk for organisations embarking on programmes given that, as the Open Public Services White Paper stated, ‘payments to providers will be based primarily on the results they achieve, with challenging minimum performance levels and year-on-year price reductions to drive improved performance’.36 This shift in funding models and the accompanying corporatised language underscores the relentless pressure on organisations, often working with clients with deeply complex needs, to deliver quantifiable results to meet preset targets or risk not recouping the financial investment they must initially outlay to support a client in gaining work. Public services increasingly model the free market structures of the commercial sector where organisations compete for inputs (contracts, in which they must appear to offer the best value for the public purse) to produce measurable outputs (moving clients into work and off state support). The CEP did not have any regulations regarding future employment; however, the programme did require participants to obtain their apprenticeship qualification before education providers and arts organisations could draw down the full amount of funding available to them. The focus of this programme was firmly located in preparing young people for the labour market but did not emphasise ongoing employment as a marker of success.37 This navigates the payment-by-results metrics usually deployed around employability; instead, the CEP is more deeply entwined with the notion of payment-by-result in the Further Education (FE) sector, that is, based on learners completing qualifications rather than securing employment. Since the introduction of the Further and Higher Education Act

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1992, the FE sector has been subject to aggressive marketisation. As Educationalists Rob Smith and Matt O’Leary state, ‘FE in England can be regarded as the crucible in which an emerging model of marketisation in education has been tested out’.38 At the outset of the twenty-first century, pervasive frameworks of marketisation operate in FE where, because funding is tethered to learners’ success, policy researcher Nehal Panchamia notes an ‘output related funding system generated a perverse incentive structure’.39 As part of the CEP was delivered by further education providers, it is important to reflect on how arts organisations sit within this intensely marketised system. In terms of the arts and culture organisations involved in the CEP in South Tyneside, there was a resistance to the incentivised structure of further education. However, the structure of the apprenticeship programme meant that labour of these young people operated in a kind of doubly productive way: providing cheaper labour for the arts organisations involved (in 2013–14 the Apprenticeship Minimum Wage was £2.68 per hour) but also creating revenue for Gateshead College via the funding they could draw down for delivering the qualification.40 Education institutions, themselves under extreme financial strain due to central FE budgets being reduced by a third since 2010, could potentially utilise the CEP as a way to generate income. Thus, the CEP navigated the monetisation of participants in relation to open public services employability schemes, yet the programme was unavoidably entwined with the economics of FE. Generating funding for FE provision is not in itself problematic but I would argue achieving this whilst only remunerating individuals for their work at 41% of the National Minimum Wage devalues the labour those young people are engaged in and exposes them to an exploitation of that labour.41 This speaks to broader concerns around value in relation to apprenticeship provision and the distribution of power occurring between the employer, education provider, and apprentice. If arts organisations and ACE are seeking to develop skills and diversify recruitment in the industry, those delivering these schemes need to further reflect on who is benefitting from such a programme and ensure the apprentices’ learning and material circumstances are prioritised. The potential monetisation of participants in payment-by-results structures is also apparent in the risks posed to organisations delivering services that are funded in this way. As policy advisors Daniel Crowe, Tom Gash,

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and Henry Kippin identify, if smaller organisations do engage in such contracts, they are required to take a disproportionate amount of risk, at times aware that ‘this is the last throw of the dice for smaller social sector organisations’ who ‘don’t have the financial back up to meet the bill if things go wrong’.42 This further intensifies the pressure on specialist and often locally embedded organisations to provide help to the communities they operate within, meaning that increasingly national providers are commissioned to deliver such social and public service contracts. In order for South Tyneside Council to draw down the full funding for the provision of the CEP, the young people involved were required to complete their apprenticeship qualification. A small amount of funding was provided upfront, another instalment six months into the project, and then the majority was paid in arrears. Such funding structures have damaging implications for smaller organisations and community-based groups who often are unable to generate sufficient funds upfront to cover their provision prior to receiving recompense. Particularly given that, as Cultural Development Officer at South Tyneside Council Richard Barber articulated, the programme was working with young people who were often coping with a lot of other external factors, the completion of the qualification was not guaranteed.43 The cultural organisations in South Tyneside were not in a financial position to expose themselves to the possible loss of funding that these young people could come to represent; as Barber notes, ‘it was a bit of a risk from the beginning, but the Council took the risk’.44 Payment-by-completion was embedded in the project, but South Tyneside Council operated as a protective mediator able to absorb the financial risk of learners not completing their apprenticeship. The Council were prepared to shoulder the financial risk and so enable arts organisations, already dealing with a harsh funding climate, to participate in the programme. As such, when two learners were unable to complete the programme, the Council absorbed the financial loss.45 This demonstrates the importance of local authority support and funding to regional arts ecologies. Alternatively, Talent Match (and Immediate Theatre’s involvement in it) maps more closely onto the traditional funding model of impact-driven applied theatre practice. That is, the programme was grant-funded, providing companies with a set annual amount of money for delivery rather than tying money explicitly to the success of participants. These organisational funding structures, as with the South Tyneside CEP example,

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functioned to resist frameworks of ‘easy wins’ where more ‘work-ready’ individuals are intensively supported while others are neglected as, in payment-­by-results structures, the sooner individuals are in work, the sooner money is released to organisations. However, this funding was coupled with fixed targets for organisations to meet regarding moving young people into employment. Given that Talent Match aimed to offer support to young people facing a number of complex obstacles in relation to obtaining work, these targets were adjusted appropriately. Immediate Theatre only had to support five young people into employment in their first year in operation.46 This structure allows organisations to take more ‘risks,’ and support young people in a range of ways, and it provides a greater sense of stability across organisations who have secured project funding. However, in introducing fixed targets, Talent Match has adopted a linguistic and functional framework akin to the rhetoric of the Coalition’s Open Public Services agenda. Emerging out of this target-driven and financially precarious payment-­ by-­results structure, a widely acknowledged and endemic practice of ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’ occurred across the Work Programme.47 That is, clients who have the most complex needs are identified by providers who assume they will not be able to get the client to a point of work readiness and so do not offer them appropriate levels of support (they are ‘parked’). Concurrently, organisations mark those who present as easier to move into work and offer them intensive support to do so (these clients are ‘creamed’). This ensures that time is invested in individuals deemed most likely to provide a financial return.48 Such discourse reconceives people as points that organisations must accumulate in order to make a profit. This functions to dehumanise individuals and undermine caring pathways of authentic support in favour of fast-track solutions and short-term results. Challenging the ideology and practice of ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’, both the CEP and Talent Match intentionally sought to engage young people that might be defined as particularly complex and who face a number of obstacles to the labour market. In the case of Talent Match, the programme attempted to engage ‘young people who are not accessing statutory services, who are furthest from the labour market and who face a number of barriers to entering work without a new approach’.49 By targeting this client group, Talent Match removed the possibility of ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’, instead seeking to prioritise those with the greatest needs.

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However, even within this supportive context, there remains a linguistic promiscuity that demonstrates an exposure to the marketisation of public services and a vocabulary of monetisation of participants emerging in arts employability practice. As such, Immediate Theatre’s collaborative ways of working are undermined, as Training Coordinator at the company, Chloe Jones, outlined, We’re not double counting […]. You can have your targets and we can have our targets and they’re kind of different projects and I think that as long as that young person is getting the support we can both take the commission.50

The language Jones adopts highlights the pervasive commodification of these young people and the need for arts practitioners in this field to be able to navigate such discourse. The reassurance Jones gives regarding ‘double counting’ and ‘both tak[ing] the commission’ points to the need to ease worries around competition: ‘you do have to kind of really persuade other providers that we’re not just going to take their young people away’.51 In such a competitive public services arena, there is an increased need for accountability and a fierce concern over the ownership of ‘successful outputs’. This is an indicative example of the mixture of discourses operating within arts-based employability projects: while Jones is deploying language that affirms the commodification of participants, she also advocates for the importance of supporting young people. There is thus a tension at play between the communal and the competitive arts organisations engaging in this kind of practice. In such a hostile and incentive-driven marketplace, there is a reticence to share client support across agencies as when someone is claiming multi-­ agency support, it is difficult to establish who can claim the individual’s success should they secure work. As Jones outlines, ‘[n]ow there’s a lot more competition for the young people which is kind of really sad but I guess that’s how it works. […] there’s a kind of sharing issue’.52 Beyond payment-for-results, across services, the majority of funders require evidence of high levels of participant engagement in order to demonstrate value for money and justify increased funding. This breeds a reticence to ‘share’ participants, particularly when working with overlapping demographics, occupying the same locality, and drawing money from similar funders. This is an acute problem when trying to engage young unemployed people as, on a practical level, they can be disengaged from services and

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difficult to find. The Work Foundation reported in 2012 that around a third of 16–24-year-olds (excluding student populations) looking for work were not receiving unemployment benefit.53 Not claiming benefits also often excludes these young people from engaging with services that can signpost them to community-based projects such as Talent Match. If numbers at projects are low, it is natural for organisations to want to retain the participants they have; however, this can lead to fragmented services and a lack of joined up support for young people. The Work Foundation identified the damaging implications of such fragmentation: ‘[t]his inconsistency around support for young people, moving between one service and another, and with possible gaps […], appears at odds with the critical task of providing support around the education to employment transition’.54 When supporting people, particularly young people, into employment, there needs to be a joined up provision which provides a holistic level of support to service users. This requires organisations to communicate effectively with one another and refer across agencies to ensure the participant is receiving the best support available to them. In operating through local partnerships with different services, Talent Match models a culture of joined up provision and collective support. As Jones identifies, this enables organisations to feel confident in working with one another more openly: Talent Match is good because it is about collaboration and we do try and work together and as long as someone’s engaging the young people—people from other places can come to our groups, our young people can go to their groups. It’s a lot more open.55

Such a model attempts to intervene in the culture of individual organisations claiming successful outputs as their own and recognises the value in being able to refer people to specialist services that will be responsive to their particular needs. Talent Match London’s advice to policy makers and commissioners calls for them to ‘[i]ncentivise collaboration rather than competition for easy wins’.56 Nationally, the Talent Match programme is underpinned a consistent desire to foster collaboration between partners and promote engagement across a range of social sector organisations. This both recognises the competitive and uncooperative landscape these organisations occupy and pushes back against it. In the employability sector where funding is bound up with metrics of success, it is difficult to protect participants from being reduced to a

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valuable (or non-valuable) output, a result by which to leverage funds. Talent Match and CEP both structurally and ideologically reject this commodification, and yet the inflection of such discourses within their practice and the landscape they occupy is clear: the monetisation of education, the need for larger organisations to function as protectors from risk, and anxiety around collaborative working and sharing outputs. While operating amid this rhetoric of competition and marketisation, both projects in different ways enacted and resisted such a monetised framing of service users. Working in such contexts creates arts practitioners who deploy a complex and contradictory layered discourse that is both engaged with commissioning priorities and concerned with community practices.

Apprenticeships: Training or Exploitation State apprenticeship programmes are indicative of the confluence and conflict of financial, social, and educational objectives that I have outlined above. In 2010, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties’ Coalition Agreement stated: ‘[w]e will seek ways to support the creation of apprenticeships, internships, work pairings, and college and workplace training places as part of our wider programme to get Britain working’.57 The emphasis was placed on these as active labour market approaches ‘to get Britain working’. This is indicative of these schemes as being driven by a desire to move people off state benefit rather than as an extension to education provision or an investment in learning. This emphasis on skills training as a means to promote employment was underpinned by a myriad of reports that changed the face of such skills delivery over the following five years.58 Concurrently, there was an overt move to redistribute the responsibility for apprenticeship provision from education providers to employers. The Education Act 2011 replaced what was previously a state duty to provide apprenticeship places to all qualified 16–19-year-olds, with one to ‘make reasonable efforts to ensure employers participate in Apprenticeship training’.59 This shift towards an emphasis on employers’ participation has been a consistent objective for both the Coalition and Conservative governments. In 2015 the Conservatives pledged they would create three million more apprenticeships by 2020, funding this through the introduction of an Apprenticeship Levy to businesses, inducing the most significant investment in UK apprenticeships ever. Tellingly, alongside this unparalleled investment in apprenticeships, the Adult Skills

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Budget was cut by 35% between 2009 and 2015, undermining the notion that the state was investing in learning and skills.60 This shift is particularly evident in entrepreneur Doug Richard’s 2012 report (known as the Richard Review) for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, wherein there is a marked disparity between the agency and active role of the three key stakeholders—learners, employers, and government. The report asserted the importance of ‘shift[ing] the power over designing and developing apprenticeship qualifications to employers’.61 Alongside the call to give greater agency to employers over the content and delivery of apprenticeships, Richard argued for the ceding of control over skills provision to businesses: The purchasing power for training must lie firmly in the hands of employers. […] To become real consumers of training, employers should have control of Government funding and, also, contribute themselves to the cost of training.62

The language asserts a renegotiated relationship between employers and government particularly around the role of consumer and provider. As above, the employer is placed as the agentic party, demanding increasing control of the financial regulation and content design of the apprenticeship system. The launch of the Richard Review was accompanied by a speech from, then Business Secretary, Vince Cable that affirmed the government’s desire to prioritise the needs of employers: ‘Doug Richard’s review echoes the Government’s current thinking on putting employers in the driving seat of our apprenticeship programme. This will be vital to ensure the skills of our workforce fit with employer needs’.63 There was a continual deference to industry in the Coalition rhetoric that goes beyond Conservative anti-statism and amounts to a handing over of skills education to employers. This has continued, and expanded, during the Conservative administration, as the Institute for Public Policy Research notes: The government is handing more responsibility to employers for funding, designing, buying and delivering apprenticeships, while at the same time removing the requirement that they include a nationally recognised qualification.64

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This relaxing of regulation further asserts the dominance of industry over the education and employment markets and highlights the prioritisation of education for work as opposed to education for knowledge, not to mention broader ‘betterment’ or even pleasure. It also marks the importance of developing analyses of how apprenticeships are being deployed in the arts at the outset of the twenty-first century. This shifting apprenticeship landscape has inflected how arts organisations delivering the CEP navigated the provision of work and training for learners. Cultural industries scholars David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker have sought to examine definitions and delineations of ‘good work’ and ‘bad work’ in the creative industries. Their study established that ‘good work’ was largely characterised by good wages and working hours, autonomy, interest and involvement, sociality, self-esteem, self-realisation, work-life balance, and security, while ‘bad work’ was aligned with poor wages and working hours, powerlessness, boredom, isolation, low self-­ esteem and shame, frustrated development, overwork, and risk.65 This categorisation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is productive as it identifies the ambiguous experiences of the creative worker in the labour market, with individuals regularly experiencing both good and bad work. The CEP was developed as a response to the poor employment conditions, particularly around security and self-realisation—two key aspects of ‘good work’—for people entering the creative industries. The programme offered a year of secure employment to those wanting to join the industry and gave the opportunity to engage in a broad range of activities to develop people’s skills.66 The CEP offered an opportunity to cultivate skilled workers in arts management, production, technical theatre, community theatre, and administration. Similar to discourses emerging in policy at the same time, the CEP sought to broaden what could be conceived of as an apprentice and underscore the need for specific skills training for different roles. South Tyneside Creative Apprentices undertook a number of different job roles at the various cultural venues including operational support such as ushering and box office/reception duties; administrative duties; development and delivery of education and outreach programmes; marketing and promotion activities; production, event, and technical support; and supporting a range of cafe/restaurant hospitality and catering functions.67 The breadth of the roles apprentices were engaged in and the number of organisations they worked at functioned as training for a future in the cultural industries. This mirrors a freelance or sessional worker’s schedule, where working in set blocks and

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moving across organisations is common practice. This need to constantly cultivate new relationships and build supportive networks as the worker moves from organisation to organisation replicates the affective requirements of a significant amount of employment in this sector. However, in providing these young people with a year of stability, the CEP offered a relatively secure period of work for the apprentices. It thus enacted a kind of structural training for precarity that young people may encounter if they pursue a career in this industry, but did so over the course of a comparatively stable fixed-term contract. In South Tyneside Council’s review of the programme, a number of apprentices alluded to negotiating the terms of their work pattern and job roles at different organisations, stating that ‘the experience, both hands­on in a cultural venue specifically and generally in terms of skills development were attractive’.68 This facilitated apprentices’ relationships with the local arts ecology and enabled them to gain useful contacts in the industry, increasing their access to cultural capital. Further, apprentices reported that there was a collegiality that emerged out of working with a cohort of other young people who were often in similar situations to themselves. This promoted Hesmondhalgh and Baker’s assertion of ‘sociality’ as crucial to good work, with a number of apprentices stating that they had grown in confidence, networking, and improved relationships with others over the course of the year.69 The South Tyneside partnership’s delivery of the CEP therefore equipped participants with specialist creative abilities but also developed participants’ relational skills, necessary to navigate the arts labour market during this period. However, given that this particular iteration of the CEP was a collaboration between different organisations, the potential for poor understandings of the role of apprentices also emerged as a significant weakness in particular organisations. Unsurprisingly apprentices ‘felt that menial tasks such as washing dishes, cleaning toilets, doing bins and administrative work were the least useful [experiences]’.70 This description does not evoke the development of skills but rather suggests undertaking a role with no underpinning learning or support and so one that should be assigned to an employee receiving at least the Living Wage. This highlights the potential murky parameters of an apprenticeship given that it is both an entry-level role and a training opportunity. That is, Structural Hierarchies operating within cultural institutions, as with most workplaces, demand a certain amount of ‘bad work’ in entry-level positions (poor pay, overwork, boredom); however, the status of an apprentice as

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learner, whose labour is financially remunerated at a lower rate in recognition of this discrete status, is more ambiguous. There is thus a potential for the devaluing of labour through an apprenticeship model if there are not stricter structures making their role distinct and governing the legal obligations of employers during apprenticeships. Such a blurring of the role of the apprentices did not occur across all the organisations involved in the partnership. Indeed, Barber was intent on the project appropriately supporting young people, stating the organisations needed ‘to buy into it and give [their] supervisors the time to, because it’s not a scheme that comes for free labour, but it takes an investment of time in these young people’.71 So the Council’s motivation was a genuine hope to provide training for young people, which would develop their skills and be useful for their ongoing career development. However, Barber conceded there were difficulties in placing the apprentices in creative roles, a desired goal of the CEP: One of the difficult things looking back is, we didn’t really get young people doing that much creative activity. Often, they were in things like supporting functions. For example, the young people involved in museum services were in attendant type role[s] rather than curatorial type roles. Those who were involved in Customs House were involved with technicians, marketing and the restaurant part. There was neither the opportunity nor the skill base to put them into the Participation and Learning Team.72

Despite the language of creativity that framed the scheme, this lack of ‘creative activity’ that Barber cites highlights challenges of the CEP. Barber’s comments note that the functional roles apprentices were assigned to were in part due to the lack of skills they had already. If organisations are unable to facilitate young people developing their industry-focused skills, then such apprenticeships become focused on ‘supporting [the] functions’ of the cultural institution in which they are located. Such a flexible conception of Creative Apprenticeships coupled with a lack of sufficient financial support for organisations or guidance for learners can lead to individuals in these roles undertaking a disproportionate amount of ‘bad work’, which fails to develop apprentices experience and understanding of cultural work. The CEP sought to deliver Creative Apprenticeships in part as an attempt to intervene in pervasive exploitative labour practices occurring within the creative sector. Given the period of high youth unemployment the UK was experiencing at the time, there was a particular concern that

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young people were being excluded from or exploited by the cultural labour market.73 The Sutton Trust reported in 2014 that there are approximately 70,000 interns in the UK with up to 15,000 of these being unpaid.74 They have suggested this is a significant underestimation of the true figure due to a paucity of information shared by companies. The same report found 63% of adverts on a specific internship site related to creative work.75 At their Creative Apprenticeships Week, ACE recognised the limiting implications of models of free labour, ACE representative Moira Sinclair stating, we will narrow the talent pool to only those who can afford to take unpaid opportunities, and those who can afford education. That will be a danger to us and to our creativity and to the wealth of experiences we need to bring into our industry to make it valuable.76

Requiring lengthy periods of voluntary work in order to establish a foothold in the industry excludes a large number of people from engaging in that workforce and homogenises the sector. Similarly, sociologists Kimberly Allen, Jocey Quinn, Sumi Hollingworth, and Antheathe Rose identify that the ‘discursive construction of the ideal work placement student and potential creative worker—with a currency on flexibility, enterprise and self-sufficiency—privileges whiteness, middle class-ness, masculinity and able-bodiedness’.77 The increase in unpaid labour and voluntary placements in overstretched arts organisations instigates exclusionary practices that foster an elitist and monocultural industry. The CEP attempted to reduce barriers to participating in the arts workforce, addressing the fact that, in 2014, 58.8% of jobs in the ‘Creative Economy’ were filled by individuals with degree qualifications. This figure is significantly more than that of all UK jobs (31.8%).78 This intervention by Creative and Cultural Skills therefore sought to offer accessible pathways into operational roles such as arts administration or project management in the cultural sector. Of the 40 apprentices involved in the CEP in South Tyneside, none of them had previously been employed in the arts and cultural sector prior to undertaking the apprenticeship and all stated that they felt ‘lack of experience’ and ‘not having a degree’ had meant they would not have applied for arts jobs in the past.79 After the apprenticeship, they felt more equipped and confident to pursue careers in the creative industries. However, apprentices also noted that the low wage they received during the apprenticeship was restrictive, particularly to those

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with dependents and cautioned that this could impede access.80 The CEP in South Tyneside did expand accessibility; however, the low wages attached to apprenticeships in the UK mean not everyone can afford to undertake one. Alongside increasing access to non-graduates, the CEP enabled investment in arts organisations across all regions in England. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) noted in 2015 that there is a significant disparity in employment in the creative sector across regions: ‘across the whole of the UK, around 1  in 12 jobs (8.5%) were in the Creative Economy and ranged from 1 in 20 jobs (5.1%) in the North East to 1 in 6 jobs (16.2%) in London’.81 The CEP brought just under half a million pounds into South Tyneside to underpin employment opportunities in the arts and cultural sector and thus expand the region’s arts ecology. Through investing in different regions, the CEP presented a small intervention in the London-centric landscape of arts employment, enabling local markets to grow. If such interventions were more sustained, then this model holds the potential to rebalance the geography of the arts and cultural sector in the UK. Beyond a definition of quality, Hesmondhalgh and Baker’s conception of work is concerned with how ‘good’ and ‘bad’ work is distributed, arguing that ‘the problem of good work should be understood as part of [the] broader political problems of freedom, equality and the social division of labour’.82 As the aforementioned figures attest, there is significant inequality in the distribution of roles in the creative industries. Figures relating to the success of the CEP in engaging a more diverse workforce are yet to be published. However, as my analysis of the CEP demonstrates, it is important that ACE consider diversity through the quality, not only the quantity, of work individuals are engaging in. The CEP provided a number of opportunities to young people who may not have been able to engage in creative work otherwise; however, it is important that we continue to track the kind of tasks individuals undertake in order to capture the nuances of shifts in access to the creative industries. Examining the apprenticeship landscape in the UK illuminates the persistent recession of the state, growing control of the employer, and intensifying the responsibility felt by the individual to sufficiently equip themselves for the workplace. In this context, ACE’s attempt to intervene in exploitative labour practices operating within the arts does provide more accessible roots into the cultural sector that seek to diversify this workforce. However, the combination of the ambiguity of roles in the arts

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sector and the increasingly deregulated area of apprenticeships means that the CEP opens learners up to both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ work. If organisations are to sufficiently support individuals and ensure their progression in the arts, it is vital to recognise an apprenticeship as uniquely positioned at the intersection of education and employment.

Practice Changing the Discourse or Discourse Changing the Practice? Above I have focused on structural analysis of the intersections and overlaps between employment and artistic policy that have emerged in Talent Match and the CEP. I now turn to an exploration of how these discourses around employability effect, and are effected by, a specific performance project. In their first year as part of the Talent Match Partnership, Immediate Theatre delivered what became The First Door. Named by participants, one of whom stated it meant ‘[i]f someone would just help us to open that first door—well, the rest we can open ourselves’, The First Door was an employment-focused performance project for those young people.83 The first performance the group produced was a ten-minute work-in-­ progress sharing at a conference for the Talent Match London partners hosted by consortium leaders London Youth. This event was an opportunity to share learning so far and support good practice across the organisations. The participants had been developing a piece of performance that depicted the difficulties of using the Jobcentre and the stigma they faced as young people trying to access the service. Lead facilitator and director of the piece, Rebecca Adamson, recounts the arrival of the group at the event just as a senior manager of Jobcentre Plus (JCP) in London began his speech on the programmes they were undertaking with young people: His impression seemed to be that [JCP] were doing a reasonable job. Anyway so our young people were there and the more they listened to him the more visibly angry they were getting about it.84

Immediate Theatre then followed this with their performance, a critique of the service they had received during their encounters with Jobcentre Plus, including intimidation from security guards, lack of care from Jobcentre staff, and repeated sanctioning of their benefit. Following the performance there was a panel discussion about experiences of youth

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unemployment with the manager from Jobcentre Plus and the Talent Scouts (young people employed by Talent Match in order to support the co-production of the programme).85 Adamson continued, I think that they were able to get involved in that discussion meant a lot to them […]. But also having some people who weren’t just playing the game and on message about ‘thanks for the funding, we’re so happy to be working with you’, they were actually like ‘no, this is not my experience, what you’re saying is wrong’. And this Jobcentre guy, bless him, took a bit of a beating during that panel discussion but stayed afterwards […] and he was saying ‘I’m happy to listen’.86

This work-in-progress sharing demonstrates the active role that socially committed performance addressing unemployment can play in rupturing state-sanctioned discourses surrounding unemployment. The discursive event that Talent Match London and Immediate Theatre facilitated between these young people and a senior London Jobcentre Plus manager allowed a disruption to occur within JCP rhetoric. As Adamson notes, the value of amplifying these young people’s voices illuminates how small companies dependent on funding from schemes like Talent Match might be unable to challenge key stakeholders in the same way that the Immediate Theatre participants did. The relationships cultivated through this encounter, and fostered through Talent Match, continued to inform the practice of both Immediate Theatre and Jobcentre Plus. In her role as Training Co-ordinator, Jones discussed how the two organisations might work together to improve understanding on both sides. Immediate Theatre initially proposed taking their performance into Jobcentre and following it with a youth-led workshop for advisors to attend, in the hope that the discussion that occurred at the Talent Match London conference could be provoked across JCP offices. However, given the logistical and economic strains on Jobcentres during this period this initial plan was significantly pared back. Instead, it was decided that the participants would make a film for use at staff training events within the Jobcentres where they had established links. The 13-minute film initially follows the story of the fictional character of Joe and his struggle to gain work and resist getting involved in the black market economy prevalent in his community. The tone then shifts and viewers are introduced to the real participants who share things about

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themselves; this is intercut with the scenes about difficulties of using the Jobcentre that the participants performed for the Talent Match conference.87 The film has a Do-It-Yourself aesthetic, there are no costumes or lighting, and the camera does not have a strong mic, resulting in the regular use of voiceovers. This visual sparseness elevates the value of the vocal performances and importance of the language deployed in the piece. This primacy of language creates a platform for the participants to be vocal, to amplify their experiences of the Jobcentre, and to be heard by the organisation’s staff. The film opens with a wide shot of Joe wandering aimlessly down a London street. Over this shot, we hear the following: 1: This is Joe. He goes by Joe, Jay, JJ, Joker, Joey. Others call him Joseph or The Young Person. joe: What’s young person? voice 2: There are young people and then there are The Young People. voice 3: Apparently Joe’s NEET, whatever that means.88 voice

By utilising a number of different nicknames for Joe, the audience is given a sense of this character and the playfulness of his personality. This playful naming is significant as it bestows a three dimensionality to Joe that affords the audience a connection to him. This is punctured by the coldness of the bureaucratic naming of the character by the, at this point, unidentified other voices. This opening introduces us to the disconnect felt by young people between themselves and the linguistic construction of ‘The Young Person’ in the bureaucratic sites they find themselves entangled in. The film then proceeds to counter this construct of ‘The Young Person’ by introducing us to the participants who have created the film and their individual personalities. Shot in a close up, each participant raises their head and looks directly at the camera telling us their name and describing themselves in three words: ‘Taurus, Funny, and Caring’; ‘ambitious, driven, enigma’. This acts in a similar way to the naming of Joe at the outset, giving audience insight into them as people, rather than them as ‘The [generalised] Young Person’. To reinforce this, shot in a similar style, at the close of the film the participants share their aspirations: ‘I want to own my own beekeeping company, and make all natural honey with no pesticides. And also to try and protect the world as we know it. Also I want to own my own house and just, to have a good life’.89 While access to safe

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and stable housing was a common thread, the beekeeping was not. The motivations of the participants were diverse, varied, and ambitious; a key struggle that they articulated was the inability of services such as JCP to be able to acknowledge their diversity or support them in achieving their personal goals. The film also included a section where each participant shared their frustration at JCP, the struggles they have encountered with form filling, their four-minute meetings with advisors, and the impossibility of them imparting the complexities of their lives to JCP staff within these rigid confines. The film partially seeks to recreate the discussion that occurred at the Talent Match London conference and disseminate the learning across JCP staff. Through articulating their characteristics, ambitions, and specific circumstances, which are not given space in the bureaucratic discourse of ‘The Young Person’, participants are able to present a personal narrative. This allows a more nuanced representation of their identity to emerge that nuances their identity beyond just their employment status, expressing a new conception of these individuals in a state of possibility, potentiality, and hope. The importance of language in this piece evidences the stakes involved in generating positive discourse around young unemployed individuals. Additionally, The First Door film demonstrates that there is a desire among young people to co-construct these discourses to make them more representative of their diverse personal narratives. The First Door project enabled participants to feel listened to and be proud of their creative work; further, it extended beyond participants and provided a provocation for local JCP staff. Indeed, Jones accompanied some young people to a showing of the film at a JCP senior management meeting, and despite initial reticence—‘[t]hey found it quite hard to believe I think, or didn’t wanna believe it’—the staff engaged in a reflective discussion around improvements that could be made to more appropriately support engagement with young people.90 Immediate Theatre made a small-scale intervention in Jobcentre Plus training at a local level around providing appropriate support to young people. However, Jones also spoke of her despair at trying to penetrate such a vast and unwieldy system as DWP: missed meetings, difficulty in accessing the right people, and a service stretched to the limit meant that the relationship between Immediate Theatre and Jobcentre Plus subsequently broke down. While this relationship dissolved, it is important that it was forged, even fleetingly, to foster a different quality of engagement between young welfare claimants and Jobcentre Plus staff. The impenetrability of the wider DWP

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structure points to the utility of performance developing local strategies and regional partnerships in order to tackle the systemic removal of claimants’ humanity. In such contexts, applied performance can offer otherwise divergent discourses the opportunities to meet and clash, creating spaces for listening and articulating wherein performances of language might shift particular understandings of communities. Having explored how arts practice might intervene in discourses around unemployment, I now consider how arts projects might decentre artistic practice in service of employability objectives. Shifts in skills rhetoric have increasingly focused on labourers developing ‘portable’ or ‘transferrable’ skill sets. There is an increasing awareness that employability courses need to equip people for the realities of the insecure workplace, and as Jane Mulderrig asserts to prepare individuals for ‘a life of uncertainty in which risk and responsibility for one’s own welfare and security must be accepted’.91 ‘Transferrable’ skills have gained considerable traction in applied and community theatre. There has been an intensification of a skills-based rhetoric focusing on the application and utility of soft skills gained through artistic practice.92 The language surrounding transferrable skills therefore becomes central to a consideration of the interaction of policy discourse and artistic practice concerned with unemployment. Reflecting on the role of Immediate Theatre in the consortium of partners involved in Talent Match London, Adamson suggested, it’s a theatre company doing it alongside other partner organisations who aren’t theatre based at all. And how you’re engaging with them is quite different […]. You’re sort of added value doing the group sessions, whereas the other organisations I think all they’re having is the one to one stuff.93

There is an understanding in the partnership that theatre accesses a different mode of engagement beyond individual job support, application mentoring, and volunteering opportunities. Theatre offers participants a collective experience and a space for collaboration. This potentially interrupts the construction of individual responsibility that is cultivated by the experience of unemployment, where there is not regularly room for group work in the systems you encounter. This isolation is intensified by a discourse that is consistently rendering individuals at fault for not accruing the appropriate skills to be able to traverse the labour market successfully.94 In approaching Immediate Theatre to be involved in the partnership, the consortium acknowledges the importance of these spaces for collaboration and the capacity of drama projects to deliver them.

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However, despite this acknowledgement, as Jones articulates, there is a lack of understanding of what participants are actually gaining from engaging with Immediate Theatre: I think they’re supportive of it, I think they can understand ‘you do interview skills and role play’ but it’s more for us […]. It is the confidence building, it is the team building, it is the trust, it’s being able to learn to communicate in a more positive way. Those kind of things that build up slowly, which I guess if you haven’t done drama or you’re not aware of that process you don’t see it.95

There is an absence of aesthetic or artistic language in Jones’ discussion of what participants gain from involvement in The First Door. While the competencies she outlines are certainly important, they are indicative of the transferrable skills discourse that has emerged across employability provision and arts projects that address social outcomes. I propose that there is a porousness in this language which surrounds applied performance, which has the potential to enable an ‘interruption’ or ‘substitution’ of the language of artistic practice in service to the linguistic constructions of state employment policy.96 These shifts in language lead to shifts in practice. In fact, despite a strong artistic impetus continuing throughout much of the work of Immediate Theatre, during my interview with Jones, she indicated that Talent Match had encouraged the organisation to depart from this artistic emphasis. Jones was in the process of developing the next course for the 2015–16 cohort; she stated: It is about building self-confidence, looking at things like body language, status, managing your emotions, stress, and time management. So it’s like building in different skills, step by step and then interview skills, office etiquette. So it’s much more employability focused which I think is what the programme are asking for.97

This decentres the role of performance in favour of employability skills and ‘office etiquette’. As I have alluded to above, the value of including a theatre company lies in its ability to creatively provoke discussion and give voice to young people through performance. It is worth noting that throughout the national Talent Match Interim Evaluation Report there are a number of references to the ‘innovative’ or

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‘creative’ solutions each local partnership is taking in order to engage their particular constituents. However, there is no mention of theatre, performance, or the arts as an approach that is being utilised by partners delivering the scheme. Indeed, Immediate Theatre are the only arts organisation I identified as being involved, and it appears that their particular artistic approach has been modified to fit more readily into the context of employability provision. As Jones articulates, arts and community based organisations, have to follow where the political lead is. So now suddenly there’s lots of money for employability projects, so obviously as an arts organisation, you are need to think about developing in that area. So you are kind of led by policy.98

While arts organisations responding to shifts in the political landscape echo the rhetoric surrounding social inclusion and funding during the New Labour period, I suggest that the climate of scarce funding and intensified competition has further raised the stakes of such practices. Given the political focus on unemployment since the economic crash in 2008, the subsequent wealth of funding available for employability projects has more overtly aligned arts organisations with the provision of employment skills, subsidised labour schemes, and work-focused training. Arts organisations need to reassert the distinctive value of arts practice in community settings rather than shifting their discourse and practice to fit with existing provision or commissioner priorities. This context requires practitioners and scholars to be alert and critical of the functions of the complex discourse of creativity, competition, and skills operating within this field.

Conclusion As unemployment remains unjustly stigmatised, apprenticeship numbers increase, and exploitative labour practices persist, it is an important time to review the position of arts organisations involved in employability provision. In investigating how the CEP and Talent Match traverse the new marketised arena of social provision, I have evidenced where arts provision has been inculcated in discourses and practices of payment-by-results. I identified micro-instances where arts funding models, which allow for the non-linear outcomes of the arts project, might seek to disrupt this notion of ‘results’. Indeed, the collaborative model, embedded in much socially

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motivated arts practice, might intervene in the increasingly individualised and competitive employability marketplace. My discussion of the developing UK apprenticeship sector identifies a new area of analysis for questions around ‘good work’ and ‘bad work’ in the arts sector, advocating for continuing to develop interventions in arts employment in order to improve the accessibility, distribution, and quality of creative work. Finally, in exploring performances of employability enacted in Immediate Theatre’s First Door project, I have demonstrated how applied theatre might stage dialogue across different stakeholders around work, value, and support. Conversely, I evidenced how the language utilised by Immediate Theatre shifted over the course of their collaboration with Talent Match and argued that this, in turn, led to a shift in the practice the company deliver in this area. This exposes the dialogic relationship between policy and practice in arts-based employability projects. The ‘interruption’ and linguistic co-optation of arts discourse by state-sanctioned economic vocabularies that serve employability agendas can effectively contaminate ideologies of community and creative practices which exist in applied performance. However, arts organisations continue to disrupt established frameworks of employability and payment-by-results models through rejecting the monetisation of learners, cultivating community practice, encouraging collaborative working. In such a landscape arts practitioners must be self-reflexive about the language they deploy and be able to navigate a complex and contradictory layered discourse of public service commissioning priorities and applied arts practices.

Notes 1. See Judith Ackroyd, ‘Applied Theatre: An Exclusionary Discourse?’, Applied Theatre Researcher/IDEA Journal (2007), https://www.griffith. edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/52889/01-ackroyd-final.pdf (accessed 7 November 2014); Jonothan Neelands, ‘Taming the Political; The Struggle Over Recognition in the Politics of Applied Theatre’, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 12, no. 3 (2007): 205–317; Dani Snyder-­Young, Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 2. Michael Balfour, ‘The Politics of Intention: Looking for a Theatre of Little Changes’, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 14, no. 3 (2009): 347–359 (347). 3. Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (Abingdon: Routledge (1995), 2013), 94.

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4. Kate Oakley, ‘Whose Creative Economy? Inequality and the Need for International Approaches’, Les Enjeux de l’information et de la communications 17, no. 2 (2016): 163–171 (169). 5. David Freud, Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity: Options for the Future of Welfare to Work, independent report to Department for Work and Pensions, 2007. 6. Nick Mathiason, ‘Business Phenomenon of the Century’, Guardian, 20 November 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2005/nov/ 20/politics.publicservices (accessed 19 June 2017). 7. HM Government, Open Public Services White Paper (London: Cabinet Office, 2011), https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/255288/OpenPublicSer vicesWhitePaper.pdf (accessed 15 May 2016). 8. Ibid. 9. For further evidence of this, see, for example, Privatization of Public Services: Impacts for Employment, Working Conditions, and Service Quality in Europe, ed. by Christoph Hermann, Jörg Flecker (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 10. Andy Parkinson and Sarah Wilkie, Evaluation of the Cultural Commissioning Programme, National Council for Voluntary Organisations, April 2016, https://www.ncvo.org.uk/images/documents/practical_support/public_ser vices/cultural-commissioning/cultural-commissioning-programme-evaluation-may-2016.pdf (accessed 10 November 2016). 11. Sally Bagwell, David Bull, Iona Joy, and Marina Svistak, ‘Opportunities for Alignment: Arts and Cultural Organisations and Public Sector Commissioning’, Cultural Commissioning Programme, June 2014, http://www.ncvo.org.uk/images/documents/practical_support/public_ services/cultural-commissioning/full-report-opp-for-alignment-arts-cultural-orgs-public-sector.pdf (accessed 19 February 2017). 12. For a more extensive analysis of the combinations of private, public, and philanthropic models of arts funding, see Jen Harvie, ‘Public/Private Capital: Arts Funding Cuts and Mixed Economies’, Fair Play (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 150–191. 13. Parkinson and Wilkie, 10. 14. Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 12. 15. Balfour, 347. 16. Parkinson and Wilkie, 3, 5, 10, 24, 66. 17. Julia Slay, ‘The Art of Commissioning: How Commissioners Can Release the Potential of the Arts and Cultural Sector’ (The Cultural Commissioning Programme: New Economics Foundation, 2016), 57. 18. See Harvey, Funding Arts and Culture in a Time of Austerity.

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19. Bagwell, Bull, Joy, and Svistak, 41. 20. Ibid., 6. 21. Local Enterprise Partnerships are ‘local business led partnerships between local authorities and businesses and play a central role in determining local economic priorities and undertaking activities to drive economic growth and the creation of local jobs’. 22. The diversity of the Talent Match London partnership—which includes, among others, West Ham United Community Sports Trust, training and environment organisation Groundwork, single parent charity Gingerbread, the Royal Association for Deaf People, and ex-offenders charity St Giles Trust—is indicative of the multiple approaches of employability intervention and different service users being engaged by the programme. See Talent Match London, http://talentmatchlondon.org/about/partners/ (accessed 17 May 2016). 23. Big Lottery, ‘£108 Million Across England to Tackle Youth Unemployment’, Big Lottery Fund, 22 January 2014, https://www.biglotteryfund.org. uk/~/link.aspx?_id=C87D4439FC00419DB4F5E9447EC40015&_z=z (accessed 12 May 2016). 24. ‘About’, Immediate Theatre, http://www.immediate-theatre.com/about (accessed 12 November 2016). 25. Jo Carter qtd. in Russell Parton, ‘All the World’s a Stage: Immediate Theatre is Out to Change Young People’s Lives’, Hackney Citizen, 10 June 2015, https://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2015/06/10/hackneycharity-immediate-theatre-changing-young-peoples-lives/ (accessed 10 November 2016). 26. ‘About’, Immediate Theatre. 27. Immediate Theatre have run other employment interventions such as Theatre Pathways and the 2moro Project. 28. In 2014 Hackney’s unemployment rate was 8.5% compared to 7.1% in London. ‘A Profile of Hackney, its People and Place LB Hackney Policy Team January 2016’ (London: Hackney Council, 2016), 21. 29. As well as The First Door initial sharing at Talent Match, London participants also worked to create a longer piece of performance for an audience of invited friends and family, which I attended at the Elise Centre, Dalston, London, on 29 July 2014. I have chosen to focus on the work-in-progress sharing, and later the film, to emphasise the way in which the project sought to reach beyond the community it was working with and facilitate conversation across different and conflicting speakers. 30. Catherine Large, ‘Creative & Cultural Skills  – Creative Apprenticeships Week Event’, Tate Modern, London, 22 January 2013. 31. Sara Whybrew, Director of the CEP, interview with author, 7 October 2016. 32. Heather Walton and Lauren Bishop, Creative Employment Review (South Shields: South Tyneside Council, April 2015), p. 5. This amounts to over

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15% of young people in the area, compared to a national average of 8% at the time. Our Better Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2013–2016 (South Shields: South Tyneside Council, 2013), 14. The Youth Contract is government provision for those young people deemed hardest to reach or furthest from the labour market; it is available if a young person has been out of work for six months or more. 33. Barber, interview. 34. Ibid. 35. Department for Work and Pensions, ‘The Work Programme’, https:// assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/49884/the-work-programme.pdf (accessed 10 November 2014). 36. Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Open Public Services White Paper’, July 2011. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/255288/OpenPublicServices-WhitePaper.pdf (accessed August 2013). 37. ‘Creative Employment Programme FAQs’, Creative and Cultural Skills, https://ccskills.org.uk/downloads/creative-employment-programmefaqs.pdf (accessed April 10, 2016). 38. Rob Smith and Matt O’Leary, ‘New Public Management in an Age of Austerity: Knowledge and Experience in Further Education’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 45, no. 3 (2013): 244–266 (245). 39. Nehal Panchamia, ‘Choice and Competition in Further Education’, Institute for Government, https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/ sites/default/files/publications/FE%20Briefing%20final.pdf (accessed 1 February 2017). 40. Apprenticeship wages vary depending on the age of the worker and what stage they are at in their apprenticeship. Apprenticeship Minimum Wage was £2.68 for 16–18-year-olds and 19-plus-year-olds in the first year of their apprentice. If the apprentice was longer than a year, this went up to £5.03  in the second year. ‘Apprenticeship Pay Survey’, Department for Business Innovation and Skills, December 2014, https://www.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/387319/ bis-14-1281-apprenticeship-pay-survey-2014.pdf (accessed 10 December 2015). 41. In 2013–14 the Apprenticeship Minimum Wage was £2.68 and the National Minimum Wage was £6.50. 42. Daniel Crowe, Tom Gash, and Henry Kippin, ‘Beyond Big Contracts: Commissioning Public Services for Better Outcomes’, Institute for Government, 23 January 2014, 24, http://www.instituteforgovernment. org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/Beyond%20Big%20Contracts. pdf (accessed 10 November 2016).

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43. Richard Barber, interview with the author. 44. Ibid. 45. Barber, interview. 46. While this is a small number, due to the poor engagement and uptake of this first cohort, there were only 11 participants in total. Given this, to move five into employment is a relatively high target proportion. 47. Richard Johnson, ‘The Work Programme’s Only Success is at “Creaming and Parking”’, Guardian, 20 February 2013, https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2013/feb/20/work-programme-success-creamingparking (accessed 10 November 2016). 48. James Rees, Adam Whitworth, and Eleanor Carter, ‘Support for all in the UK Work Programme? Differential Payments, Same Old Problem…’, Third Sector Research Centre, Working Paper 115, December 2013, available http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/generic/tsrc/documents/tsrc/ working-papers/working-paper-115.pdf (accessed 9 November 2016). 49. Big Lottery, ‘Talent Match: An £108 Million Investment to Tackle Youth Unemployment in 21 Areas of England’, Big Lottery Fund, n.d., https:// www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/talentmatch (accessed February 2016). 50. Chloe Jones, interview with author, 22 February 2015, London. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Neil Lee, Paul Sissons, Brhmie Balaram, Katy Jones, and Nye Cominetti, Short Term Crisis Long Term Problem? Addressing the Youth Unemployment Challenge (Lancaster, The Work Foundation, June 2012), 46. 54. Ibid. 55. Jones, interview. 56. ‘Policy and Funders’, Talent Match, http://talentmatchlondon.org/policy-and-funders/ (accessed April 2016). 57. ‘Apprenticeships Policy, England 2010–2015’, House of Commons Library, http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/ Summary/CBP-7278 (accessed 16 October 2016). 58. Alison Wolf, ‘Review of Vocational Education: The Wolf Report’, Department for Education and Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, March 2011, http://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ review-of-vocational-education-the-wolf-report (accessed 1 October 2016); Doug Richards, ‘The Richards Review’, Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, November 2012, https://www.gov.uk/government/ news/the-richard-review-of-apprenticeships (accessed 1 October 2016); ‘Apprenticeships’, The Business and Skills Committee Report, November 2013, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmbis/83/83.pdf (accessed 1 October 2016). 59. HM Government, ‘Apprenticeships: Education Act 2011’, Legislation. gov.uk, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/21/pdfs/ukpga_ 20110021_en.pdf (23 June 2016).

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60. University and College Union, ‘What Will 24% Cuts Mean to Further Education in England?’, University and College Union Briefing Paper, June 2015, https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/7108/FE-England-budget-cuts2015-16%2D%2D-a-UCU-briefing/pdf/ucu_fecutsbriefing_feb15.pdf (accessed 23 June 2017). 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 11. 63. Vince Cable, ‘Announcement: The Richard Review of Apprenticeships’, Department for Business Innovation and Skills, Gov.uk, 27 November 2012, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-richard-review-ofapprenticeships (accessed 15 May 2016). 64. Charlynne Pullen and Jonathan Clifton, ‘England’s Apprenticeships: Assessing the New System’, Institute for Public Policy Research, 16 August 2016, http://www.ippr.org/publications/englands-apprenticeshipsassessing-the-new-system (accessed 25 August 2016). 65. David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 31. 66. For a live list of current apprenticeship frameworks, see ‘Apprenticeship Frameworks: Live List’, Department for Work and Pensions, May 2014, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/apprenticeship-frameworks-live-list (accessed 15 October 2016). Currently these frameworks fall under the banner of one of nine specified areas, of which the CEP falls into Arts, Media, and Publishing. 67. Walton and Bishop, 5. 68. Ibid., 12. 69. Ibid., 9. 70. Ibid., 10. 71. Barber, interview. 72. Ibid. 73. See, for example, the Precarious Workers Brigade, Training for Exploitation?: Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education (London, Leipzig, and Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2017); Creative and Cultural Skills, Internships in the Arts: A Guide for Organisations (London: Arts Council England and Creative and Cultural Skills, 2011). 74. The Sutton Trust, ‘Research Brief: Internship or Indenture’, Sutton Trust, 12 November 2014, http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/ 2014/11/Unpaid-Internships.pdf (accessed 15 April 2016). 75. Ibid. 76. Moira Sinclair, ‘Creative & Cultural Skills – Creative Apprenticeships Week Event’, Tate Modern, London, 22 January 2013, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=sQ9D_nrb9VU (accessed 1 June 2017).

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77. Kimberly Allen, Jocey Quinn, Sumi Hollingworth, and Antheathe Rose, ‘Doing Diversity and Evading Equality: The Case of Student Work Placements in the Creative Sector’, in Educational Diversity: The Subject of Difference and Different Subjects, ed. by Yvette Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 180–200 (186). 78. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ‘Creative Industries: Focus on Employment’, Gov.uk, June 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/439714/Annex_C_-_ Creative_Industries_Focus_on_Employment_2015.pdf (accessed 17 October 2016). Specifically, in the performing, music, and visual arts sector, 58.4% of positions are filled by graduates. 79. Walton and Bishop, 12. 80. Ibid. 81. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ‘Creative Industries: Focus on Employment’, 12. 82. Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 222. 83. The First Door participant Lee qtd. in ‘Talent Match Programme Overview’, Immediate Theatre, 2015, http://www.immediate-theatre. com/uploads/downloads/Talent-Match-Programme-Overview.pdf (accessed 1 February 2017). 84. Rebecca Adamson, interview with author, 22 February 2015, London. 85. It is notable that the Talent Match scheme has adopted the term ‘talent’ and even ‘talent scout’, with their allusions to creative or sporting success and associations of individual innovative success in neoliberal economies. 86. Adamson, interview. 87. The First Door, Immediate Theatre, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_Wa8Crzdek8 (accessed 12 November 2016). 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Jones, interview. 91. Jane Mulderrig (2003) ‘Consuming Education: a critical discourse analysis of social actors in New Labour’s education policy’, in Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies, 1 (1) 116. 92. See Introduction, pp. 14–20. 93. Adamson, interview. 94. I explore this notion of individual responsibility further in Chap. 3, 91–95. 95. Jones, interview. 96. See Chouliaraki and Fairclough. 97. Jones, interview. 98. Ibid.

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References Judith Ackroyd, ‘Applied Theatre: An Exclusionary Discourse?’, Applied Theatre Researcher/IDEA Journal (2007), https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/ assets/pdf_file/0005/52889/01-ackroyd-final.pdf (accessed 7 November 2014). Rebecca Adamson, interview with author, 22 February 2015, London. Kimberly Allen, Jocey Quinn, Sumi Hollingworth, and Antheathe Rose, ‘Doing Diversity and Evading Equality: The Case of Student Work Placements in the Creative Sector’, in Educational Diversity: The Subject of Difference and Different Subjects, ed. by Yvette Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 180–200 (186). Michael Balfour, ‘The Politics of Intention: Looking for a Theatre of Little Changes’, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 14, no. 3 (2009): 347–359. Sally Bagwell, David Bull, Iona Joy, and Marina Svistak, ‘Opportunities for Alignment: Arts and Cultural Organisations and Public Sector Commissioning’, Cultural Commissioning Programme, June 2014, http://www.ncvo.org.uk/ images/documents/practical_support/public_services/cultural-commissioning/full-report-opp-for-alignment-arts-cultural-orgs-public-sector.pdf (accessed 19 February 2017). Richard Barber, telephone interview with the author, 23 March 2015. Big Lottery, ‘£108 Million Across England to Tackle Youth Unemployment’, Big Lottery Fund, 22 January 2014, https://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/~/link. aspx?_id=C87D4439FC00419DB4F5E9447EC40015&_z=z (accessed 12 May 2016). Big Lottery, ‘Talent Match: An £108 Million Investment to Tackle Youth Unemployment in 21 Areas of England’, Big Lottery Fund, n.d. https://www. biglotteryfund.org.uk/talentmatch (accessed February 2016). Business, Innovation, and Skills Committee, ‘Apprenticeships’: Fifth Report of Session 2012–13, November 2013, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/ pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmbis/83/83.pdf (accessed 1 October 2016). Vince Cable, ‘Announcement: The Richard Review of Apprenticeships’, Department for Business Innovation and Skills, Gov.uk, 27 November 2012, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-richard-review-of-apprenticeships (accessed 15 May 2016). Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Creative and Cultural Skills, ‘Creative Employment Programme FAQs’, https:// ccskills.org.uk/downloads/creative-employment-programme-faqs.pdf (accessed April 10 2016).

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Creative and Cultural Skills, Internships in the Arts: A Guide for Organisations (London: Arts Council England and Creative and Cultural Skills, 2011). Daniel Crowe, Tom Gash, and Henry Kippin, ‘Beyond Big Contracts: Commissioning Public Services for Better Outcomes’, Institute for Government, 23 January 2014, http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/ sites/default/files/publications/Beyond%20Big%20Contracts.pdf (accessed 10 November 2016). Department for Business Innovation and Skills, ‘Apprenticeship Pay Survey’, December 2014, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/387319/bis-14-1281-apprenticeship-pay-survey-2014.pdf (accessed 10 December 2015). Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ‘Creative Industries: Focus on Employment’, Gov.uk, June 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/439714/Annex_C_-_Creative_ Industries_Focus_on_Employment_2015.pdf (accessed 17 October 2016). Department for Work and Pensions, ‘The Work Programme’, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/49884/the-work-programme.pdf, accessed 10 November 2014. Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Open Public Services White Paper’, July 2011. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/255288/OpenPublicServices-WhitePaper.pdf, accessed August 2013. Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (Abingdon: Routledge, (1995) 2013). David Freud, Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity: Options for the Future of Welfare to Work, independent report to Department for Work and Pensions, 2007. David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). HM Government, ‘Apprenticeships: Education Act 2011’, Legislation.gov.uk, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/21/pdfs/ukpga_20110021_ en.pdf (accessed 23 June 2016). HM Government, Open Public Services White Paper (London: Cabinet Office, 2011), https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/255288/OpenPublicServices-WhitePaper.pdf (accessed 15 May 2016). Immediate Theatre, ‘About’, http://www.immediate-theatre.com/about (accessed 12 November 2016). Immediate Theatre, ‘Talent Match Programme Overview’, 2015, http://www. immediate-theatre.com/uploads/downloads/Talent-Match-ProgrammeOverview.pdf (accessed 1 February 2017). Immediate Theatre, ‘First Door (2014)’, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_Wa8Crzdek8 (accessed 12 November 2016).

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Richard Johnson, ‘The Work Programme’s Only Success is at “Creaming and Parking”’, Guardian, 20 February 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2013/feb/20/work-programme-success-creaming-parking (accessed 10 November 2016). Chloe Jones, interview with author, 22 February 2015, London. Catherine Large, ‘Creative & Cultural Skills  – Creative Apprenticeships Week Event’, Tate Modern, London, 22 January 2013. Neil Lee, Paul Sissons, Brhmie Balaram, Katy Jones, and Nye Cominetti, Short Term Crisis Long Term Problem? Addressing the Youth Unemployment Challenge (Lancaster, The Work Foundation, June 2012), 46. Jonothan Neelands, ‘Taming the Political; The Struggle Over Recognition in the Politics of Applied Theatre’, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 12, no. 3 (2007): 205–317. Nick Mathiason, ‘Business Phenomenon of the Century’, Guardian, 20 November 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2005/nov/20/politics.publicservices (accessed 19 June 2017). Kate Oakley, ‘Whose Creative Economy? Inequality and the Need for International Approaches’, Les Enjeux de l’information et de la communications 17, no. 2 (2016): 163–171 (169). Nehal Panchamia, ‘Choice and Competition in Further Education’, Institute for Government, https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/ files/publications/FE%20Briefing%20final.pdf (accessed 1 February 2017). Andy Parkinson and Sarah Wilkie, Evaluation of the Cultural Commissioning Programme, National Council for Voluntary Organisations, April 2016, https://www.ncvo.org.uk/images/documents/practical_support/public_services/cultural-commissioning/cultural-commissioning-programme-evaluation-may-2016.pdf (accessed 10 November 2016). Russell Parton, ‘All the World’s a Stage: Immediate Theatre is Out to Change Young People’s Lives’, Hackney Citizen, 10 June 2015, https://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2015/06/10/hackney-charity-immediate-theatre-changingyoung-peoples-lives/ (accessed 10 November 2016). Precarious Workers Brigade, Training for Exploitation?: Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education (London, Leipzig, and Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2017). Charlynne Pullen and Jonathan Clifton, ‘England’s Apprenticeships: Assessing the New System’, Institute for Public Policy Research, 16 August 2016, http:// www.ippr.org/publications/englands-apprenticeships-assessing-the-new-system (accessed 25 August 2016). James Rees, Adam Whitworth, and Eleanor Carter, ‘Support for all in the UK Work Programme? Differential Payments, Same Old Problem…’, Third Sector Research Centre, Working Paper 115, December 2013, available http://www. birmingham.ac.uk/generic/tsrc/documents/tsrc/working-papers/workingpaper-115.pdf (accessed 9 November 2016).

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Doug Richards, ‘The Richards Review’, Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, November 2012, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-richardreview-of-apprenticeships (accessed 1 October 2016). Moira Sinclair, ‘Creative & Cultural Skills – Creative Apprenticeships Week Event’, Tate Modern, London, 22 January 2013, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sQ9D_nrb9VU (accessed 1 June 2017). Julia Slay, ‘The Art of Commissioning: How Commissioners Can Release the Potential of the Arts and Cultural Sector’ (The Cultural Commissioning Programme: New Economics Foundation, 2016). Dani Snyder-Young, Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Rob Smith and Matt O’Leary, ‘New Public Management in an Age of Austerity: Knowledge and Experience in Further Education’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 45, no. 3 (2013): 244–266 (245). South Tyneside Council, Our Better Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2013–2016, South Shields, 2013. Sutton Trust, ‘Research Brief: Internship or Indenture’, Sutton Trust, 12 November 2014, http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/ 11/Unpaid-Internships.pdf (accessed 15 April 2016). Talent Match, ‘Policy and Funders’, Talent Match London, http://talentmatchlondon.org/policy-and-funders/ (accessed April 2016). ‘Apprenticeships Policy, England 2010–2015’, House of Commons Library, http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summar y/ CBP-7278 (accessed 16 October 2016). University and College Union, ‘What Will 24% Cuts Mean to Further Education in England?’, University and College Union Briefing Paper, June 2015, https:// www.ucu.org.uk/media/7108/FE-England-budget-cuts-2015-16%2D%2Da-UCU-briefing/pdf/ucu_fecutsbriefing_feb15.pdf (accessed 23 June 2017). Heather Walton and Lauren Bishop, Creative Employment Review (South Shields: South Tyneside Council, April 2015). Sara Whybrew, telephone interview with author, 7 October 2016. Alison Wolf, ‘Review of Vocational Education: The Wolf Report’, Department for Education and Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, March 2011, http://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-vocational-education-the-wolf-report (accessed 1 October 2016).

CHAPTER 3

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

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.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Bartley, Performing Welfare, Contemporary Performance InterActions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44854-7_3

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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. As François Matarasso has argued, shifts in political rhetoric around community have implications for the community arts movement: 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

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

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further highlights the intersection of the two. Additionally, it underscores the importance of understanding such relationships in community performance practices representing the welfare system. 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

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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. Such an understanding and application of community in political discourse raises important questions around how artists and participants collaborate in socially focused arts practice and where they seek to rhetorically locate their practice. Brighton People’s Theatre, in being named a people’s theatre rather than a community theatre, are perhaps indicative of the shift identified by Matarasso and, I would argue, reinforced by contemporary usages of community as a political device. For Alexander, a rejection of the term ‘community theatre’ does not amount to a rejection of the underpinning ideology of community: 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

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­ ovement […]. What I’m really interested in is investing in people and their m 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

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. 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.

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Modelling Individual Responsibility: Social Policy and the Spect-actor The pervasive narrative of personal responsibility is particularly evident in welfare policy from the mid-1990s onwards as liberalised perspectives asserted individual pathologies as the root cause of unemployment. In 2008, the financial crash threatened to destabilise the neoliberal construction of personal accountability for labour market failure; the UK state responded by intensifying discourses of personal responsibility for unemployment. As social policy scholar Jay Wiggan argues, 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

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. 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

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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

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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

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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. During an interview with Michael Chandler, Programme Director at Cardboard Citizens, I addressed the individualising potential of the style of performance. He commented: [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

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. 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

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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 Given the context I’ve outlined above, I now turn to ask how specific narrative forms might call on a particular aesthetics of dependency, one which problematises contemporary welfare narratives, to be reclaimed and celebrated in contemporary community performance practices. The linguistic framing of community, dependency, and individual behaviours has been central to the shift in civic responsibility from the state to the individual. As linguist Jane Mulderrig states, 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

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

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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. 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

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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. Significantly, the performance of storytelling also resonates with the representational labour that is required from participants in community performance. Such projects often necessitate the sharing of stories or personal experiences in order to generate material for creative play, exploratory discussion, or performance. At stake here is the tension between public and private in community performance practices. James Thompson has identified the need to attend to such an interplay in applied theatre as a ‘double performance practice’, wherein ‘the private world recognises its public-ness, and in public we somehow find a means of presenting the private in a way that does not position the practice within over-convenient disciplinary or discursive boundaries’.70 This relationship between public and private exposes the dynamics of participation in community performance, where those engaged are often asked to perform their own private stories in a public space to change or affirm representations of their collective identity. This is particularly resonant in projects with the unemployed where participants are generally reliant on public funds in order to sustain their private selves; subsequently those private selves are subject to heightened scrutiny. In such a context, community performance’s ability to navigate the public and the private must be leveraged in the representations of unemployment it provides. Thompson warns there is a danger that such practice can become entangled in ‘over-convenient discursive boundaries’.

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In such a contested socio-political context, performance work with the unemployed must be wary of the discourses it perpetuates. Such practice requires sensitivity to modes of resistance promised and provoked by practitioners and to the public visibility of private narratives of unemployment. When discussing the narrative strategies used in Tighten Our Belts, Alexander commented, 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

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. The piece performed a disruption of the assumed relationship of the performer to the narrative content in community theatre practice. One of the performers, while reading his monologue about an unemployed man struggling to find work, seemingly stepped out of the edifice of the performance suddenly breaking from his reading striding off upstage shouting. 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.

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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

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. Other performers try to rally Ken, 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

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: (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

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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’. 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

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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

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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 Opportunities for relationality and recognition between participant and audience can provide much needed moments of collectivity in community performance. During the development of Tighten Our Belts, the social practice of Brighton People’s Theatre extended beyond the workshop space to providing opportunities for the performers and creatives to build relationships with one another. Through their partnership with the Brighton Dome, the People’s Theatre received free tickets for all company members to attend relevant performances, which allowed them to access all the contemporary performance pieces programmed at the venue over the course of the project. As Alexander comments, 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,

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c­ hatting 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

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. 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

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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. Brighton People’s Theatre’s performance erased the distinction between participant and audience member, or in the specific case of projects focused on unemployment: claimant (who drains) and worker (who contributes). Significantly, Delanty argues that the symbolic construction of community can emerge most acutely from exposure to oppression: 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

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.

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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

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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

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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.

Notes 1. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 10. 2. The character of Daniel Blake in the film I, Daniel Blake (dir. by Ken Loach, 2016) is a clear example of this. Signed off sick by his doctor but unable to claim disability support due to a failure to meet government requirements for the benefit, Blake is forced to look for jobs which, even when he is offered, he cannot take due to his illness. I further examine I, Daniel Blake in the Conclusion to this book. 3. Cardboard Citizens, ‘Our People’, Cardboard Citizens, https://www. cardboardcitizens.org.uk/our-people (accessed 10 June 2016). 4. Jackson has translated several of Augusto Boal’s writings into English. See Augusto Boal, Aesthetics of the Oppressed, trans. by Adrian Jackson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), and Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. by Adrian Jackson (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992).

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5. Cardboard Citizens, ‘Who We Are’, Cardboard Citizens, https://www. cardboardcitizens.org.uk/who-we-are (accessed 10 June 2016). 6. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York & London: Continuum 2006). 7. Frances Babbage, Augusto Boal (London and New  York: Routledge, 2004), 68. 8. Ibid., 69. 9. Cardboard Citizens, unpublished ‘Benefit Schedule’, 2015. I saw the production early in the run on 7 March 2015 at The Pleasance Theatre in London. 10. Cardboard Citizens, unpublished ‘Strategic Touring Application’, 2014, 3. The company have since produced Cathy, Ali Taylor (August 2017– October 2018), and Rising, Femi Keeling (October–November 2018). 11. Ibid., 14. 12. Ibid. 13. Cardboard Citizens, ‘Strategic Touring Application’, 15. 14. Brighton People’s Theatre, ‘Brighton People’s Theatre’, Brighton People’s Theatre, https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/ (accessed 10 January 2017). 15. Naomi Alexander, ‘Brighton People’s Theatre’, naomiontheatre, https:// naomiontheatre.net/projects/the-92/ (accessed 10 January 2017). 16. Naomi Alexander, interview with the author, London, 10 March 2017. 17. Naomi Alexander and Jenny Hughes, ‘A People’s Theatre for Brighton— An Interview with Naomi Alexander’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 22, no. 1 (2017): 172–181 (174); Islington Community Theatre are now known as Company Three; see their website for further information on their work, http://www.companythree.co.uk/. 18. There were some shifts in the cast for these two performances, with three of the initial performers leaving the cast after the sharing and two additional members joining before the second performance. 19. Arts Council England, ‘Grants for the Arts Awards Made Between 01 April 2015–31 March 2016’, and Arts Council England, ‘Grants for the Arts Awards Made Between 01 April 2016–28 February 2017’, both available at http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/grants-arts-0 (accessed 1 March 2017). 20. Alexander and Hughes, ‘A People’s Theatre for Brighton’, 174. 21. Alexander, interview. 22. Brighton People’s Theatre, ‘Tighten Our Belts’, Brighton People’s Theatre, https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/austerity-and-the-city/ (accessed 10 October 2016). 23. James Frideres, A World of Communities: Participatory Research Perspectives (Ontario: Captus Press, 1992). 24. Ibid., 169.

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25. Dudley Edwards, cited in Our Voice Magazine, Issuu, August 2011, https://issuu.com/malcdc/docs/ourvoice2011the30thanniversaryissue (accessed 4 February 2017). 26. Alexander, ‘Brighton People’s Theatre’. 27. Brighton People’s Theatre, ‘home’, https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/. 28. Baz Kershaw, ‘Alternative Theatres: 1946–2000’ in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, ed. by Baz Kershaw, 351–377 (350). 29. Alexander, interview. 30. ‘About’, Brighton People’s Theatre, https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/ about/about/ (accessed 12 September 2017). 31. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 6. 32. Ibid. 33. Gerard Delanty, Community (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 31. Delanty’s work was heavily influenced by the writing of Victor Turner and Anthony Cohen. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-­Structure (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), and Anthony Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001). 34. Ibid., 49. 35. Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. xi. 36. François Matarasso, ‘“All in this Together”: The Depoliticisation of Community Art in Britain, 1970–2011’, in Community, Art, Power: ICAF 2011, ed. by Eugene van Erven (ICAF, 2011), 215–240 (216). 37. David Price, Office of Hope: A History of the Employment Service (University of Westminster: Policy Studies Institute, 2000), 22. 38. Desmond King, Actively Seeking Work?: The Politics of Unemployment and Welfare Policy in the United States and Great Britain (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 19–66. 39. HM Government, ‘National Insurance Act 1946’, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1965/49/schedule/1/crossheading/the-nationalinsurance-act-1946 (accessed 12 October 2014). 40. Frank Field, ‘From the Cradle to the Grave’, New Statesman, 29 November 2012, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/11/cradle-grave (accessed 12 October 2014). 41. HM Government, ‘National Assistance Act 1948’, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/11-12/29/contents (accessed 12 October 2014). 42. William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (The Beveridge Report), 13. The gendered language of this report is notable and explored further in Chap. 6, pp. 206–210. 43. Tony Blair (1997).

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44. Lynne Hancock, Gerry Mooney, and Sarah Neal, ‘Crisis Social Policy and the Resilience of the Concept of Community’, Critical Social Policy 32, no. 3 (2012): 343–64 (354). 45. Alexander, interview. 46. Joseph, 1–29. 47. Alexander and Hughes, ‘A People’s Theatre for Brighton’, 177. 48. Wiggan, 386. 49. Norman Fairclough, ‘Discourse, Social Theory and Social Research: The Discourse of Welfare Reform’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 4, no. 2 (2000): 163–195. 50. Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, xxi. 51. Cardboard Citizens, ‘Strategic Touring Application’, 15–21. 52. Paul Dwyer, ‘Making Bodies Talk in Forum Theatre’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 9, no. 2 (2004): 199–210, (209). 53. Terry O’Leary, Benefit Promotional Video, February 2015, http://cardboardcitizens.org.uk/events/benefit-sarah-woods (accessed 14 August 2015). 54. Cardboard Citizens and Pilot Theatre, ‘#BenfitPlayLive’, Twitter, https:// twitter.com/hashtag/BenefitPlayLive?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw (accessed 20 June 2016). 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Michael Chandler, interview with author, 17 July 2015. 58. Vicky Reem, ‘Benefit the Play Receives Overwhelmingly Positive Feedback’, CardboardCitizens.org.uk, https://www.cardboardcitizens. org.uk/benefit-recieves-overwhelmingly-positive-feedback (accessed 17 December 2018). 59. Berlant, 2. 60. Helen Nicholson, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 12. 61. Jane Mulderrig, ‘Consuming Education: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Actors in New Labour’s Education Policy’, Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies 1, no. 1 (2003): 29–39 (31). 62. I offer a detailed reading of dependency in the Introduction to this book; see pp. 10–14. 63. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 139. 64. Ibid., 141. 65. Sennett, 136. 66. Cardboard Citizens, Benefit, dir. by Adrian Jackson, 7 March 2015, The Pleasance Theatre, London.

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67. Martin Evans, ‘Family on Benefits Move into £2 Million Home’, Telegraph, 14 August 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/8701091/Family-on-benefits-move-into-2-million-home.html (accessed 10 February 2017). 68. ‘The ‘Single’ Mother-of-Six on Benefits, The £2.5 million Belgravia Mansion She Wants You to Pay For’, Daily Mail, 22 March 2013, http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297796/The-single-motherbenefits-2-5million-Belgravia-mansion-wants-pay%2D%2DAnd-mysteryVERY-elusive-fashion-boss-husband.html#ixzz4YrD7xbNE (accessed 10 February 2017). 69. This aspect of the performance was influenced by a performance strategy the company drew from Men in the Cities, Chris Goode, the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 1 August 2014. Brighton People’s Theatre saw the production when it was on tour at the Brighton Dome in 2015. I discuss the influence of this performance on the company further below. 70. Thompson, Performance Affects, 40. 71. Alexander, interview. 72. Tighten Our Belts, unpublished script, 2016, 19–20. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Helen Nicholson, ‘A Good Day Out: Applied Theatre, Relationality and Participation’, Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. by Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 259. 76. Emma Rhys, ‘Benefit, Z-Arts’, The Manchester Review, April 2015, http:// www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/?p=4616 (accessed 18 February 2016). 77. Cardboard Citizens, ‘Benefit—What Our Audiences Think ….’, YouTube, 10 April 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROXpHRGUBmY (accessed 12 May 2015). 78. Sonia Hamel, ‘When Theatre of the Oppressed becomes Theatre of the Oppressor’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 18, no. 4 (2013): 403–416 (414). 79. Alexander, interview. 80. Jonothan Neelands, ‘Taming the Political: The Struggle Over Recognition in the Politics of Applied Theatre’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 12, no. 3 (2007): 305–317, (315). 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 34. 83. I attended a rehearsal of Tighten Our Belts at the Brighton Dome on 9 November 2016.

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84. Baz Kershaw, ‘Towards a Historiography of the Absent’, Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. by Jenny Hughes, Helen Nicholson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 23. Emphasis in original.

References Naomi Alexander, ‘Brighton People’s Theatre’, naomiontheatre, https://naomiontheatre.net/projects/the-92/ (accessed 10 January 2017). Naomi Alexander, interview with the author, London, 10 March 2017. Naomi Alexander and Jenny Hughes, ‘A People’s Theatre for Brighton—An Interview with Naomi Alexander’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 22, no. 1 (2017): 172–181 (174). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). Arts Council England, ‘Grants for the Arts Awards Made Between 01 April 2015–31 March 2016’; and Arts Council England, ‘Grants for the Arts Awards Made Between 01 April 2016–28 February 2017’, both available at http:// www.artscouncil.org.uk/grants-arts-0 (accessed 1 March 2017). Frances Babbage, Augusto Boal (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011). William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (The Beveridge Report), (London: HMSO, 1942). Augusto Boal, Aesthetics of the Oppressed, trans. by Adrian Jackson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. by Adrian Jackson (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992). Paul Bracchi and Neil Sears, ‘The “Single” Mother-of-Six on Benefits, The £2.5 million Belgravia Mansion She Wants You to Pay For’, Daily Mail, 22 March 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297796/The-singlemother-benefits-2-5million-Belgravia-mansion-wants-pay%2D%2DAnd-mystery-VERY-elusive-fashion-boss-husband.html#ixzz4YrD7xbNE (accessed 10 February 2017). Brighton People’s Theatre, ‘About’, https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/about/ about/ (accessed 12 September 2017). Brighton People’s Theatre, ‘Brighton People’s Theatre’, Brighton People’s Theatre, https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/ (accessed 10 January 2017). Brighton People’s Theatre, ‘Home’, https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/. Brighton People’s Theatre, ‘Tighten Our Belts’, Brighton People’s Theatre, https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/austerity-and-the-city/ (accessed 10 October 2016).

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Brighton People’s Theatre, Tighten Our Belts, unpublished script, 2016. Cardboard Citizens, ‘Our People’, Cardboard Citizens, https://www.cardboardcitizens.org.uk/our-people (accessed 10 June 2016). Cardboard Citizens, ‘Who We Are’, Cardboard Citizens, https://www.cardboardcitizens.org.uk/who-we-are (accessed 10 June 2016). Cardboard Citizens, Benefit, dir. by Adrian Jackson, 7 March 2015, The Pleasance Theatre, London. Cardboard Citizens, unpublished ‘Benefit Schedule’, 2015. Cardboard Citizens, unpublished ‘Strategic Touring Application’, 2014. Cardboard Citizens, ‘Benefit—What Our Audiences Think ….’, YouTube, 10 April 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROXpHRGUBmY (accessed 12 May 2015). Cardboard Citizens and Pilot Theatre, ‘#BenfitPlayLive’, Twitter, https://twitter. com/hashtag/BenefitPlayLive?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw (accessed 20 June 2016). Anthony Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001). Michael Chandler, interview with author, 17 July 2015. Gerard Delanty, Community (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003). Paul Dwyer, ‘Making Bodies Talk in Forum Theatre’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 9, no. 2 (2004): 199–210. Norman Fairclough, ‘Discourse, Social Theory and Social Research: The Discourse of Welfare Reform’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 4, no. 2 (2000): 163–195. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York & London: Continuum, 2006). Frank Field, ‘From the Cradle to the Grave’, New Statesman, 29 November 2012, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/11/cradle-grave (accessed 12 October 2014). James Frideres, A World of Communities: Participatory Research Perspectives (Ontario: Captus Press, 1992) Dudley Edwards, cited in Our Voice Magazine, Issuu, August 2011, https://issuu. com/malcdc/docs/ourvoice2011the30thanniversaryissue (accessed 4 February 2017). Martin Evans, ‘Family on Benefits Move into £2 Million Home’, Telegraph, 14 August 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/8701091/Family-on-benefits-move-into-2-million-home.html (accessed 10 February 2017). HM Government, ‘National Insurance Act 1946’, http://www.legislation.gov. uk/ukpga/1965/49/schedule/1/crossheading/the-national-insuranceact-1946 (accessed 12 October 2014).

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HM Government, ‘National Assistance Act 1948’, http://www.legislation.gov. uk/ukpga/Geo6/11-12/29/contents (accessed 12 October 2014). Sonia Hamel, ‘When Theatre of the Oppressed becomes Theatre of the Oppressor’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 18, no. 4 (2013): 403–416. Lynne Hancock, Gerry Mooney, and Sarah Neal, ‘Crisis Social Policy and the Resilience of the Concept of Community’, Critical Social Policy 32, no. 3 (2012): 343–364. Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Baz Kershaw, ‘Alternative Theatres: 1946–2000’ in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 3, ed. By Baz Kershaw, 351–377 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Baz Kershaw, ‘Towards a Historiography of the Absent’, Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. by Jenny Hughes, Helen Nicholson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Desmond King, Actively Seeking Work?: The Politics of Unemployment and Welfare Policy in the United States and Great Britain (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 19–66. Jonothan Neelands, ‘Taming the Political: The Struggle Over Recognition in the Politics of Applied Theatre’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 12, no. 3 (2007): 305–317. Helen Nicholson, ‘A Good Day Out: Applied Theatre, Relationality and Participation’, Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. by Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Helen Nicholson, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). François Matarasso, ‘“All in this Together”: The Depoliticisation of Community Art in Britain, 1970–2011’, in Community, Art, Power: ICAF 2011, ed. by Eugene van Erven (ICAF, 2011), 215–240. Jane Mulderrig, ‘Consuming Education: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Actors in New Labour’s Education Policy’, Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies 1, no. 1 (2003): 29–39. Terry O’Leary, Benefit Promotional Video, February 2015, http://cardboardcitizens.org.uk/events/benefit-sarah-woods (accessed 14 August 2015). David Price, Office of Hope: A History of the Employment Service (University of Westminster: Policy Studies Institute, 2000). Vicky Reem, ‘Benefit the Play Receives Overwhelmingly Positive Feedback’, CardboardCitizens.org.uk, https://www.cardboardcitizens.org.uk/benefitrecieves-overwhelmingly-positive-feedback (accessed 17 December 2018). Emma Rhys, ‘Benefit, Z-Arts’, The Manchester Review, April 2015, http://www. themanchesterreview.co.uk/?p=4616 (accessed 18 February 2016).

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Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).

CHAPTER 4

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

On 6 August 2011, civil unrest broke out in the Tottenham borough of London. Over the following four days, rioting spread across England and ignited the most intense civil disorder the country had seen in decades. Initially restricted to London, by 8 August major cities including Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, and Manchester were all experiencing rioting, looting, and violent clashes between police and those involved. By 9 August, David Cameron (then Prime Minister) and Boris Johnson (then London Mayor) and other politicians were flooding back to London from their summer break in order to address the unrest. Rolling news channels were running images of a nation on fire. The England Riots of August 2011 emerged out of a peaceful protest in response to the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, an unarmed Black British man, by police on 4 August 2011 and the subsequent false statement given by police that they were shot at first during the incident.1 Though stemming from protests about the treatment of Black people and people of colour by the Metropolitan Police, the disorder soon spread beyond London and came to encompass broader anger towards the police, the disenfranchisement of young people, and a reaction to the stark inequalities individuals and communities were experiencing across the country. The complexity of the factors contributing to the disturbances across England relating to the racial, social, economic, and political marginalisation of people in post-industrial urban centres was largely bypassed

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by sections of the press. Instead, the events of early August 2011 produced a proliferation of potent images and accompanying assertions of the action as a result of mob mentality and increased criminality, particularly in reference to marginalised young people. Given this context of increased visibility and acute marginalisation, in this chapter I consider how an arts practice so rooted in making identities visible can offer strategies to do so safely when those identities are deeply stigmatised and representation feels impossibly compromised. Applied and socially engaged arts practices often require, and are premised on, a group of people identifying under a particular community or identity banner (e.g. unemployed, student, offender, LGBTQ, resident). Given the frequent marginalisation encountered by many of communities listed above, and the acute oppression of the communities explored Performing Welfare, how do artistic representations of unemployment navigate tactics of visibility and invisibility in order for participants to negotiate policy, social constructions of shame, and a context of civil unrest? I shift my focus from the linguistic investigation in the preceding two chapters to a frame of analysis that seeks to foreground how participatory arts practice interacts with the imagery that has emerged in popular representations of unemployment. I explore The Bite Back Movement’s A Dangerous Figure (2013), a socially engaged arts project exhibited at Somerset House in London that called attention to the intensification of the structural and social shaming of young unemployed people since the economic recession of 2008. It is the sole example examined in this chapter, offering, as it does, a rich opportunity to interrogate the complex visual terrain occupied by both the subject of the piece (young and marginalised people) and the particular visual strategies deployed by the artists. On the one hand, I turn to Jacques Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’—that is the aesthetic and political regimes of the in/visible, in/audible, un/sayable—for thinking through how communities appear in participatory arts practice.2 On the other, I align with feminist scholar Peggy Phelan’s cautionary approach to assumptions of increased visibility for the underrepresented as a means to secure a stronger cultural and political position. Phelan nuances understandings of representational economies, asserting that ‘the binary between the power of visibility and the impotency of invisibility is falsifying. There is real power in remaining unmarked; and there are serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal’.3 I advocate for practices of invisibility and contend that considering the political potential of strategies of anonymity

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can usefully expand the influence of participatory arts practice. This argument is further underpinned by a discussion of José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, which examines the strategies of survival queer people of colour undertake to navigate the violence and erasure they encounter in the public sphere.4 In deploying disidentification, I do not seek to collapse the experiences of the young unemployed and queer people of colour but instead mobilise Muñoz’s critical focus on how individuals marked as adjunct to hegemonic social structures, in this instance those deemed to operate beyond the productive boundaries of a capitalist society, can negotiate their lives within these structures.5 In particular, I document and examine the tactics deployed by artists working with young people during a period in which negative and racialised images of this group resonated with the hostile framing of them in public space. Holding Rancière, Phelan, and Muñoz together teases out the complexities of, and paradoxes within, the dynamics of visibility and invisibility at play in creating arts practice with marginalised communities. The Bite Back Movement is a collaboration between visual artists Alexander Augustus and Seung Youn Lee and was established in 2012. Their practice predominantly operates in public sites and ‘traverses seminal social issues such as cultural differences, religion, youth unemployment, and migrant workers’.6 They utilise a diverse range of forms including sculpture, installation, performance, costume, and technology. The piece was funded by Somerset House in collaboration with telecommunications company O2 Telefonica’s Think Big social innovation fund. It tackled the hypervisible—highly mediated—subject of youth unemployment in the UK, which exceeded one million in August 2011 and stood at over 950,000 when the exhibition opened in August 2013.7 A Dangerous Figure utilised a digital platform that asked users to upload a portrait image of themselves and respond to a survey that collected data on their employment status, qualifications, geographical location, ethnicity, and amount of debt. Over 10,000 photographs submitted by participants were combined in one constantly modulating portrait image; this composite creation was displayed online at the project website and also projected on a wall of the Deadhouse Gallery, the exhibition space in Somerset House where the work was shown (see Fig. 4.1). In addition to this central image, A Dangerous Figure consisted of paper copies of hundreds of real rejected curricula vitae (CVs) and job applications, audio recordings of interviews with young unemployed people, and a graphic novel created in

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

collaboration with participants and legal aid teams depicting the rights of young people in the workplace. Offset from the main gallery, there were four small ‘coal hole rooms’ in which two chairs sat facing one another, as if set up for an interview. In these sub-rooms viewers could read the graphic novel and listen to the recordings of individuals explaining their experiences of the labour market. Interrogating what is hidden and what is exposed, or asserted even, in circulating images of youth unemployment reveals broader social and political agendas around the marginalisation of young non-working citizens. Equally, A Dangerous Figure can be read as gesturing towards the particular demonisation of young Black people and people of colour during this period and usefully held alongside the acute struggle of this group in the UK labour market. The racial makeup of the ‘dangerous figure’ goes some way to gesture towards the acute ethno-racial inequalities occurring in the UK labour market.8 There is a significant racial aspect to unemployment which the image created by participants in A Dangerous Figure stands to represent. This is crucial to the piece, particularly when the racial disparity

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among youth unemployment is considered. Data from 2011, the year of the England Riots, indicated 20.8% of unemployed 16–24-year-olds were White, 22.4% were Mixed Race, 26.7% were Asian, and 47.4% were Black.9 Given this context, A Dangerous Figure intervenes in constructions of youth, race, and unemployment in the UK at the outset of the twenty-first century. As Augustus, lead artist on the project, commented, the piece sought to ‘re-brand the young unemployed’ by presenting its human face.10 The work offers different ways of presenting and making present the misrepresented or occluded experiences of welfare claimants; therefore, A Dangerous Figure provides space to reflect on the utility of anonymity in socially engaged arts practice and advocates for the potential of this strategy to unsettle of pervasive cultural images of marginalised people. My argument is presented in three parts: first I address how socially engaged arts practice can mobilise modes of collective anonymity to navigate social structures of shame and challenge negative representations of marginalised communities. Then I examine how threat is made visible in A Dangerous Figure to consider the utility of this affect in socially engaged practices of representation. In particular, I identify how state and media images of young people and people of colour constructed them as threatening in the wake of the 2011 England Riots. I subsequently consider how The Bite Back Movement utilised this stigma to deploy an aesthetics of threat in the piece. Finally, I illuminate how arts projects can make visible and material the hidden labour of the unemployed and construct layered understandings of performance sites in order to expose broader cultural histories of unemployment. By approaching this work from these three perspectives, I identify the multiple ways in which young unemployed people—and marginalised groups more broadly—are regulated through their visibility and advocate for the diverse socially engaged arts strategies that can contend with such a governing of an individual’s experience of appearing in social spaces.

Challenging Shame and Mobilising Anonymity The central tension in A Dangerous Figure is a familiar bind in socially committed arts practice working in culturally contentious locations: how can such practice enable disenfranchised people to represent their individual experiences of, for example, prison, welfare, or social housing whilst also supporting participants to navigate hostile and shaming social

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structures (media, public attitudes, policy) they may be subjected to because of their status as prisoner, claimant, tenant. Social policy scholars Robert Walker and Elaine Chase conducted a global research project that found shame to be a universal attribute of poverty, an affect persistently instilled in the disenfranchised across different international contexts. Walker and Chase found that people experiencing poverty and unemployment are unfairly stigmatised and exposed to shaming experiences through the way in which they are depicted in public rhetoric and constructed in government policy. Accompanying financial poverty therefore, shame is a powerful relational affect, an imposition of hierarchies of power that serve to marginalise those in need of support. In line with the arguments I have made in the previous chapters, Walker contends that ‘poverty is often taken to be the result of individual failure’. Unemployed people, subject to acute narratives of individual failure, are therefore vulnerable to feelings of shame. Images of unemployment are produced and disseminated by artists, governments, and media outlets, such production practices operate in relation to ideologically inflected and ethically weighted understandings and experiences of identity and labour. As Walker outlines, ‘[s]hame is internally felt but externally imposed and poverty is both a social and political construction’.11 During a period of global economic crisis, in a context of austerity policies and an ailing labour market, the damaging scapegoating of the unemployed through government policy and popular media continues to project feelings of shame on to non-working individuals. Chase and Walker found that people in situations of poverty were ‘shamed on a daily basis by the people they meet, in their dealings with officialdom and through the fall-out of political and media discourse’.12 Rapid increases in levels of poverty in the UK over the past decade mean socially committed arts practices are increasingly occurring in sites of acute deprivation and with greater number of participants who are experiencing poverty. It is therefore crucial to understand how poverty-related shame functions—both as it is projected by publics and how it might be felt by participants—in relation to modes of representation within socially engaged arts practice. Such multiple and layered encounters with shame through bureaucracy and political and cultural discourse resonate with experiences of unemployed youth at the time A Dangerous Figure was produced. Socially engaged performance can illuminate the complex interplay between the personal, social, and political involved in experiences of shame and poverty. It is therefore necessary to consider the impact

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of shame as a regulating force in relation to arts practice seeking to make participants visible through the projects they undertake. In examining shame as an affect that might in some way govern the appearance of images of young and unemployed people in the socio-economic and cultural climate of the UK in 2013, it is useful to turn to Rancière’s writings on politics and aesthetics. Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ identifies how social orders are delineated through individuals’ and communities’ access to space, time, and voice within socio-economic and cultural hierarchies.13 Rancière asserts, ‘[p]olitics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time’.14 Aesthetics and politics are therefore bound together through their interdependent deploying of strategies of representation that intervene in and uphold systems of social regulation. Marginalised unemployed people in the UK are being prevented from accessing public space or performing visibly legitimate action and thus not being recognised as valued citizens. Such exclusion is, what Rancière would term, ‘policed’ through government and media rhetoric that enforces a kind of regulation which ‘is not so much the “disciplining” of bodies as a rule governing their appearing’.15 The manner in which images of particular identities or communities are presented, augmented, or entirely concealed is thus inextricably bound up with notions of power and regulation. Socially engaged arts practitioners and scholars must carefully consider the images produced by such projects in order to harness the opportunity within arts practice to map the visible and how we conceive it and to affect a reconstitution of who gets to speak and where. The Bite Back Movement’s A Dangerous Figure intervened in what Rancière’s identifies as a structural ‘governing of appearing’ through utilising a multi-platformed mode of collective identification rather than exposing individual participant’s identities. The webpage (shown in Fig. 4.2) garnered the material for the central work of the exhibition: a projection of a face, an average representation of the young unemployed in the UK. Young unemployed people submitted a photograph of themselves on a digital portal, and the composite image was constructed via an algorithm that amalgamated a random subset of these photographs; submissions blended in and out at random to create a constantly changing but ever-present portrait of youth unemployment. A standardised, but continuously developing, data-laden text was held alongside the image on left of the webpage: a letter from the unemployed. Similarly, the letter was

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

generated from a template that drew data from both tick box responses and sections for participants to free write. This too was continuously updated as responses from participants input their information. The premise of the project was that participants would have a stake, an identifiable marker of themselves, within the project while remaining anonymous. Augustus emphasised this premise as foundational to the project: people are quite uncomfortable with being unemployed. A lot of people are not angry about it they’re kind of ashamed or unhappy about it. So, do they want to put their name to it? Do they want to put their face to it? The whole kind of interplay in the project is about allowing people to participate and to create something, it’s entirely user generated, but they can still remain completely anonymous. So this face is representing them, without them actually having to let anyone know.16

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The strength of A Dangerous Figure lies in its ability to maintain this contrary tension between recognition and anonymity. As I identified from the outset, such an objective underscores a key consideration that orbits socially engaged arts projects and questions of representation: how can an artist depict the unemployed (or otherwise excluded) citizen if they are reticent to appear? Returning to a critical examination of shame, social policy scholar Diego Zavaleta stresses the importance of being able to be witnessed by and active in the community to which one is attached.17 In line with the research of Walker and Chase, Zavaleta suggests deprivation-induced shame functions as an obstacle to making oneself visible in the community. Zavaleta draws on economist and philosopher Amartya Sen’s extensive scholarship on poverty which points out that alongside hunger ‘being ashamed to appear in public’ is a key indicator of poverty.18 Sen contends the importance of considering the social and cultural effects of poverty and identifies ‘the ability to appear in public without shame, or to take part in the life of the community’ as a minimal requirement for social functioning.19 In relation to unemployment, people want to disassociate themselves from the negative connotations associated with non-working identities. Indeed, negative cultural representations of benefit claimants, particularly those foregrounded by tabloid newspapers, are often premised on those people being shameless; their somehow enduring poverty without shame being deemed socially irresponsible. There is therefore a social pressure on those in poverty, and reliant on state-administered financial support, to overtly perform their feelings of shame.20 The reticence surrounding ‘appearing’ as unemployed in public therefore leads to a lack of accurate representation of this group. Utilising aesthetic frames of anonymity in socially engaged art can facilitate the visibility of marginal identities while protecting participants from shame, hate speech, and other forms of abuse. Projects such as A Dangerous Figure enable people to ‘appear in public’ and identify under a collective banner of unemployment without shame. Augustus suggests the image of the face operates as an ‘ambassador for their cause’, a politicised figure that can be deployed to represent the young unemployed without exposing them.21 The piece and potentially the frameworks of applied and socially engaged arts provide opportunities for those in poverty to reconstruct their own image, appear in public spaces, and participate in community practices without exposing their individual identities to regulating impositions of shame.

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There are affective and structural obstacles to visibility in public spaces for people in poverty and, I have argued, the unemployed. A Dangerous Figure offers aesthetic approaches to navigate these obstacles. As I previously noted, Phelan has questioned the emphasis given to visibility in discourse around representations of marginalised communities and individuals. She posits: ‘[w]hile there is a deeply ethical appeal in the desire for a more inclusive representational landscape and certainly underrepresented communities can be empowered by an enhanced visibility, the terms of this visibility can often enervate the putative power of these identities’.22 In relation to unemployed participants, individual visibility is potentially exposing; however, the modes of representation utilised in A Dangerous Figure present new terms of collective visibility: the possibility to appear and intervene in public constructions of unemployed identities without fear of retribution and thus foster a more inclusive and democratic ‘representational landscape’. The collective anonymity of A Dangerous Figure as a form of representation then circumvents discourses of individual shame, potentially redirecting shame towards the broader social and structural functions that have rendered people excluded from the job market.

The Individual Made Collective Identifying who was involved in the England Riots of 2011 has been understandably difficult. A very partial picture is given by Ministry of Justice data of those arrested: 53% were under 20 years old and only 5% were over 40; 41% identified as being from the White ethnic group, 39% from the Black ethnic group, 12% from the mixed ethnic group; 59% of people charged come from the most deprived 20% of areas in the UK.23 This gives an indication of those charged by the police in a criminal justice system we know are underpinned by racism and social inequality, but it is generally accepted that rioters were more commonly young people, and often those living in disenfranchised and under-resourced communities. In this section, I examine how the riots in 2011 were culturally framed through understandings of crowd psychology and consider how deindividuation can function as a useful strategy within arts projects. Gareth White’s conceptualisation of the aesthetics of audience participation has engaged with crowd psychology as a semiotic device in participatory performance.24 Here, I reflect on the particular ethical and representational stakes of encouraging deindividuation and collectivity within socially engaged arts projects.

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As I noted above, the intersecting economic, social, racial, and cultural factors that both backgrounded and provoked the riots remained largely absent from popular discourse that emerged in the wake of the disorder. However, out of the myriad of reasons cited for the unrest by those who participated in it, lack of work and opportunity emerged as significant: 59% of 270 rioters interviewed by researchers at London School of Economics were unemployed and a further 79% stated unemployment as an ‘important cause of the riots’.25 Such underlying inequality did not emerge as significant in public discourse surrounding the unrest; as youth policy scholar Charlie Cooper notes, the disorder ‘led to a renewed fascination in mainstream media and political discourse with the cultural “deficit” of disadvantaged “communities”, predominantly related to age, race and the “underclass”’.26 The failure to acknowledge deeply ingrained social inequalities which may have contributed to the grievances felt by these, mainly, young people allowed images of ‘yobs’, ‘mobs’, and ‘hoodies’ to take root. Such rhetoric was damaging, not least in its contribution to the inordinate criminalisation of those involved in the riots. Such responses were underscored by then Prime Minister David Cameron who sought to delegitimise the riots as a political action, identifying them as ‘mindless’ aligning them with mob violence.27 Concurrently, the majority of media reports in the immediate aftermath of the unrest referred to the influence of crowd mentality and a negative sense of deindividuation; national newspaper front pages on 9 August 2011 reading: ‘Rule of The Mob’ (Telegraph); ‘Mob Rule’ (Independent); ‘Yob Rule’ (Daily Mirror); ‘Riots: The Madness Spreads’ (Metro). The invocation of the mob draws on psychologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon’s writing on submergence at the close of the twentieth century. Le Bon’s discussion of deindividuation was occupied with the assumed loss of self to the throng of the crowd and the proposed reversion to a primitive state.28 However, as psychologist Stephen Reicher notes: One of the more remarkable things about traditional crowd psychology is that it has tended to constitute a theory without a referent. Rather than starting from a set of phenomena that are in need of explanation, a set of explanations were elaborated in order to underpin certain ideological presumptions about the crowd.29

The construction of crowd actions as mindless is rooted in fallacy; further, such rhetoric seeks to undermine the political and social context of group

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protest. Despite these early theories of crowd psychology being discredited, they remain a frequent response for those hoping to explain the events such as the riots in 2011.30 This obscures contemporary theorisations of riots, articulated by Reicher and Clifford Stott, that ‘[r]iots generally occur when groups have a sense of illegitimacy about how they are treated by others and where they see collective confrontation as the only means of redressing the situation’.31 We can also perceive socially engaged arts practice as opportunities for groups to gather and perform an act of ‘collective confrontation’. A Dangerous Figure deploys a strategy of collective action in its practice of gathering portraits and work histories from over 10,000 young people and deploys this material to generate a composite image of the crowd of contributors. This image, a portrait directly staring outwards, confronts its viewer and seeks to expose the labour exploitations and inequalities experienced by young people in the UK. Through engaging with collectivity, the piece challenges the depiction of young people as a mindless mass, but it concurrently deploys the aesthetics of the crowd in order to underpin this central critique. A Dangerous Figure can be read through revised understandings of deindividuation emerging at the outset of the twenty-first century presented by Reicher, Spears, and Postmes in their Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects (SIDE).32 This development of the concept gives attention to the previously neglected dialogic relationship between the individual and the group in the act of social identification. How individuals negotiate and perform their identity through engaging with various groups suggests the importance of groups in conferring rather than negating selfhood. They propose identity consolidation occurs through interactions with the ‘in-group’ that inform participants’ behaviours and enable them to confirm their membership of that group. These interactions also contribute to the distinction of an ‘out-group’, which refers to individuals’ construction of their identity via the exclusion of others from the group with which they assimilate. By encountering the self as embedded in a group rather than through negative culturally imposed discourses of individual failing, The Bite Back Movement piece provided participants with a positive performative frame for their group identity. In developing a platform where participants can collaborate in the construction of a shared identity, which is then materialised in the form of one image, the piece provides an opportunity for participants to momentarily reclaim the tools of social categorisation and grouping. This renders individuals adept at

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highlighting the challenges posed to their, now shared, non-working identity by a powerful out-group (i.e. the UK government). A requirement for in-group/out-group constructions of identity to function is the visible enactment of group parameters. That is, an aspect of audiencing is necessary to support the creation of these social categorisations, to make individuals aware of groups and how to access them. A Dangerous Figure facilitated widespread access to (and witnessing of) this group through utilising online platforms, social media, and the cultural and institutional space of Somerset House. The Bite Back Movement provided fora for group members to recognise one another and themselves as a part of a collective. In collecting data for the project, Augustus found that the majority of young unemployed people spent most of their time by themselves, noting that this isolation, as a key feature of unemployment, creates an obstacle to traditional forms of group protest and resistance.33 He claims, ‘it’s not like a union, it’s not like people who are bound together by a common purpose, these are people from such disparate, different places, all over’.34 It is challenging to conceive of oneself as a group member if there is no space for collective recognition. The experience of unemployment is often so individualised and there are few opportunities to gather and acknowledge one another as part of the same large, potentially powerful, group. The piece was an opportunity, however brief, to form a kind of union physically or digitally, which embedded young unemployed people in a wider community of people having similar experiences to them. Similarly, Klein, Spears, and Reicher have emphasised the strategic manner in which a social identity performance of deindividuation can be employed by oppressed groups in order to resist more powerful groups, ‘identifiability within the in-group enables group members to join and coordinate their actions in order to resist […] a powerful out-group’.35 However, they also note that public visibility of a group identity can also be detrimental to that group, facilitating repression by a more powerful group.36 In this case the punitive welfare landscape means participants could be reticent to involve themselves in arts projects or activism that is critical of government policy. The Bite Back Movement operationalised anonymity in order to allow participants to appear in these spaces, develop a collective activist identity, and form in-group/out-group constructions of their identity without having to publicly expose themselves to potentially shaming criticism from those not within the group. A Dangerous Figure enabled participants to make themselves and their experiences

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visible to one another and heightened a wider awareness of youth unemployment whilst not exposing them to possible negative ramifications from a defined ‘out-group’. This project offered a mode to move beyond the individually felt and incapacitating obstacle of shame and thus provide a space for participants to engage with other emotions—in this case, anger at systemic problems which have brought about their dependency on, and neglect or abuse by, the state. So, while obscuring individuals’ identities, the project made visible their group membership and thus allowed participants to attest to the macro failings of the UK welfare system in dealing with the unemployed. This can be read as enacting Rancière’s articulation of the aesthetic regime of politics, which ‘consists above all in the framing of a we, a subject of collective demonstration whose emergence is the element that disrupts the distribution of social parts, an element that I call the part of those who have no part—not the wretched, but the anonymous’.37 In engaging with the young unemployed, the project seeks to amplify the voice of those who have ‘no part’ in order to disrupt the social distribution of power and participation. This group are relentlessly counted (in terms of statistical monitoring of their employment status), and yet young unemployed people are rarely represented or given space to participate in discussions, appear in public, and exist within economic systems. In reasserting the participants as a collective ‘we’, they are equipped with the potential to disrupt the dynamic of the social space in which they are located and assume the powerful position of the ‘anonymous’ in the political sphere. Advocating for an approach that promotes deindividuation presents a challenge to the traditional vocabularies and practices of community, applied, and socially engaged arts. As curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud highlights, much contemporary art is concerned with the aesthetic framing of intersubjectivity which forms the ‘substrate’ of the artistic event.38 A Dangerous Figure, however, provokes an extension of intersubjectivity in creating an artwork that collapses the distinctions between participants. Individuals do not remain as discrete agents displaying their relationality but instead forgo their own identity to that of the group. Therefore, converse to Bourriaud’s conceptualisation of relationships in contemporary arts practice, this piece presents an iteration of intersubjectivity in which the ‘subject’ is lost in service to a co-subjectivity, the creation of a collective identity. Managing a group whilst also ensuring individuals are supported is important to arts practitioners working with community participants. However, in A Dangerous Figure, the visual

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sacrifice of the individual participant’s face for the formation of the ‘ambassador’ conflicts with this careful balancing of group dynamics and individual needs. As Augustus notes: I did have people saying that it was negative for them because it took their individuality away and, for me, I can definitely see that and it is kind of reminiscent of something quite dark. But I like the idea of it kind of being threatening […]. A disembodied face, it’s the culmination of a lot of anger but it’s not easily identifiable you know you can’t—you can’t weed out an individual from that face to fight or exploit.39

As I have identified in Chaps. 2 and 3, applied and socially engaged arts practice can be accompanied by a focus on the development of the individual, both in their artistic ability and in the soft skills vocabulary of empowerment and self-improvement. Works such as A Dangerous Figure, which is bound by a necessity to displace the individual, instead cultivate a large-scale societal critique and unsettle this focus on personal development. Where established iterations of community art might illuminate a participant’s labour and individual contribution, this piece subsumes such acknowledgement in the mass representation of the final product. This aspect resonates with considerations of delegation and outsourcing in contemporary arts practice but also poses a useful consideration around presenting the vulnerable individual in community arts practice. In my previous chapter, Brighton People’s Theatre Director Naomi Alexander highlighted ways in which such an identifiable visibility can expose participants.40 As Muñoz notes in relation to performance and culture, It is important to keep in mind that not all performances are liberatory or transformative. Performance, from the positionality of the minoritarian subject, is sometimes nothing short of forced labour. […] Minoritarian subjects do not always dance because they are happy; sometimes they dance because their feet are being shot at.41

This critique of the celebration of representational performance and visibility provokes crucial considerations when brought to bear on applied, community, and socially engaged performance practices. While there has been careful attention given to the complexities of transformative politics often ascribed to socially committed arts practices, we must further nuance our engagement with the intricacies of representational labour undertaken

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by the participants we work with in such practices, particularly when those participants are drawn from disenfranchised and objectified minorities who encounter systemic and structural violence. Further exploring the dynamics of visibility that orbit such violence is key to expanding the representational repertoire of socially engaged arts practices. Significantly, the strength of A Dangerous Figure—and what my analysis here underscores in critical considerations of visibility in socially committed arts practices— lies in the occlusion of participants’ identity. As Phelan argues, in relation to cultural representations of women, there is a power located in the unseen: ‘an active vanishing, a deliberate and conscious refusal to take the pay-off of being visible’.42 This ‘active’ disappearance points to Phelan’s advocacy for an invisibility that is present in the practices she discusses, as opposed to simply the neglecting or omission of representation. Such an existent absence then seeks to call attention to the viewer’s gaze as intrinsically bound up with ethically complex systems of power and distinctions of otherness. Through a turn to deindividuation, A Dangerous Figure deploys the ‘active vanishing’ articulated by Phelan, and while the project retains a heightened visibility for the community as a whole, it navigates the objectification of images of youth unemployment and provokes a consideration of how such images are consumed by the wider public. A consideration of deindividuation allows us to understand how Muñoz’s theory of disidentification might be usefully deployed in performance engaging with the marginalised community of young unemployed people, particularly young unemployed Black people and people of colour. In particular, Muñoz identifies ‘the burden of liveness’ which is endured by those who sit beyond the dominant hegemonic culture of whiteness, affluence, maleness, and heterosexuality. Muñoz articulates this burden of liveness as a cultural imperative within the majoritarian public sphere that denies subalterns access to larger channels of representation, while calling the minoritarian subject to the stage, performing her or his alterity as a consumable local spectacle.43

There exists both a lack of representation and a hypervisible performance of the marginalised subject that is structurally sustained, concurrent, and pervasive. In 2013, the young unemployed were encountering such a paradoxical cultural visibility, both silenced and concurrently met with pervasively circulating cultural representations in the news and media. In applying Muñoz’s concept to socially committed arts practice, it is

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important to reflect on how applied and socially engaged arts projects might regularly encourage and promote a burden of liveness, asking marginalised bodies to enact their ‘alterity’ onstage and potentially spectacularising subjects’ experiences. Conversely, in constructing a collective identity, A Dangerous Figure both critiques the political representation and mediatised consumption of images of this community in the public sphere and illuminates how the lived experiences of young unemployed people are elided. Further, through appropriating the tools of their oppression—namely, negative and shaming representations of them and the reduction of human lives to mass data—the project provides a subversive critique of the regulation of this group of people. The piece commandeered and deployed the anonymous multitude as a powerful subject position, facilitating collective agency in a context where revealing individual identities was met with shaming and punitive responses.44

Dangerous Figures and Levels of Threat: Iconographies of Criminality and Institutional Unease The ‘dangerous figure’ refers to the statistical figure of youth unemployment but also evokes the affective threat implicit in the project and its aesthetic, particularly given A Dangerous Figure’s emergence after the riots in August 2011. Indeed, the project spoke to the keenly felt hostility and suspicion directed towards young people at this time, as identified by Joe, a young person from Salford: all the upper generation are judging the lower generation because they think we’re fuckin’ bastards. […] I’m at the job centre most days of the week. I’m trying my hardest. […]. I don’t get nowhere because of what we look like. […] At the end of the day, they think we’re youths and the youth generation today goes mental. [But] we don’t go mental, we don’t want no trouble. We just want a job. I’m happy to do hard work, decent work.45

Indicatively, generational researcher Jeremy Leach found, out of 29 European countries surveyed in 2011 (prior to the riots), Britain had the most negative perception of its young people.46 The Bite Back Movement underscored and invoked the culturally imposed affect of ‘threat’ that surrounds the image of young people in the UK. Further, the blended portrait image of youth unemployment (Fig.  4.3) at the centre of the

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

exhibition goes some way to reflect the significant racialisation of unemployment in the UK and provokes a consideration of how this experience is captured and deployed by The Bite Back Movement. As I have outlined above, the four-­day period of civil unrest was associated with disaffected young people and has been disproportionately racialised by some commentators.47 Consequently the ‘appearance’ of images of excluded youth, and particularly excluded young Black people and people of colour was culturally stigmatised in this context. The explicit framing of the young people as threatening was in part instilled by their criminalisation. The Guardian newspaper reported in 2012 that criminal courts had seen over 700 children (10–17-year-olds) in relation to the unrest. There was little recourse to established patterns around the sentencing of young people, particularly in terms of the standard softer response to first-time offenders; indeed, of these 700, 218 were given custodial sentences averaging eight months.48 In adult cases, judges handed down sentences that were typically over four times longer than those for comparative non-riot-related offences.49 Such a criminalisation of mainly young and predominantly poor individuals elided an

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opportunity for meaningful policy and welfare interventions to address social and economic factors contributing to the riots.50 Alongside this strategy of harsh punishment, cultural images of the destructive behaviour of the riots, and the state policing of that behaviour, became hypervisible through the circulation of surveillance footage, instant messenger exchanges, and police arrest photographs. The significant criminalisation of those involved in the unrest was paralleled with a demonisation of young people and a racialisation of the riots. Given its origin in a peaceful protest regarding the mistreatment of Black people by the police, there was an explicitly racial aspect that backgrounded the unrest. However, as I identified above, there were a number of complex contributing factors and, as data has shown, the rioters were a mixed ethno-racial group.51 Yet the disturbances were regularly tied to Black people and people of colour in the media, leading to a pervasive demonisation of these communities. An indicative example of the racist discourse emerging at this time was television historian David Starkey’s appearance on the BBC programme Newsnight. After citing Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech,52 he went on to claim, the Whites have become Blacks.[…] Gangster culture has become the fashion, and Black and White boy and girl operate in this language together. This language that is wholly false, which is this Jamaican Patois, that has intruded in England. And this is why so many of us have this sense of literally living in a foreign country.53

Starkey went on to constitute Black culture as synonymous with rap music and gang culture, claiming ‘this type of Black male culture militates against education’.54 Such racist and reductive constructions of Black culture are familiar troupes that seek to assert the criminalisation of Black people in the UK. The headshot format of submissions to A Dangerous Figure directly engages with the iconography of the riots, parodying the use of facial recognition technology and deluge of photographs that flooded media outlets and social networks in the wake of the unrest. Such legible cultural citation aligns with the foundational tenet of Muñoz’s disidentification as ‘a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology’ rather than assimilating within it or acting directly counter to it (two responses which thereby affirm hegemonic power).55 That is, disidentification advocates for trying to ‘transform a cultural logic from within’.56 In A Dangerous Figure, this takes the form of repurposing modes of cultural production in relation

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to images of young people. Indeed, The Bite Back Movement’s use of facial representations and digital technology in the construction of the central image co-opts and subverts pervasive iconographies of crimialised young people at this time. The aesthetic of the piece mimics that of the traditional ‘mug shot’: the framing of the head and shoulders, the sparse background giving deference to the primacy of the face, and the direct gaze of the subject confronting the viewer. In the claustrophobic space of the exhibition, the dangerous figure’s eyes are unavoidable, they stare down at the viewer, provoking an uneasy sense of being surveilled. This reverses the pervasive scrutiny encountered by young people in the contemporary UK. In sharing this set of aesthetic modalities with state surveillance, The Bite Back Movement drew on a potent visual grammar that inferred a sort of identification of criminality. Both images depict ‘dangerous figures’, the CCTV surveillance images of rioters, and The Bite Back Movement’s ambassador for a growing number of unemployed and disenfranchised 16–24-year-olds. The artists co-opt this threatening aesthetic and so underscore societal unease around young people. The project inverts the process of the police photograph, rather than the state-endorsed institution capturing, controlling, and disseminating the individual’s image; participants upload their own image as an act of protest at their situation and testify to the responsibility of that same state for it. As such, participants reclaim their image to make visible the failure of the state as opposed to the state identifying them to make visible individual failings. This attempts to shame the state for the inadequate support they have received, which has rendered participants stigmatised, in some cases, in positions of poverty. Further, the images of rioters were disseminated in order to identify those unknown to the state; the reverse is true in A Dangerous Figure, by uniting the individual image with multiple others, it shifts from the identifiable to the anonymous. In reappropriating this imagery, The Bite Back Movement presents the affective threat within this aesthetic, imagined but unrealised, and arguably more powerful in that ‘ghost jump’ of reality. The ‘figure’ presented in the piece is a constantly shifting mix of ethno-­ racial backgrounds; this is accentuated as different images of participants shift in and out of the composite face. As such, the titling of the artwork draws attention to the insidious racist discourses of danger associated with non-White communities and particularly in relation to young people. This perception of ‘threat’ was acutely intensified post-2011 given the way right-wing media and political commentators’ discourse led to what

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Cooper has termed a ‘pathologising [of] elements of “black” culture’.57 In making this affect of ‘threat’ present in the exhibition space, The Bite Back Movement calls attention to entrenched racism which remains pervasive in the UK at the outset of the twenty-first century. However, notably, the image created by the project is not representative of the statistical breakdown of youth unemployment I presented at the outset; and so, while it offers the tools for representation, arts practitioners must reflect on how engagement operates and continue to promote marginalised communities’ access to and participation in cultural space. Artwork addressing the organisation of labour and unemployment can be antagonistic, not only towards individuals, and established social formations, but also towards institutions in which it sits. A Dangerous Figure posed potentially difficult questions for Somerset House that itself had an unpaid internship programme at the time, which very much implicated it in the culture of exploitation of labour across the arts sector.58 There was a concern that Augustus might instigate a direct protest action attacking Somerset House within the exhibition space; however, it was decided that the piece should be exhibited as it responded to an important and ongoing social issue. The project was successfully received, sparking debate and drawing an impressive footfall, and as a direct result, Somerset House revised its policy on internships, no longer hiring people on an unpaid basis. Reflecting on the historical context of this piece, Somerset House’s unease around protest and collective action was understandable: the work speaks to the same issues of the inequality addressed by the Global Occupy Movement. Emerging in New York in 2011, this movement spread worldwide seeking to challenge socio-economic inequality and uneven distributions of power through assembling and occupying politically, economically, and culturally significant sites. This movement, in tandem with the 2011 riots, has inflected how socially engaged art projects examining the exploitation and disenfranchisement of young people could be perceived. The Bite Back Movement understood this growing perception around collective gatherings of angry young people and utilised it. Yet the project draws its potency precisely by not turning this anger into embodied action, but rather retaining the tension of a threat of action. Augustus commented, if I had organised a riot in Somerset House, it would’ve completely destroyed the point of the project because all of the people involved in that would’ve been prosecuted […] they would’ve been made into the enemy and they

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would look like the persecutors, which is exactly what happened in the Riots. So it was never going to happen that way, it was always going to be in the balance of a threat.59

It was in light of the portrayal of participants in the England Riots and Occupy that The Bite Back Movement constructed their aesthetic of unrealised threat. This nuanced management of anger enabled the project to embed itself within the institution and position participants at the discursive and cultural centre. The artwork thus referenced societal and cultural expressions enacted in the Riots and Occupy and directly intervened in the recruitment practice of Somerset House, providing a self-reflexive moment for the institution to reconfigure its policy on the unpaid labour of young people. The social and cultural perceptions of young people in the riots as a ‘threat’ were accompanied by strong sanctions from the state, both in the tough penal stance I have identified above and through regulating access to social security. Indeed, the statecraft of the Conservative-led Coalition government utilised the welfare system as a tool to control those dependent on it. When Conservative-run Wandsworth Council began eviction proceedings to remove a mother from social housing whose son was accused of involvement in the disorder, David Cameron stated: ‘I think for too long we have taken too soft an attitude to people who loot and pillage their own community. If you do that you should lose your right to housing at a subsidised rate’.60 Mobilising the welfare system, specifically the threat of removing a right to social housing, operates as another way to control the behaviour of poor citizens. As sociologist Loïc Wacquant underscores in his investigation of penal and welfare systems in the US and Europe, The institutional pairing of public aid and incarceration as tools for managing the unruly poor can also be understood by paying attention to the structural, functional, and cultural similarities between workfare and prisonfare as “people-processing institutions” targeted on kindred problem populations.61

The construction of the ‘dangerous figure’ in The Bite Back Movement’s practice pulls into focus the parallels between workfare, or in this instance welfare, and prisonfare. By drawing on an aesthetics of criminality to address youth unemployment, this piece underscores the confluence of

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criminality and welfare in the imaging and experience of the ‘problem population’ of young people in the UK. This returns my argument to the regulation of the appearance of young unemployed people in public spaces as related to social and structural impositions of shame and that here can be seen in relation to institutional policing of their access to social housing.62 The aesthetic approaches of A Dangerous Figure called attention to this attempt to shame, criminalise, and negatively depict the behaviour of young people and, through co-opting an aesthetics of threat and anonymity, challenged this systemic marginalisation.

Documenting Labour and Materialising Communities The political and economic conditions that construct perceptions of work, and subsequently how work is valued, influence the way in which unemployment is socially and ideologically understood. In a context of austerity, more than ever, it is important to identify what gets counted as work and how work is measured, quantified, and displayed. The adage that ‘applying for jobs is a job in itself’ is widely accepted and yet concurrent with a dominant framing of the unemployed jobseeker as lazy, a ‘shirker’, or ‘scrounger’. The paradoxical existence of these contrary views is facilitated by the invisibility of the labour expended over applications and interviews, which is especially obscured when individuals are unsuccessful in securing work. ‘Jobseeker’ is an active noun and the need to perform that activity has intensified since the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) introduced a tougher sanctioning system from October 2012, which demanded claimants conduct and evidence a greater number of job searches.63 In 2014 the ‘Supervised Jobsearch Pilot Scheme’ required selected claimants to attend their Jobcentre for 35  hours a week in order to be witnessed conducting their job search.64 There was a desire embedded within Coalition government policy to make visible this labour, or rather there was an implicit assumption in policy that there was an absence of claimant labour that needed to be corrected. This policy impetus ensured that the application process was more heavily monitored and stringently surveilled, marking claimants as incompetent or idle; however, it did not render an application visible or mean it was acknowledged as a document requiring a significant amount of labour. In 2012 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported 69% of job applications made by their control group received no response at all.65 Writing a job application or adapting your CV for a

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specific role is an intensive process and yet, as this statistic demonstrates, one that repeatedly goes unacknowledged in a post-recession job market saturated with available and appropriate workers. The report also notes the substantial change in recruitment practice since the beginning of the century: the majority of employers no longer publicise vacancies in the printed press due to the low-cost alternatives available through Internet advertising. Additionally, while there is considerable variation across localities and job types, increasingly employers operate an online application process that expands digital inequalities and potentially further alienates people from this significant undertaking of labour.66 The Bite Back Movement’s exhibition made visible this labour by displaying a vast number of real rejected CVs and job applications as part of the installation. In presenting the CVs and applications in their paper form, A Dangerous Figure contested the increasingly immaterial aspect of application forms in the contemporary labour market, where applications often circulate electronically rather than as material documents passed between people.67 This shift in recruitment practices made the confrontation with this mass of paper even more acutely felt as I entered the gallery. As such, the project enabled a materialisation and documentation of the labour undertaken by unemployed citizens in their efforts to gain work. The mass of paper also testified to a community of young people who had been rejected from the labour market. These failed documents hung from the ceiling of the exhibition space positioning you below the burden of multiple broken engagements with application bureaucracy. The viewer had to walk the length of the gallery underneath them before arriving at the face, pointing to the journey of repeated rejection of those whose features generate the haunting portrait. The sheer mass of paper symbolised the size of the problem and the labour that it represents, as Augustus recalls, I had one girl who was looking through and she was reading all the applications and she’d submitted one and when she found the one she’d done she started crying. Something about seeing all of the other ones and I mean you know the figures, you know the numbers but that doesn’t stop you from feeling like you’re alone. You feel alone, you’re being told by the media constantly that it’s the highest rate of young unemployment ever but you can’t feel it, you can’t see it, you’re being told its true but you don’t know it’s true. So yeah, when she found it she was crying.68

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The exhibition of the CVs, in making visible a significant mass of other unanswered applications, lifts the problem from an individual one to a larger-scale social issue. The physical imposition on the space of these reams of paper serves to actualise the situation, to make it tangible. This community creation via documentation was a powerful aspect of the project. The mass of rejected CVs in the space enabled the community to be recorded, to become visible, and, importantly as Augustus highlights, to witness one another. This materialisation of community traces is particularly important for a group that is paradoxically hidden and hypervisible. The suspended CVs also functioned to render these written texts as visual artefacts and thus engage in an interplay of forms which lifts the document from the bureaucratic to the aesthetic. By presenting the CV in the gallery, The Bite Back Movement recognise it, bestow a kind of value on it as an artwork, a product of labour. Participant’s work reclaims legitimacy in the gallery space and is given further semantic weight by being made public and set in relation to the mass of other products of the same labour. As one of the participants interviewed for The Bite Back Movement project commented, it was important: to show quite the amount of effort that had been put into each one of those. Every single application form I have to fill out is different, and they take a lot of time and it would be quite good to see them all in one place.69

In gathering them and presenting them in quantity at a site such as Somerset House, these documents were given cultural capital. The CVs and applications had been rendered inadequate in their initial usage, but participants were able to assert a value in their work through siting it in the gallery space. In addition to those affixed to the ceiling, there was also a number of applications displayed on walls around the space, allowing viewers to read the documents in more detail and engage with the personal information within them. The hanging documents stood as symbolic of the mass scale of youth unemployment, while the concurrent display of CVs in readable locations served to provide a more affective relationship between them and the viewer. The cheerful optimistic tone of each application was rendered macabre in this site which marked the documents as failed attempts. The vast number of documents displayed were potently held alongside the singular face of youth unemployment projected on the gallery wall,

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prompting the viewer to remember the multitude of faces that contribute to the portrait. The disparity of the failed enthusiasm of the CV and the perceived latent violence of the ‘dangerous figure’ expose the chasm between this optimistic application and threatening image.70 In holding these two conflicting representations together, the project reveals the demonisation of young people and also provides a frame of distance which allows the viewer to acknowledge the systemic failing of the state and the labour market to support young people. In addition to viewers being able to engage with the written content on some of the CVs, through the recordings played in the exhibition space, participants were able to voice their experiences and so construct personal narratives which further nuanced the statistics of youth unemployment. The participants involved in A Dangerous Figure had few opportunities to articulate their constituent voices in public forums or at sites of cultural significance; further, while arts practice may support marginalised voices in becoming audible, this practice remains entrenched in social and cultural dynamics of power that mediate these voices and the vocal idiosyncrasies which construct individual and community identities. A Dangerous Figure, however, enabled unscripted young voices to occupy cultural space and underscores the silencing of young people in social forums. The recordings that visitors could listen to in the exhibition space identified the difficulties young people were facing in entering the workplace, a narrative elided in popular discourse. While the portrait of the ‘dangerous figure’ was an assimilation of many, these voice recordings enabled individual voices and experiences to emerge in the project. These voices, disembodied and anonymised in audio recording, offered protection for these young participants and enabled them to critique the conditions—of employment, youth culture, and projected violence—in which their identity as young people was being constructed. The deployment of documentation and audio recordings in A Dangerous Figure illuminates ways in which applied and socially committed arts approaches can productively align with notions of the community archive. Archival scholar Andrew Flinn defines the community archive as ‘based upon self-identification […] with the community taking a significant role in its construction and content’.71 All of the content in the final exhibition was user-generated and, while The Bite Back Movement constructed the online platform that enabled participants to submit their image and data regarding their employment histories, A Dangerous Figure utilised tools felt to be accessible to individuals in this community. The

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shifting nature of the user-generated data included in the ‘Letter from the Youth Unemployed’ evidences the ways in which the community directly inform the content of the piece. As way of demonstration, I have bolded the text where the participants were able to make an intervention. On 26 February 2012, this read: I am 26 years old, live in the UK and am unemployed. I have been unemployed for 7 months, and apply for roughly 12 jobs a week. I have £19,334.00 of debt. I speak 2 language(s) and have GCSEs, A-Levels, As-Levels, Undergraduate, Post-Grad qualifications. I feel frustrated, upset, annoyed. Previously I have worked for a total of 3 months unpaid. I consider leaving the country Frequently. I have 4 unemployed friend(s) but spend the majority, on average, Alone, Actively searching for jobs online. I Never take political action relating to my situation, now I think about it Always.72

On 8 July 2013, it read: I am 25 years old, live in the UK and am unemployed. I have been unemployed for 9 months, and apply for roughly 8 jobs a week. I have £18,710.00 of debt. I speak 4 language(s) and have GCSEs, A-Levels, As-Levels, Undergraduate, Post-Grad qualifications. I feel frustrated, upset, down. Previously I have worked for a total of 4 months unpaid. I consider leaving the country Frequently. I have 6 unemployed friend(s) but spend the majority, on average, Alone, Actively searching for jobs online. I Never take political action relating to my situation, now I think about it Always.73

The framing text therefore creates a structure in which participants can register their own particular experience and potentially shift the text as it appears online. As is demonstrated in the two examples above, the text did shift, particularly in terms of numerical figures, but there are resonances across the responses. Locating the artwork as a community archive places youth unemployment as part of a broader narrative around work cycles and puts A Dangerous Figure in dialogue with other practices of the documenting and recording of marginalised groups. The piece allowed a shared narrative, and subsequently enabled a community identity, to emerge out of the disparate and isolated experiences of the participants. The mass of rejected CVs in the space enabled the community to be recorded in ways beyond statistical data and to become

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visible to the public and to one another. This materialisation of community traces is particularly important for a community that is paradoxically hidden and hypervisible. The project attested to the activist potential of community archiving; as Flinn comments, ‘the capturing of oral histories and community memories can be used to empower the community in challenging the narratives that are falsely representing them and may be used against them’.74 A Dangerous Figure demonstrates the potential of socially engaged performance and archival practice to challenge popular perceptions of youth unemployment and reconstruct empowering forms of collectivity in relation to non-working identities. As Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd identify, [t]he emergence of “community archives” in the UK coincides with concerns that where public or government-funded archives do contain material on those not from the dominant sections of society, that material has tended to view them as objects (of concern, of action, of surveillance) rather than as citizens and individual actors in their own right.75

As I have outlined above, such ‘objectifying’, and shaming, is being undertaken in political and media rhetoric surrounding youth unemployment in the UK. A Dangerous Figure demonstrates that performing communities through archival strategies can return agency and subjectivity to citizens. I want to stress that I am reading the project as archival but not an as an archive. It did not remain after the exhibition closed. The artists removed the digital platform from the Internet, and the profiling of the ‘dangerous figure’, in terms of data and images gathered, was not retained. This temporality identifies the piece as a snapshot of participants’ unemployment, making them momentarily visible but not trapping them in this status of unemployment. This attests to the problem of rendering this group in an archive: it would imply classifying them permanently by their early labour market failure. Such classification is identified as a long-term ‘scarring’, a trend illuminated in research around the topic, which notes unemployment from a young age can reduce wages in the long term and leave you more vulnerable to unemployment later in life.76 Economists David Bell and David Blanchflower have found that youth unemployment has a negative impact on ‘happiness, health, and job satisfaction, many years later’.77 The aspect of anonymity embedded in the project is a way to render participants visible to one another, and heighten awareness of the issue, while avoiding rigidly and perhaps detrimentally categorising them.78

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In reading the piece as a staging of the archive, the piece offers a critical position which challenges the individualising discourse of unemployment, legitimises marginal voices, and facilitates the documentation of these experiences. The material document can therefore operate as an activist strategy in socially committed arts practice. Reframing the CVs, images, and voice recordings included in the piece as community documentation, within a semiotically weighted space, ascribes value to these failed applications and unheard voices. Reading A Dangerous Figure via dramaturgical strategies of the archive serves to amplify participants’ critical and contestatory position and question the way artists, participants, and existing policy structures might historicise youth unemployed. This presents a reconstitution of the complex socio-economic system at play in the labour market and so performs an intervention in the rhetoric of individual failing.

Locating Histories of Unemployment Muñoz articulates the spectacularisation of minoritarian bodies and illuminates how such fetishised images are mistakenly seen to stand in for cultural or political representation, arguing that in such circumstances ‘performing beyond the channels of liveness and entering larger historical narratives seems especially important’.79 Beyond my own reading of A Dangerous Figure as archival, a critical intervention that seeks to undermine the individualising and immediate crisis of unemployment, locating the piece at Somerset House contributes a historicity to the work. The looming presence of government bureaucracy and the presentation of statistics and documents in Somerset House speak to the symbolic status and history of the building within the context of labour and formal record keeping. The Deadhouse Gallery, in which the exhibition was held, was previously one of the rooms in which the civil register (a collection of national data pertaining to birth, marriage, and death certificates in England and Wales) was stored. Siting the work here, with its critique of the exploitation of young labour and failure of those in need of assistance, speaks powerfully to the history of taxation and the dissolution of welfare support in the UK since 2010. Initially built as a Thame-side palace by Edward Seymour, Lord Protector and Duke of Somerset in 1547, Somerset House operated as a royal residency up until the end of the 1600s. At its reincarnation in 1775 before becoming the ‘key cultural destination’ it identifies as today, the

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building housed public offices and learned institutions.80 The first to take up residence there was the Royal Academy of Arts, fostering the interrelation of power, policy, scholarship, and artistry in the historical spatiality of the building itself. From 1837 Somerset House began storing public records, and in 1843 the Inland Revenue also moved its offices into the building. Cathy Turner notes, ‘[e]ach occupation, or traversal, or transgression of space offers a reinterpretation of it, even a rewriting. Thus space is often envisaged as an aggregation of layered writings—a palimpsest’.81 The exhibition of A Dangerous Figure in the Deadhouse Gallery constitutes a palimpsestic siting of performance given the use of a gallery historically coded as a site of civic record and public archive. The records held at Somerset House were largely paper based, and so The Bite Back Movement’s display of CVs and applications around the space enact a kind of tangible reminiscence, attesting to a time past of printed or written records and documents. The relationship of the building to national records and civil registration is in direct contrast to the uncivil representation of young people as ‘dangerous figures’ and the data-driven numerical representation of the youth unemployment problem. Youth unemployment was predominantly understood in terms of data and statistics at this time, particularly given the significant one million figure surpassed at the time of the exhibition in 2013. The Bite Back Movement commandeered this space saturated with statistical past to present a different figure, a human figure. The piece thus enacts a kind of public recording of these young people; yet the project also sought to unsettle the state processes of statistical recording in relation to youth unemployment, instead revealing the human experience of the individuals behind the data. The gallery is inscribed with the mass of statistical data that has passed through the exhibition space just as the issue of youth unemployment is obscured by the statistical mass that threatens to subsume the human aspect of the issue. By locating the artwork in this space, A Dangerous Figure renders youth unemployment as part of a larger narrative of labour struggles in relation to a broader context of time, space, and state bureaucracy. This productively challenged the emergence of discourses of individual failing in UK unemployment policy and media representations, as identified by social policy and linguist scholars Jay Wiggan and Norman Fairclough.82 In visual arts scholarship, Bob Dickinson explores the iconography of unemployment by tracking shifting depictions of worklessness from the communal to the individual:

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In the post-industrial world so-called unemployment blackspots out of which the unemployed never seem to be able to escape, and into which ­artists find it difficult to fit, have replaced the public spaces through which the older, defunct icons of unemployment previously paraded or demonstrated.83

Images such as the Jarrow Marchers in 1936 and the miners’ strikes and dole queues of the 1980s stand in stark contrast to the individualising depictions emerging on British television in programmes such as Benefits Street and Super Scroungers.84 Since 2008, when the economic crash threatened to destabilise the neoliberal construction of personal accountability for labour market failure, the state has intensified individualised blame for unemployment. This constructs individuals with dysfunctional behaviours in order to disconnect their unemployment from the economic ecology. The siting of A Dangerous Figure, within a gallery that previously housed public records, usefully situates the piece at the juncture of archive and performance. This nuances the interaction of site and performance, inferring, as Sophie Nield does, that ‘the resonances of performance remain after the event itself is over, and form a differently configured relationship between site and event’.85 Thus, the site and the participants can both be read anew, inscribed with one another’s coding. The performance of youth unemployment in A Dangerous Figure is legitimised by its location in this space of civic record keeping, but the piece also unsettles this site and viewers’ understandings of what, how, and who gets recorded by the state. Beyond Somerset House occupying a site of historical resonance, its architectural schema, in particular the location of the Deadhouse Gallery below the building’s central courtyard, underscored the inequality experienced by the subjects it sought to depict. As Augustus states, In the courtyard all of the top layer of sculpture, the sculptural scheme, is all about work, industry, it’s all about military industry and the fishing industry and things like this. The Deadhouse Gallery was a disused space and is directly below the courtyard. So above is all about employment and all about industry below is where all the electrics go through, where all the plumbing goes through, there’s gravestones in the walls.86

The positioning of the artwork in a sub-level disused space below the grandeur of the courtyard, with its celebration of and memorials to industry, further accentuates the abandonment of young people by the labour

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market. Invoking these historicising aesthetics places participants in a lineage of labour struggles. Positive iconographies of unemployment are disappearing from public space; through its palimpsestic use of the gallery space, A Dangerous Figure productively made visible unemployment at the centre of a cultural institution but also documented it at a historical site of civic record.

Conclusion A Dangerous Figure speaks to larger cultural implications and networks of meaning that the imagery around youth and race are subject to in the UK. The piece subverts negative depictions of these groups through utilising the very tools of their oppression (i.e. bureaucracy, invisibility, privileged sites, profiling, and media rhetoric). Rendering administrative processes, such as the CV, an aesthetic strategy or artistic object enables an unsettling of dominant conceptions of labour and challenges exclusionary bureaucratic frameworks of employment by subverting them to become socially engaged arts objects. This aesthetic move returns these civic mechanisms, such as application forms or employment documentation, to those who are traditionally excluded by them. Locating the piece at the historical site of labour regulation by the state invokes this past through use of site places participants in a lineage of labour struggles. This palimpsestic siting of work re-establishes the complex socio-economic system at play in the labour market and so intervenes in the rhetoric of individual failing. The piece engages with the construction of threat in relation to images of youth, race, and the ‘underclass’, both highlighting the demonisation of these groups and also utilising that demonisation as an affective strategy to activate change. Exploring this project through an engagement with Phelan, Muñoz, and Rancière illuminates the necessity and potential for socially engaged or applied arts projects to work in the space between visibility and invisibility, acknowledging these two conditions not as a binary but as productive partners in the representation of excluded communities. A Dangerous Figure thus performs the invisibility of this marginalised group, offering platforms for them to appear and yet retain their anonymity at the cultural centre. Socially engaged art can promote frameworks of collective resistance and anonymity through which participants may challenge their misrepresentation and reconfigure cultural images themselves. Documenting new representational strategies in a context of an increasingly disciplinary

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form of governmentality ensures the continuing development of participatory practice and supports the evolving needs of participants.

Notes 1. It is now broadly accepted that the shooting of Mark Duggan and subsequent false statement that officers were shot at first, from the Independent Police Complaints Committee to the media, sparked the initial protests in Tottenham. Duggan’s death is part of a long history of Black people who have died at the hands of the police, or while in custody, in the UK. Lynette Goddard reflects on theatrical responses to the killing of Duggan and David Oluwale by the police in Goddard, L. (2018). #BlackLivesMatter: Remembering Mark Duggan and David Oluwale in Contemporary British Plays, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 6(1), 69–86. 2. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). 3. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 6. 4. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (London & Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 5. More broadly, applications of queer theory offer a distinct value for examining demarcations and subjectivities of failure, non-productivity, and otherness; that is particularly generative for analyses of unemployment. 6. ‘About’, The BiteBack Movement, http://www.thebitebackmovement. com/ (accessed 12 May 2018). 7. Office for National Statistics, ‘Labour Market Statistics, November 2011’, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http:// www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/november-2011/statistical-bulletin.html (accessed 14 May 2016); Office for National Statistics, ‘Young People in the Labour Market, 2014’, ONS, 5 March 2014, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/2016010 5160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_355123.pdf (accessed 27 May 2016). 8. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported in 2013 that unemployment among Pakistani men was one and a half times greater than that of White British men; for Black Caribbean men, unemployment was three times greater. Similarly, Pakistani women’s unemployment rate was triple that of White British women’s, and for Black Caribbean women, it was double the unemployment rate of White British women. Jennifer Brown, ‘Unemployment by Ethnic Background’, Briefing Paper, House of Commons Library, Number 6385, 29 November 2016, http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06385/SN06385.pdf (accessed 20 May 2016). 9. ‘Data showing how young black men have been hit by unemployment’, Guardian Data Blog, 9 March 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/

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news/datablog/2012/mar/09/black-unemployed-youngmen?intcmp=239#data (accessed 15 May 2016). Also see James Ball, Dan Milmo, and Ben Ferguson, ‘Half of UK’s Young Black Males are Unemployed’, Guardian, 9 March 2012, https://www.theguardian. com/society/2012/mar/09/half-uk-young-black-men-unemployed (accessed 15 May 2016). The latest figures available at the time of writing indicated unemployment among young Black people remained the highest at 30% in the year to June 2016, while youth unemployment rates stood at 13% for White people and 26% for people from a Bangladeshi or Pakistani ethnic background. See Brown, ‘Unemployment by Ethnic Background’, 2. 10. Alexander Augustus qtd. in Jack Mills, ‘A Dangerous Figure’, Frieze Blog, 20 August 2013, http://blog.frieze.com/a-dangerous-figure/ (accessed 10 January 2015). 11. Ibid., 69. 12. Robert Walker and Elaine Chase, ‘Adding to the Shame of Poverty: The Public, Politicians and the Media’, Poverty 148 (2014): 9–13. 13. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. 14. Ibid., 12–13. 15. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 29. 16. Alexander Augustus, interview with the author, London, 13 February 2015. 17. Diego Zavaleta, The Ability to Go About Without Shame (University of Oxford: Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, 2009). 18. Amartya Sen qtd. in Diego Zavaleta, 1. Emphasis added. Also see Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1776). 19. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 73. 20. We might note the UK, and subsequent US, television series Shameless as indicative of adverse cultural representations of poor people who refuse or resist performances of shame in relation to their own poverty. 21. Alexander Augustus, ‘A Dangerous Figure’, The BiteBack Movement http://thebitebackmovement.com/110337/1102124/ projects-/a-dangerous-figure-young-and-unemployed-in-the-uk (accessed 26 March 2015). 22. Phelan, 7. 23. Ministry of Justice, ‘Statistical bulletin on the public disorder of 6th–9th August 2011’, gov.uk, 13 September 2012. Available at https://www.gov. uk/government/statistics/statistical-bulletin-on-the-public-disorderof-6th-9th-august-2011%2D%2D2 (accessed 10 September 2015) and Lewis et al., ‘Reading the Riots’.

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24. Gareth White, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 138. 25. Paul Lewis, Tim Newburn, Matthew Taylor, Catriona Mcgillivray, Aster Greenhill, Harold Frayman, and Rob Proctor, Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder (London: London School of Economics and the Guardian, 2015). 26. Charlie Cooper, ‘Understanding the English “Riots” of 2011: “Mindless Criminality” or Youth “Mekin Histri” in Austerity Britain?’, Youth & Policy 109 (2012): 6–26 (8). 27. David Cameron Downing Street Statement, ‘UK Riots: Mindless Rioting Highlights Folly of Firing Police’, Daily Mirror, 10 August 2011, http:// www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uk-riots-mindless-rioting-highlights-146714 (accessed 17 March 2015). 28. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2006). 29. Stephen Reicher, ‘The Psychology of Crowd Dynamics’, in Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes, ed. by Michael A.  Hogg, Scott Tindale (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 2001), 182–208 (182). 30. See Reicher, Spears, and Postmes, ‘A Social Identity Model of Deindividuation’. 31. Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott, ‘You Won’t Prevent Future Riots by Disregarding the Psychology of Crowds’, Guardian, 19 August 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/19/riots-psychology-crowds (accessed 15 March 2015). 32. Reicher, Spears, Postmes, ‘A Social Identity Model of Deindividuation’. 33. Alexander Augustus, unpublished research document, 2013. 34. Augustus, interview. 35. Klein, Spears, and Reicher, ‘Identity Performance’, 30. 36. Ibid., 33. 37. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. by Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 141–142. 38. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses Du Reel (1998), 2002). 39. Augustus, interview. 40. See Chap. 3, p. 98. 41. Muñoz, 189. 42. Phelan, Unmarked, 19. 43. Muñoz, 182. 44. Jacques Rancière in Davide Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’, trans. by Davide Panagia, Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2000): 113–126 (124).

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45. Joe from Salford in Shiv Malik, ‘“They Think the Youths Go Mental. We Don’t. We Just Want a Job”’, Guardian, 13 August 2011, https://www. theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/12/uk-riots-analysis (accessed 1 February 2017). 46. Jeremy Leach, ‘The Poor Perception of Younger People in the UK’, Intergenerational Foundation, 17 August 2011, http://www.if.org.uk/ wp-content/uploads/2011/08/The_Poor_Perception_of_Younger_ People_in_the_UK_17Aug3.pdf (accessed 15 May 2016). 47. See, for example, John Bird, ‘Fashion Has Become a Weapon on the Streets of London’, Independent, 14 August 2011, http://www.independent. co.uk/voices/commentators/john-bird-fashion-has-become-a-weaponon-the-streets-of-london-2337838.html (accessed 20 February 2017), and Tony Parsons, ‘UK riots: Why Did the Riots Happen? Who Are the Rioters? What Can We do to End This Madness?’, Daily Mail, 13 August 2011, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uk-riots-why-did-theriots-happen-who-147237 (accessed 20 February 2017). 48. Fiona Bawdon and Owen Bowcott, ‘Riot Sentencing Put “Nice Kids” Behind Bars, Lawyers Say’, Guardian, 3 July 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/03/riot-sentencing-nice-kids-lawyers (accessed February 2017). 49. Ibid. 50. Analysis of more than 1000 court records suggests ‘59% of the England rioters come from the most deprived 20% of areas in the UK. Other analysis carried out by the Department for Education and the Ministry of Justice on young riot defendants found 64% came from the poorest fifth of areas— and only 3% came from the richest fifth’. Lewis et al., Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder, 5. 51. Ministry of Justice, ‘Statistical Bulletin on the Public Disorder of 6th to 9th August 2011–September 2012 Update’, Gov.uk, 13 September 2012, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/219665/august-public-disorder-stats-bulletin-130912. pdf (accessed 5 May 2015). 52. Enoch Powell, Speech to the Conservative Association Meeting, Birmingham, 20 April 1968. This has subsequently become an infamous speech in the UK.  It was given in response to the then Labour government’s proposal of the Race Relations Act, which made illegal the refusal of housing, employment, or public services to a person on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic, or national origins. Powell’s speech responded to this legislation and prophesied a nation divided and destitute due to mass immigration. 53. David Starkey appearance on Newsnight, BBC, 12 August 2011. Available at England Riots: ‘The Whites Have Become Black’ Says David Starkey,

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BBC, 13 August 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517 (accessed 16 January 2016). 54. Ibid. 55. Muñoz, 11–12. 56. Ibid. 57. Cooper, ‘Understanding the English “riots” of 2011’, 8. 58. For a more extensive examination of labour practices in the arts sector, see Chap. 2, pp. 54–61. 59. Augustus, interview. 60. Alexandra Topping and Patrick Wintour, ‘London Riots: Wandsworth Council Moves to Evict Mother of Charged Boy’, Guardian, 12 August 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/12/london-riotswandsworth-council-eviction (accessed 12 April 2017). 61. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 291. 62. While the incident of housing being removed from individuals associated with the riots in Wandsworth was isolated, legislative changes brought in by the Conservative government that came into effect as of April 2017 strip 18–21-year-olds of entitlements to social housing. 63. Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance Sanctions – decisions made to June 2013’, November 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/255176/sanctions-nov-2013.pdf (accessed 16 April 2015). I discuss the activity implicit in the UK government’s Jobseeker’s Agreement further in the Introduction to this book; see in particular pp. 18–24. 64. HM Government, ‘The Jobseeker’s Allowance (Supervised Jobsearch Pilot Scheme) Regulations 2014’, www.legislation.gov.uk, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2014/1913/contents/made (accessed 16 April 2015). 65. Rebecca Tunstall, Ruth Lupton, Anne Green, Simon Watmough, and Katie Bates, ‘Disadvantaged Young People Looking for Work: A Job in Itself?’, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, October 2012, http://www.jrf. org.uk/sites/files/jrf/young-people-disadvantage-jobseekers-full.pdf (accessed 27 February 2015). 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Augustus, interview. 69. Unpublished participant interviews from A Dangerous Figure (2013). 70. Ibid., 49. 71. Andrew Flinn, ‘Archival Activism: Independent and Community-led Archives, Radical Public History and the Heritage Professions’, Interactions:

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UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 7, no. 2 (2011): 1–20 (6). 72. ‘Average Young Unemployed’, The BiteBack Movement, TheWayBackMachine Archive, 26 February 2012, https://web.archive. org/web/20141016082816/http://www.adangerousfigure.co.uk/ (accessed 16 December 2018). 73. ‘Average Young Unemployed’, The BiteBack Movement, TheWayBack Machine Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20141016082816/ http://www.adangerousfigure.co.uk/ (accessed 16 December 2018). 74. Flinn, ‘Archival Activism’, 10. 75. Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd, ‘Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream’, Archival Science 9 (2009): 71–86 (p. 73). 76. See, for example, Thomas Mroz and Timothy Savage, ‘The Long-Term Effects of Youth Unemployment’, Journal of Human Resources 41, no. 2 (2006): 259–293; The Youth Labor Market Problem: Its Nature, Causes, and Consequences, ed. by R.  B. Freeman and D.  A. Wise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 77. David Bell and David Blanchflower, ‘Young People and the Great Recession’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 27, no. 2 (2011): 241–267 (360). 78. In January 2014 the National Portrait Gallery accepted the portrait of the dangerous figure to their public archive. Contrary to the dynamic character of the project, this served to fix the image of youth unemployment in its transition to an institutionally recognised archive. 79. Muñoz, 188. 80. ‘Home Page’, Somerset House, http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/ (accessed 15 May 2016). 81. Cathy Turner, ‘Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for Site-Specific Performance’, New Theatre Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2004): 373–390 (373). 82. Jay Wiggan, ‘Telling Stories of 21st Century Welfare: The UK Coalition Government and the Neo-liberal Discourse of Worklessness and Dependency’, Critical Social Policy 32, no. 3 (2012): 383–405; Norman Fairclough, ‘Discourse, Social Theory and Social Research: The Discourse of Welfare Reform’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 4, no. 2 (2000): 163–195. I discuss the rhetoric of individual failing extensively in Chap. 3; in giving a brief summary here, I am able to demonstrate the way this discourse is challenged by the visual and spatial intervention of A Dangerous Figure. 83. Bob Dickinson, ‘Gizza job!’, Art Monthly, 373 (February 2013), 11–14 (12).

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84. Benefit Street, January 2014–, Love Productions for Channel 4; Super Scroungers, February 2013–, Channel 5 Productions. 85. Sophie Nield, ‘Siting the People: Power, Protest and Public Space’, in Performing Site-Specific Theatre Politics, Place, Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 219–232 (223). 86. Augustus, interview.

References Alexander Augustus, interview with the author, London, 13 February 2015. Alexander Augustus, ‘A Dangerous Figure’, BiteBack Movement, http://thebitebackmovement.com/110337/1102124/projects-/a-dangerous-figure-young-andunemployed-in-the-uk (accessed 26 March 2015). Alexander Augustus, unpublished research document, 2013. James Ball, Dan Milmo and Ben Ferguson, ‘Half of UK’s Young Black Males are Unemployed’, Guardian, 9 March 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/ society/2012/mar/09/half-uk-young-black-men-unemployed (accessed 15 May 2016). David Bell and David Blanchflower, ‘Young People and the Great Recession’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 27, no. 2 (2011): 241–267. John Bird, ‘Fashion Has Become a Weapon on the Streets of London’, Independent, 14 August 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/ john-bird-fashion-has-become-a-weapon-on-the-streets-of-london-2337838. html (accessed 20 February 2017). The BiteBack Movement, ‘About’, http://www.thebitebackmovement.com/ (accessed 12 May 2018a). The BiteBack Movement, ‘Average Young Unemployed’, TheWayBack Machine Archive, 26 February 2012, https://web.archive.org/ web/20141016082816/http://www.adangerousfigure.co.uk/ (accessed 16 December 2018). The BiteBack Movement, ‘Average Young Unemployed’, TheWayBackMachine Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20141016082816/http://www. adangerousfigure.co.uk/ (accessed 16 December 2018b). Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2006). Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses Du Reel, (1998) 2002). Fiona Bawdon and Owen Bowcott, ‘Riot Sentencing Put “Nice Kids” Behind Bars, Lawyers Say’, Guardian, 3 July 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/ uk/2012/jul/03/riot-sentencing-nice-kids-lawyers (accessed February 2017). David Cameron Downing Street Statement, ‘UK Riots: Mindless Rioting Highlights Folly of Firing Police’, Daily Mirror, 10 August 2011, http://www.

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mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uk-riots-mindless-rioting-highlights-146714 (accessed 17 March 2015). Charlie Cooper, ‘Understanding the English “Riots” of 2011: “Mindless Criminality” or Youth “Mekin Histri” in Austerity Britain?’, Youth & Policy 109 (2012): 6–26. ‘Data showing how young black men have been hit by unemployment’, Guardian Data Blog, 9 March 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/mar/09/black-unemployed-young-men?intcmp=239#data (accessed 15 May 2016). Bob Dickinson, ‘Gizza job!’, Art Monthly, 373 (February 2013), 11–14. England Riots: ‘The Whites Have Become Black’ Says David Starkey, BBC, 13 August 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517 (accessed 16 January 2016). Norman Fairclough, ‘Discourse, Social Theory and Social Research: The Discourse of Welfare Reform’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 4, no. 2 (2000): 163–195. Andrew Flinn, ‘Archival Activism: Independent and Community-led Archives, Radical Public History and the Heritage Professions’, Interactions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 7, no. 2 (2011): 1–20. Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, Elizabeth Shepherd, ‘Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream’, Archival Science 9 (2009): 71–86. House of Commons Library, ‘Unemployment by Ethnic Background’, Briefing Paper, Number 6385, 29 November 2016, http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06385/SN06385.pdf (accessed 20 May 2016). Jeremy Leach, ‘The Poor Perception of Younger People in the UK’, Intergenerational Foundation, 17 August 2011, http://www.if.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2011/08/The_Poor_Perception_of_Younger_People_in_ the_UK_17Aug3.pdf (accessed 15 May 2016). Paul Lewis, Tim Newburn, Matthew Taylor, Catriona Mcgillivray, Aster Greenhill, Harold Frayman, and Rob Proctor, Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder (London: London School of Economics and the Guardian, 2015). Sophie Nield, ‘Siting the People: Power, Protest and Public Space’, in Performing Site-Specific Theatre Politics, Place, Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 219–232. Shiv Malik, ‘“They Think the Youths Go Mental. We Don’t. We Just Want a Job”’, Guardian, 13 August 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/ aug/12/uk-riots-analysis (accessed 1 February 2017). Jack Mills, ‘A Dangerous Figure’, Frieze Blog, 20 August 2013, http://blog. frieze.com/a-dangerous-figure/ (accessed 10 January 2015). Ministry of Justice, ‘Statistical bulletin on the public disorder of 6th–9th August 2011’, gov.uk, 13 September 2012. Available at https://www.gov.uk/govern-

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ment/statistics/statistical-bulletin-on-the-public-disorder-of-6th-9th-august2011%2D%2D2 (accessed 10 September 2015). Ministry of Justice, ‘Statistical Bulletin on the Public Disorder of 6th to 9th August 2011–September 2012 Update’, 13 September 2012, https://www.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/219665/ august-public-disorder-stats-bulletin-130912.pdf (accessed 5 May 2015). José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (London & Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Thomas Mroz and Timothy Savage, ‘The Long-Term Effects of Youth Unemployment’, Journal of Human Resources 41, no. 2 (2006): 259–293. Office for National Statistics, ‘Labour Market Statistics, November 2011’, http:// webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov. uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/november-2011/statistical-bulletin.html (accessed 14 May 2016). Office for National Statistics, ‘Young People in the Labour Market, 2014’, ONS, 5 March 2014, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/ http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_355123.pdf (accessed 27 May 2016). Davide Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’, trans. by Davide Panagia, Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2000): 113–126. Tony Parsons, ‘UK riots: Why Did the Riots Happen? Who Are the Rioters? What Can We do to End This Madness?’, Daily Mail, 13 August 2011, http://www. mir r or.co.uk/news/uk-news/uk-riots-why-did-the-riots-happenwho-147237 (accessed 20 February 2017). Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). Stephen Reicher, ‘The Psychology of Crowd Dynamics’, in Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes, ed. by Michael A.  Hogg, Scott Tindale (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 2001), 182–208. Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott, ‘You Won’t Prevent Future Riots by Disregarding the Psychology of Crowds’, Guardian, 19 August 2011, http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/19/riots-psychologycrowds (accessed 15 March 2015). Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance Sanctions  – decisions made to June 2013’, November 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/255176/sanctions-nov-2013.pdf (accessed 16 April 2015). HM Government, ‘The Jobseeker’s Allowance (Supervised Jobsearch Pilot Scheme) Regulations 2014’, www.legislation.gov.uk, http://www.legislation. gov.uk/uksi/2014/1913/contents/made (accessed 16 April 2015).

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Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1776). Somerset House, ‘Home Page’, http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/ (accessed 15 May 2016). Alexandra Topping and Patrick Wintour, ‘London Riots: Wandsworth Council Moves to Evict Mother of Charged Boy’, Guardian, 12 August 2011, https:// www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/12/london-riots-wandsworth-council-eviction (accessed 12 April 2017). Rebecca Tunstall, Ruth Lupton, Anne Green, Simon Watmough and Katie Bates, ‘Disadvantaged Young People Looking for Work: A Job in Itself?’, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, October 2012, http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/ young-people-disadvantage-jobseekers-full.pdf (accessed 27 February 2015). Cathy Turner, ‘Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for Site-­ Specific Performance’, New Theatre Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2004): 373–390. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009). Robert Walker and Elaine Chase, ‘Adding to the Shame of Poverty: The Public, Politicians and the Media’, Poverty 148 (2014): 9–13. Gareth White, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Jay Wiggan, ‘Telling Stories of 21st Century Welfare: The UK Coalition Government and the Neo-liberal Discourse of Worklessness and Dependency’, Critical Social Policy 32, no. 3 (2012): 383–405. Diego Zavaleta, The Ability to Go About Without Shame (University of Oxford: Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, 2009).

CHAPTER 5

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

Welfare legislation in the UK has become increasingly intertwined with, and oppressively enacted upon, human bodies. The unemployed body has become a contested site on which relationships between state power, neoliberal ideologies, and labour practices are played out. At a point when social welfare is being dismantled by the political ideology of austerity, socially committed performance can function to support the agency of participants in challenging policy and re-establishing the status of subjecthood to their precarious bodies. Here, I turn to the body as a conceptual lens through which to interrogate how unemployed identities are regulated and unpack the politics of arts practices that stage unemployed individuals hard at work. Drawing on two projects—Tangled Feet’s One Million (2013) and Helix Art’s MindFULL (2013)—I analyse the intersection of applied performance, biopolitics, and productivity in arts practices that engage a group explicitly identified as unproductive. A consideration of biopolitics, articulated by Michel Foucault as a politics ‘situated and exercised at the level of life’, underscores how applied performance engages with and represents participants’ bodies in a punitively regulated welfare landscape.1 Examining practices within applied performance and the specificities of the unemployed as a participant group illuminates how publics and policies continue to value individuals by their body’s capacity to work and/or their embodied relationship to labour

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activity. In particular, I consider three different intersections of productivity, the body, and labour that emerge in such arts practices: (1) the radical potential of reanimating unemployed bodies as productive in performance; (2) the problematic valorisation of labour that can emerge in participatory arts practices when people, marginalised by capitalist labour markets, are staged as productive through embodied performance; and (3) how depictions of unproductive bodies that reject, and are rejected by, reductive state definitions of labour might present new models of resistance in arts practices. Applied performance therefore offers both a practice through which to explore the politics of staging particular bodies as productive and provides opportunities for alternative representations of the dis/embodied labour of unemployed individuals. As such, this chapter examines how performance operates in relation to the biopolitics of the welfare state, asking in what ways arts practices subvert and intersect with embodied regimes of productivity in a capitalist regime. I am particularly concerned with how two central tenets underpinning biopolitics—namely, the discipline of the body and the regulation of the population—align with labour and welfare regimes and their representation in applied performance. Following Foucault, Thomas Lemke describes biopower as a state apparatus, a form of governance which ‘aims at the administration and regulation of life processes on the level of populations. It focuses on living beings rather than on legal subjects—or, to be more precise, it deals with legal subjects that are at the same time living beings’.2 This dual management of legal and living beings offers a useful way into considering the life governing systems embedded within welfare policy and the bodily practice involved in the performances I examine. Analysing the welfare state as a practice of biopolitics exposes the acute contention between the living body of the unemployed individual and the legal status of the benefit claimant. As precarity and mortality increasingly pervade the UK benefit system, my biopolitical focus is combined with a necropolitical analysis, wherein as political scientist Achille Mbembe proposes, ‘[t]o exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power’.3 A consideration of necropolitics thus allows for an exploration of the systems of power involved in the increasingly threatened corporality of unemployed individuals. I mobilise these two concepts in tandem to critique the UK welfare system and concurrently reveal the potential resistances and political ambiguities of the body in the performances I examine.

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In state and media discourses, unemployed citizens are subject to constant corporeal misrepresentations. These typically manifest in relation to states of action or inaction, as well as systemic miscategorisations that classify the body in terms of what the state recognises as fitness or unfitness to work. Given these two inflections, throughout this analysis I draw on the terms ‘body’ and ‘bodies’ to refer to unemployed subjects. In reappropriating these terms, I intend to demonstrate how people can strategically deploy their own bodies in performance as a tool to regain subjecthood.

One Million and MindFULL: An Overview Established in 2003, Tangled Feet are a theatre ensemble led by Co-artistic Directors Kat Joyce and Nathan Curry. The company have ‘developed a trademark style of experimental performance, which always begins from a process of physical improvisation and play’; they have created projects ‘inside theatres, on high streets, in fields, in playgrounds, on scaffolding, on rivers’.4 As such, Tangled Feet explore new sites for performance and seek out innovative ways to stage encounters between spectators and performers. Since 2012, their work has been increasingly concerned with micro and macro acts of care, dependency, and social change (e.g. All That’s Solid Melts into Air, 2012; Push, 2013; Care, 2015; Kicking and Screaming, 2015–16; Emergency, 2016). The company has been supported by a range of funders including Arts Council England (ACE), Big Lottery, the Foyle Foundation, and the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation.5 The central production in Tangled Feet’s 2013 Take to the Streets summer season, One Million was a large-scale outdoor performance spectacle which fused drama, live music, poetry, dance, and acrobatics performed over two nights in June 2013 at London’s Greenwich+ Docklands International Festival. These two free shows, whose performers included 80 young people who were unemployed at the time of the performance and 10 professional performers, were attended by an audience of 4000 people each night.6 Tangled Feet articulated that ‘the spectre of youth unemployment’ was central to the performance, as the company explored questions such as ‘[w]hat does it mean for a generation to face the start of their working lives at the time of economic recession?’ and ‘[h]ow does it feel to be caught in the unemployment trap, locked out of the labour market, denied the opportunity to contribute to society?’7 The company sought out a diverse range of participants who were interested in

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performance and had been affected by youth unemployment. Participants were drawn from Cardboard Citizens, Millennium Performing Arts College, Wanstead High School, The Big House Theatre Company, One Youth Dance, Greenwich University, Middlesex University, E15 Drama School, and A New Direction.8 In addition, Tangled Feet also worked with 30 independent participants unaffiliated with a performance company. The company also recruited nine paid interns for the production who ‘undertook bespoke 4-week work-experience placements, embedded within the core creative team’.9 This facilitated individuals gaining experience in production and creative roles such as directing, technician, design, and participation roles. Arts Council England (ACE) was the main funder of the Take to the Streets season project, with a £100,000 Grant for the Arts.10 One Million also received a £20,000 commission from Greenwich+Docklands International Festival along with grants from the Foyle Foundation (£5000) and the Garrick Charitable Trust (£5000), alongside a range of individual donations and smaller trusts and grants funding. The total cost of the Take to the Streets season was £177,000.11 The production took place outdoors in Greenwich’s Artillery Square (London) on scaffolds creating one central tower and two giant moving staircases, which traversed through the audience. An extensive lighting rig was complemented by torches, glow sticks, luminescent costuming, and fireworks, all contributing to the creation of a carnivalesque atmosphere. Focusing on youth unemployment in the UK, performers frenetically clambered around the set enacting choreographed vignettes depicting fierce competition for vacancies, bin-bound CVs, and stressful interviews. The production’s aesthetic of sparse steel scaffolds and functional metal frames invoked a lost industrial past that continues to negatively effect the UK labour market. This mechanised set served as a trace of labour market histories, alluding to the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist systems of labour: the young performers manoeuvred around the industrial set with vitality and yet the scenes that occurred on this steel framework were concerned with a lack of access to office work or competition for jobs in the service industries. In this post-industrial context, One Million rematerialised labour as a physical and embodied action. Audiences were both contained by this scaffolding, free to move around it, and required to be responsive to shifting sections set as it moved across the square. The performance contained no dialogue; scenes were entirely gestural. Poet Anthony Anaxagorou’s live lone voice, laced with something of the shamanic, was projected over speakers and stood in contrast to this mass of

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performing bodies. His stirring words, set to an original electro-orchestral score composed by Guy Connelly and Nick Gill, narrated disparate journeys through the job market. This live music oscillated between monotonous synth and rousing vocal harmonies. The piece concluded with fireworks exploding over a roaring crowd, a moment of jubilation, a message of intent. One Million is examined alongside the arts project MindFULL, a collaboration between Helix Arts, Meerkat Films, and the Tyneside branch of mental health organisation Mind. Lucy Fairley founded Helix Arts on Wearside in 1983 to increase public participation in the arts.12 Now based in North Shields and led by Chief Executive Catherine Hearne, the not-­ for-­profit business comprises a team of creative producers who ‘broker collaborations between the public, voluntary and private sectors and talented artists’ in order to facilitate projects across a range of art forms in the North East.13 Helix Arts are an ACE National Portfolio Organisation who predominantly work with unemployed adults and employed people on low incomes, children and young people at risk, those with special educational needs, and people with poor health. Based in Gateshead, the MindFULL project was undertaken with claimants in receipt of a form of state financial support known as Employment Support Allowance (ESA), given to those unable to work due to illness or disability. During the project, participants shared their experiences of accessing ESA in multi-art form workshops including poetry, visual art, and sound design, but the central outcome of the project was the participant-led film But I’m Here for Mental Health. This film depicted the participants’ stressful encounters with the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), the state’s assessment process of evaluating people’s fitness to work.14 As such, it intended to make the inscrutable—and sometimes punishing—experience of the Work Capability Assessment more visible by following three characters (created as a composite of the group’s experiences) through the WCA, from filling out the initial claim form to attending an assessment centre and, finally, receiving a decision letter. These composite characters were produced by the lead practitioner based on experiences collected through workshop sessions, written testimony, and individual interviews. The scenes in the film are short and largely set in the institutional space of the assessment centre depicted with an insipid colour palette, evoking a familiar bureaucratic aesthetic. The interior experiences of the claimant characters are narrated as voiceovers, enabling us to see their experiences unfold but rarely hear them engage in dialogue. The script was collaboratively written

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by the participants and Helix Arts and shot with professional actors in order to preserve the anonymity of participants.15 The project was supported by Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) North and a grant from the Millfield House Foundation and released to coincide with the publication of the Litchfield Review, an independent review of WCA, and screened at Northumbria University for an invited audience of local MPs and employment service providers.16 The film won the award for Best Factual Non Broadcast at the 2013 Royal Television Society North East Awards.

Visibility, Productivity, and Gestural Defiance As I outline in Chaps. 2 and 4, the collapse of the youth labour market coupled with a growth in unpaid internships and underemployment created a hostile landscape for young people seeking work, with over 950,000 16–24-year-olds registered unemployed in 2013.17 This was accompanied by increasing demands that claimants work for their benefits, particularly those young people who, as popular rhetoric asserted, had not yet learned the value of hard work through participation in the labour market. In 2015, then Chancellor George Osborne announced that the UK government’s Earn or Learn Taskforce would remove housing support from those under 21 and introduce a policy of mandatory unpaid community work as soon as young people access benefits.18 Further, Osborne stated that 16–24-year-olds in employment would not receive the new National Living Wage (£7.20  in 2015) but remain on the basic Minimum Wage (£6.70 in 2015). The term National Living Wage intends to more overtly recognise the cost of living, and the cost of the reproduction of labourers, in the payment of the labourer. In actuality, such an invocation of ‘living beings’ in the language deployed by the state to delineate the labour of particular citizens through a National Living Wage is indicative of the biopolitical governance of bodies in state welfare and labour mechanisms. That is, the phrasing indicates a management of labour as a kind of living process and a system governed by the needs of bodies to sustain themselves. Further, the institutionalised differentiation of wages by age demarcates some living labour, a term deployed by Karl Marx to articulate ‘labour-power in action’, as more proximal to living than others.19 The exclusion of young people from the National Living Wage linguistically conceives the young unemployed as less than alive via their wage status and consequently depreciated labour power. Conservative MP Matt Hancock

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defended the move by claiming young workers were not ‘productive’ enough to warrant the higher wage.20 State-sanctioned assertions of productivity, which are defined by the narrow parameters of the labour market, thus become bound up with assertions of liveness or deadness, or rather bound up with the value of some lives over others. One Million was imbued with the ambivalences surrounding young unemployed bodies embedded in this landscape of inferred unproductivity and dehumanising labour practices. The piece highlighted the possible intervention this kind of arts practice offers in making present alternative embodied representations of young people. One Million demonstrated participants’ dynamism as creative agents but also as potential employees, highlighting their vitality as labourers. A recurring motif of ladders in the production attested to the struggle to gain employment, to get on the first rung of the ladder, or even to have a clear career trajectory once signified through working ones way up the ladder (see Fig.  5.1). One sequence depicted the cast scrambling up the central scaffold, racing to the top but falling before they could reach it, others grasped at dangling ladders attached to bungee ropes which were agonisingly out of reach or unstable. One acrobat repeatedly clambered up a pole but always slipped before

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

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reaching the top. Either side of the central frame, the two staircases were overrun with performers, cyclically racing one another to the top only to be pulled down before they could reach the central column. All around, bodies fell from the structure. This repeated gestural act indicates the production’s central message: young people are, desperately and creatively, trying to engage the labour market; it is the flawed frameworks they are bound to which are failing them. Carrie Noland’s concept of ‘embodied gestures’ explores the gesture as providing access to a kind of agency that might challenge dominant conceptions: Kinaesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in performance that account for larger innovations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained.21

In One Million, the participants’ bodies move in a resistant or even deviant manner to the ways those bodies move as constructed within hegemonic welfare discourse. As Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry note, Noland’s analysis suggests ‘sensations become available when holding a gesture and can produce dissonances that alter conditioning, unsettle bodily habits and routines, challenge discourse and, as a result, mobilise transformations’.22 I therefore propose that the curious inversion evident in participatory arts, the experience of participants in kinesthetically engaging with the world in a manner irregular to their ‘norm’, provides an opportunity to reorient their bodies in relation to labour, to produce this ‘dissonance’, and, indeed, ‘to mobilise transformations’ in both their behaviour and how that is witnessed by others. As an applied performance piece, One Million provided an opportunity for participants to reorient their bodies in relation to labour and to unsettle discourses of inactivity and unproductivity which define the bodily behaviours of the young unemployed. The kind of agency this might produce is twofold, in that these gestural repertoires advocate for unemployed lives as productive, in opposition to welfare discourses that construct those bodies as un- or not-yet productive. Concurrently, however, the performance also offered an overt embodiment of the labour processes at play in a neoliberal economy where value and agency are entwined with the productivity of the body. By undertaking a productive yet ambiguous performance, such bodies undermine the central nexus of relationships between labour, economic value, and the

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generation of capital that underpins the biopolitical domain of a neoliberal economy. The built scaffolds required participants to demonstrate their vitality by climbing and sliding their way across the performance space, which was itself mobile and dynamic. Artistic Director of Tangled Feet, Nathan Curry, commented on the power of the performance to contest public perceptions of young people as lethargic, disengaged, and apathetic (Fig. 5.2): When you see someone perform you see their potential […]. It’s not only about witnessing them full stop, but witnessing their potential, they are creative, vibrant and exciting opportunities. So one thing is witnessing them standing there and being present; the other thing is witnessing what they can do.23

Seeing these bodies, so often defined by their inactivity, performing their labour power undermined their categorisation as inactive. As Judith

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

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Butler notes in her call to reconfigure discourses of vulnerability as practices of resistance: There is a plural and performative bodily resistance at work that shows bodies being acted upon by economic and social policies that are decimating livelihoods. But these bodies, in demonstrating this precarity, are also resisting those very powers.24

By depicting performers navigating an overbearing mobile structure and at times falling from the scaffolding, in One Million participants perform acts of defiance while also potentially modelling the precarisation of labour which permeates the creative industries. More broadly, the production overtly performed the precarity of the bodies in public space, enacting the oppression and resistance of the young, as participants underscored the labour policies which are ‘decimating livelihoods’ but also, in their constant return to and attempt to scale the scaffold, demonstrated their own persistence in this context. Alongside the challenge to dominant representations of young unemployed people as unskilled and lazy, the production offered a space for collective representation and for young bodies to gather and to demonstrate. Resonating with my reflection on A Dangerous Figure in Chap. 4, Curry noted the importance of participatory arts projects in providing young unemployed people with a space in which to gather: it was very much about making a visual representation because part of the problem is that it is an invisible thing and [the production is] going, ‘Here it is have a look’. […] It gets to the stage where you’re one of so many but it’s so many, it’s a million, it’s not as if it’s a hundred and you can go and find them […] where those places are for them to meet and be.25

One Million brought together and celebrated these isolated and dispersed bodies, creating a critical mass which, though present in the statistics, is materially absent from public space. As Tangled Feet note in their funding application to ACE, their large-scale and immersive performance style creates an affect ‘of community, adrenalin and celebration of human spirit’.26 This is represented in participant feedback that included comments like ‘it felt like a family’, ‘sense of togetherness’, and ‘it feels empowering to move the same movements of such a large group of people all at the same time’.27 The materiality of the performance in bringing such a mass of

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bodies together was significant to the affect of the performance given the isolation often associated with non-working individuals. Applied and participatory performance of this scale, in being able to choreograph mass collective movements across a large number of participants in order to enact unity and a group identity, is therefore able to make an embodied intervention in experiences of isolation. The collectivity created by the performance extended beyond the cast, as the immersive aspects of the performance enveloped the audience in the action. This invitation to be part of a collective experience was amplified by the provoking climax of the piece, where Anaxagorou directly addressed the audience, In times of austerity we must walk each other through, join lives, solder our hearts in solidarity […] look around you, everything is here, alive, this is all we need, a mighty stand expressed in numbers, so go ahead and unite to take back what has always been yours.28

When I saw the performance in Greenwich, this scene was accompanied by shouts from a visibly stirred audience and a feverish soundscape created by the band, as the cast encircled the audience, glow sticks aloft, creating a moment of visible, dissenting community, a body of people taking a stand. In their application to ACE, Tangled Feet identified that they wanted the performance to end with their cast of young performers ‘feeding power and energy into an optimistic final moment of unity and cohesion’.29 In Anaxagorou’s speech and the accompanying dynamic movements of the participants and rousing music from the orchestra, this affect was powerfully invoked. More broadly, One Million required the audience to invest their energy in participants’ narratives as they actively negotiated the scaffolds and pursue the action. The performance provided a powerful political intervention by resisting concerns typically and discriminatively relating to the gathering of young people in public, and opening up an agentic space that presented the productivity of young bodies, both for participants themselves and also for those who witnessed them.

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Participation and Payment While I have thus far argued for participation as a means to challenge hegemonic discourse, I also acknowledge the possibility that arts practice engaging with unemployed participants risks reinforcing what feminist sociologist Kathi Weeks has called the ‘reification and depoliticization’ of work.30 In performing the vitality and artistic productivity of young people, One Million inherently valorised active labour, resulting in potentially problematic notions of productivity remaining unchallenged. The promotion of participation in arts projects that reproduce unreflexive discourses of creative forms of productivity resonates with governmental support for active labour market policies which ‘enforce [benefits] conditionality on active job search and participation in measures to improve employability’.31 In the UK these measures include controversial initiatives like the Work Programme, Universal Credit, and the aforementioned tough sanctioning process, which similarly emphasise the implicit value in activity.32 In her critical analysis of work, Weeks cites Jean Baudrillard: ‘a spectre haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity’.33 This tethering of imagination and productivity underpins applied arts practices which prioritise the idea of active participation. Here, the performance apparatus of participatory arts projects potentially sates public desire to bear witness to the unemployed body in a state of labour. Given the growth of exploitative internships, which are increasingly prolific in the creative and cultural industries, the reparations for participants involved in One Million also merit investigation as both a consideration of the exploitation of unemployed bodies and a means of addressing value exchange in applied performance.34 The unemployed body engaged in acts of unpaid labour is a regular and required feature of applied performance projects. As Nicholas Ridout’s asserts, volunteered performance is ‘not-not work’.35 Thus, a particular consideration of engaging the unemployed in such activity returns focus to the ambiguous ethical terrain of participatory arts projects: what does it mean to be complicit with the privileging of active labour and the use of volunteered labour? This is particularly acutely felt when working with participants who have been deemed socially and legally non-­working individuals. As a performance, One Million chimes with Claire Bishop’s argument that the participation of marginalised groups in art projects often ‘assumes that the poor can only engage physically, while the middle classes

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have the leisure to think and critically reflect. [This] reinstates the prejudice by which working class activity is restricted to manual labour’.36 As Bishop identifies, when undertaking participatory project with groups such as the unemployed, there is a risk of reinforcing the commodification and activation of poor bodies in the service economy. If we are to remain alert to the potentially exploitative nature of participation, it is useful to reflect on forms of value exchange that operate in participatory performance. In producing One Million, Tangled Feet constructed a complex mixed economy of labour. First, there were the 80 young unemployed participants who were, as Curry stated, ‘[p]aid a very small amount of money […]. It wasn’t minimum wage, it was just about going “you’re here, we witness that”’.37 These participants were joined by ten professional performers and a further eight young people, who had been unemployed, to undertake roles on the production team. These contracted workers, despite being paid professional rates at this time, were (in common with freelance agents in the creative economy) negotiating their own positions of precarity and underemployment. So, the project operated as an employer but also a trainer, with both financial and experiential modes of remuneration being enacted depending on labourers’ specific circumstances. Indeed, remuneration of participants was a contentious area of consideration in a number of the projects I discuss, and the navigation of such concerns by artists illuminates the material interventions these projects make alongside their artistic objectives. This exposes the unique economies of participation that operate within applied performance practice. For example, Immediate Theatre, whose employability intervention is part of the Talent Match programme I discussed in Chap. 2, shifted their approach to remuneration as their project developed and in response to funders’ intentions. Training Co-ordinator at Immediate Theatre Chloe Jones expressed that the company had initially adopted a similar approach to financial incentives as Tangled Feet, but after establishing a core company, they began to pay participants ten pounds per hour because, as Jones states, ‘do you know what, you’re here, you’re working, you’re acting, you’re developing a project. So we need to respect your skills and your time’.38 This desire to recognise the presence of individuals, and their status as creators, at an arts project echoes the sentiments of Curry and other practitioners I have spoken with. Further, Jones pointed out that

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we gave them food vouchers, most of them wanted food vouchers which is what they got, like a ten pound Sainsbury’s voucher. It’s not even like we were just giving them cash, they wanted food so we were like cool, that’s what we’ll do.39

This desire from participants to be paid in food vouchers highlights the basic needs that the young people involved in Talent Match, and more broadly the financially struggling unemployed, have in terms of access to food for themselves and their families. These examples from Immediate Theatre and Tangled Feet demonstrate the contribution that applied performance can make in offering financial incentives to support individuals in communities who need it. Community arts projects can and do often valuably invest in material provisions for participants which exceed the artistic objectives of a project and appeal to the supportive structures embedded in such work. Yet the response of London Youth, strategic managers of Talent Match funding, was that the National Lottery did not allocate funding to be spent in that way; incentives could be given but not money or food vouchers in exchange for attendance.40 The distinctions drawn between payment and incentive in this kind of participatory performance illuminate the ambiguous relationship between work and participation in applied performance economies.41 This ambivalence is particularly acute when engaging unemployed individuals, prompting considerations around when such participation and incentives bleed into constructions of payment and work.42 This is important because it brings notions of reciprocity into focus in this type of performance practice and offers another way for scholars and practitioners to reflect on the type of labour that participants are undertaking and what the benefit is for those individuals involved. The financial support of unemployed participants is necessary to enable engagement with a group who are often navigating difficult economic situations. In feedback to ACE, Tangled Feet acknowledged that they hoped to apply learning from the One Million project in order to improve their own mode of participant payment in future projects to support participants who might face certain financial obstacles: The main areas for improvement would lie in learning how to best support the harder to reach participants with financial incentives and much more practical and emotional support. […] It became apparent quite quickly when working with young people from Big House and Cardboard Citizens

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that we needed to find a new angle and provide a lot more financial support in order to make the performance opportunity a valid one. In the future we would build in more financial and practical resources in order to make this happen.43

It is crucial that such a careful consideration of how to better support the engagement of participants who are acutely exposed to the financial, material, and emotional demands of unemployment is fostered in participatory arts organisations. By offering socially and materially supported routes into engagement, participatory performance can ensure representations of these individuals are broadened and understanding of their experience is deepened through offering them access to cultural sites and public platforms from which to speak. In the combination of employment statuses included in One Million, Tangled Feet presented a complex network of different labourers. Following Ridout’s Passionate Amateurs, I argue that placing those professional and amateur bodies in the same public space problematises the distribution of labour in contemporary society, both in the performance’s content and its very form. As Ridout comments, These are moments when politics might break out, not so much because of an absence of work or labour […] but rather because the terms upon which the theatre is made […] unsettle our capacity to distinguish between work and nonwork, poesis and praxis, the professional and the amateur.44

This blurring of distinctions between paid labour and participation was actively sought through the casting of the ‘professional’ performers who were all in the 16–24 age bracket of youth unemployment. This was particularly difficult as Tangled Feet’s interim report to ACE notes, it is ‘hard to recruit circus performers under the age of 25—as many of them are still in training at this age’.45 However, Tangled Feet persevered due to their determination that the circus performers were indistinguishable from the participant performers. This was a central performance strategy of the piece, as Curry recounts, You don’t know where the main cast ends and the participants start. So you might see someone doing something amazingly skilful on top of a bit of scaffolding and you might think it’s a young unemployed person or it might be a professional gymnast.46

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The collective performance of these bodies undermines the objective exclusion of people from labour markets and any assumptions audiences might make as to which bodies were productive and which unproductive. The employed are indistinguishable from ‘passionate amateurs’ on the one hand demonstrating their capability to enact labour and so testify to their worth within the workforce, yet on the other producing value beyond the financial or transactional in demonstrating the joy and activism of the non-­ professional performer. The critical potential of participation valorising productivity remains ambiguous; however, I argue that One Million sought to reimagine a different, more democratic, approach to labour. As cultural geographer David Harvey notes, ‘the transformative and creative capacities of the labourer always carry the potentiality […] to fashion an alternative mode of production, exchange, and consumption’.47 It is here that we can see the resistant potential of the performance of the unemployed body presented as a critical mass and in tandem with the paid labourer. Such projects with the unemployed are uniquely positioned to demonstrate ‘the creative capacities of the [non-]labourer’ and so present different modes of ‘production, exchange, and consumption’. In advocating for the payment or remuneration of participants for their labour in creating applied performance projects, I might be perceived as seeking to imbricate such labour within the boundaries of productivity under capitalism. However, I contend that rewarding such labour offers new routes through, or around, the capitalist regulation of working bodies, to instead acknowledge as socially valuable different forms of embodied labour undertaken by ‘unproductive’ citizens. A more sustained engagement with applied theatre’s labour economies is vital to ensuring an equitable practice. One Million operates through making this alternative productivity acutely visible through performing bodies; in the following section, I explore how other ‘alternative modes of production’, that depend on obscuring participants’ bodies, are developed and deployed by Helix Arts.

Traversing Visibility and Invisibility and Countering Categorisation In contemporary economic and political spheres, the contestation of non-­ working bodies is acutely concerned with their categorisation through assessments of individuals’ corporeal and cognitive fitness to participate in

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capitalist work regimes. Under the spectre of capitalism, sickness or disability is generally defined as the incapacity to perform productive work within a particular labour system. In reflecting on the productivity of bodies in relation to performance and to social welfare, it is crucial to consider how the labour of people accessing disability benefits is made visible by the state and in performance practices. Drama and film project MindFULL is a useful counterpoint to One Million, offering different strategies for navigating the construction of particular unemployed bodies in dominant political and media discourse. While One Million presented a heightened physicalised performance of labour in which gestural resistance could be performed, in MindFULL participants’ bodies did not appear in the final creative output. But I’m Here for Mental Health is a short film, written in collaboration with participants who were claiming disability benefits, depicting their experiences of government fitness to work assessments. While emerging directly from participants’ stories, characters being developed from a kind of collaging of these experiences, paid actors performed in the film rather than the participants themselves. Further, the weight of the film’s narrative lies in voiceovers and interior monologues rather than the speech of characters on screen. These aesthetic choices specifically challenge the voyeurism that accompanies ESA claimants, those people claiming benefit due to illness or disability. This project invokes a more explicit investigation of applied performance and necropolitics given the acute mortality, which I will outline below, ascribed to ESA claimants by welfare policies in the UK. But I’m Here for Mental Health, intended to raise awareness of issues faced by claimants, particularly those suffering from mental health issues, who were required to undertake the Work Capability Assessment. In doing so they were engaging with a benefit (formerly Invalidity/ Incapacity Benefit, now encompassed within Employment Support Allowance) with a history of traversing visibility and invisibility, of reclassifying claimant bodies to fit social and political agendas. An overt example of this is the Conservative government’s instrumentalisation of the benefit after they dismantled the UK coal industry. During the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government colluded with GPs to direct claimants onto Incapacity Benefit rather than unemployment benefit in order to maintain a perceived lower level of unemployment despite the collapse of traditional industries.48 Local GPs were encouraged to put miners on to Incapacity Benefit, and indeed many of them assumed it was in their patients’ interests, given that a number of them had picked

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up various health issues during their working careers and it provided a much needed and more financially lucrative option for them than Jobseeker’s Allowance. However, this also worked to the advantage of the then government who needed to demonstrate their ability to reduce the level of unemployment recorded; this benefit provided a loophole which enabled this reduction of unemployment numbers. Those in receipt of sickness benefit are not counted in either of the national data sets for unemployment: the claimant count (the number of people receiving unemployment related benefits) or in the International Labour Organization measure (figures derived from the Labour Force Survey). As claimants have been deemed unable to seek or participate in work, they are not included in the pool of potential labourers; thus, the statistics of unemployment can be manipulated in order to obscure the true depth of labour market crises. Unemployment figures fell from 11.3% in December 1985 to 6.9% in December 1989. Beatty, Fothergill, and Powell note that the same period is marked with a surge in ‘permanent sickness’ across mining communities. During this period, those placed on Incapacity Benefit were not required to meet regularly with an advisor in the same way other claimants might be. They were what the service termed ‘parked’ on the benefit, rarely seen by the employment services at all, both in terms of data and in terms of actual face-to-face interaction; they became ‘the hidden unemployed’.49 This is indicative of politicians’ mobilisation of statistics in order to generate a narrative which is favourable to them. This literal ‘doctoring’ of figures and diversion of people on to sickness benefits has been termed by Beatty et al. ‘the largest single distortion to [unemployment] data’.50 Further, this is not simply a historical account of an issue confined to the late 1980s; their research found that still, in 2004, there were nearly five times the number of people of working age claiming Incapacity Benefit than Jobseeker’s Allowance in coalfield areas.51 More broadly speaking, beyond the example of mining communities, Incapacity Benefit claims have consistently risen over the last 30 years with 2.3 million claimants in 2013 (more than double the figures of the early 1980s) as successive governments have failed to challenge, and in times of recession followed, the precedent set by the Tory leadership in the 1980s.52 While But I’m Here for Mental Health primarily focuses on the financial support of those who are unfit for work, the film also attests to systemic shifts in the provision of welfare more broadly: the disappearance of the state in the delivery of welfare provision. As I explored in Chap. 2,

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private-public partnerships had been apparent within the employment service for some years and ESA provides a neat microcosm of this. The introduction of ESA in 2008 marked an evolution in the delivery of the benefit; its implementation sought to save money by combining all illness-related benefits and, more crucially, to reconceive what was defined as ‘fit for work’. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) assumed from the outset that there would be a 23% reduction in customers qualifying for the benefit.53 Thus, there was a high level of scrutiny around government policy and ESA claimants during this process. Since this period, there has been a persistent scapegoating of sickness-­ related claimants, repeatedly positioning them in Coalition and Conservative government rhetoric as the epitome of our ‘something for nothing culture’. Ministers persistently proposed the illegitimacy of the majority of cases, making claims such as ‘more than 50 per cent of decisions for Disability Living Allowance were made simply on the basis of a claim form alone, without any additional medical evidence’.54 However, Parkinson’s UK reviewed the DWP’s own statistics on the matter and lodged a complaint with the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) regarding this statement. UKSA suggested the figure was ‘ambiguous’, revising it to around 10% of claims.55 This further demonstrates the biopolitical performance of statistics, which have become disassociated from the bodies they represent but function to regulate those bodies. Jonathan Portes, a former chief economist at the DWP, and director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, bemoaning a series of government manipulations of data at the time,56 stated: It is very important that ministers should not seek to misrepresent what those stats actually do or don’t show. […] This is, I am afraid, a consistent pattern of trying to draw out of the statistics things which they simply don’t show.57

In performing particular narratives of unemployment discourse, ministers further distort the image of unemployment within the broader public consciousness. In engaging overtly with statistics, the artists involved in One Million and But I’m Here for Mental Health redressed the obfuscation of statistical performance, realigning it with lived embodied experience and relocating it within the communities it mis/represents. Alongside the negative depictions of ESA claimants in public discourse, a stricter sanctioning process, and subsequent acute precarisation of

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unemployed people, in 2012 the government stopped releasing figures outlining the number of claimants who had died within 12 months of undertaking a Work Capability Assessment to reassess their suitability for ESA. This resonates with performance scholar Rebecca Schneider’s extension of Butler’s conceptualisation of precarity, wherein some lives are more vulnerable and less valued than others. Schneider proposes, ‘persons with precarious deaths—persons who may not appear to live or to die, nor appear to count if dead. […] Such beings cannot exist. But do’.58 Having previously denied the existence of data tracking the deaths of ESA claimants, again refusing to count these bodies, in August 2015 the government finally released figures pertaining to these deaths under a Freedom of Information application.59 It revealed that between December 2011 and February 2014, 2380 people had died within a year of being declared ‘fit for work’. Over the same period, a further 7200 people died within a year of being allocated to the Work-Related Activity Group, a categorisation that requires claimants to attend meetings and partake in Work Programme activities, leaving their claim susceptible to sanctions.60 As Frances Ryan points out, ‘[d]eath has become a part of Britain’s benefits system. That is not hyperbole but the reality that the stress caused by austerity has led us to’.61 It is painfully apparent that the struggle for correct corporeal categorisation of the unemployed emerges as indicative of the necropolitical strategies at play in employment policy. In such a climate, to conceive the bodies of unemployed citizens through Butler’s lens of ‘vulnerability’ in relation to state policy is particularly pertinent. Throughout But I’m Here for Mental Health, each of the three characters we encounter, through short and intersecting vignettes, alludes to their ongoing contemplation of suicide. The film depicts one exchange between the character of Alan initially discussing his claim with his mother, remarking ‘sometimes I just don’t know how much longer I can carry on like this’.62 This comment is immediately juxtaposed with his fit-for-work interview and a discussion with the assessor of his claim: ASSESSOR: And do you have any suicidal thoughts? Have you made any— ALAN: Yes. ASSESSOR: Have you made any steps towards actually taking your life? ALAN: No, not recently no. ASSESSOR: So, would you say you had good days?63

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This exchange and the ignorance it depicts regarding mental health, care, and suicide prevention demonstrates the failure of the Work Capability Assessment as a state instrument to engender support for those requiring it due to injury, illness, or disability. Instead the film illuminates the narrow focus of this process to specifically move people into what the state deems as productive employment regardless of their specific need. Unfortunately, the depiction of such experiences in the film aligns with the reality being faced by thousands in the UK since 2010. On 24 September 2013, 60-year-old Michael O’Sullivan committed suicide. His was the first death recorded by the coroner’s office as a direct result of being declared ‘fit for work’.64 Data recorded by the National Health Service has identified that attempted suicides among out-of-work disability benefit claimants increased from 21% in 2007 to 43% in 2014; for female ESA claimants, the figure is 47%.65 This means attempted suicides have more than doubled since the introduction of fit-to-work assessments in 2008. Beyond the character of Alan, throughout But I’m Here for Mental Health, there are references to the anxiety invoked by the process, and the film concludes with the character of June explaining why she has contemplated suicide as a result of her encounters with the welfare system. This support system thus conversely operates as a form of necropolitical governance, in which some lives are exposed to violence due to their perceived non-productivity within the context of a capitalist work regime. The damaging objectification of disabled or sick bodies in unemployment discourse dehumanises respondents; additionally, it resonates with a desire to look at certain bodies. This aligns with cultural theorist and disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson description of the objectification of disability in broader culture as a practice of ‘looking without recognising, a separate stare that refuses to move towards one’s fellow human’.66 Applied to the Work Capability Assessment, Garland-Thomson’s assertion describes the need to perceive the ESA claimant’s body and yet the failure to acknowledge or respond to the person’s needs. The assessment process is underpinned by a policy rhetoric and mechanised bureaucracy that puts human experience at such a distance that claimant populations are constructed as, in Butler’s terms, less than living. In giving voice to the inner narrative of the characters in the film, But I’m Here for Mental Health enables a more complex understanding of claimants to emerge than one entirely anchored in the body. Importantly, as its title makes clear, the film acknowledges the support needs of mental health claimants as well as those with physical disabilities

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in a context where 43% of claimants are accessing the benefit due to ‘mental or behavioural problems’.67 Such claimants are often erased, or worse reproached, by body-focused media rhetoric surrounding ESA due to a desire for the sickness to be visibly embodied and evidenced, and condemnation if this visibility is not consistently and coherently performed. The deeply embedded relationship between capital and the categorisation of the unemployed body is characteristic of a capitalist economy, as David Harvey notes, ‘sickness is defined under capitalism broadly as inability to work’.68 But I’m Here for Mental Health demonstrates that understandings of sickness have become increasingly contested in relation to assessment as fit or unfit to work within a capitalist system. The film asserts the social, political, and moral right of a body to be sick and argues for a broader understanding of sickness than is currently accepted by the state. Further, the end of the film notes that ‘[t]he successful appeal rate’ for people with a mental health problem who had been deemed fit for work ‘stands at over 40%’.69 In providing more nuanced understandings of ‘the healthy body’, the film challenges the state regulation of bodily ‘fitness’ in relation to labour. MindFULL allowed participants to communicate the less visible effects of their illnesses and/or disability and also provided the narrative scope—lacking from popular, soundbite-driven rhetoric—to display the differing experiences of physicality they each encounter. This aligns with Garland-­Thomson’s call for a ‘visual politics of deliberatively structured self-­disclosure’.70 Participants are thus able to reclaim the narrative of their illness and attempt to disseminate this narrative, mobilising it in service to their own agenda. Similarly to A Dangerous Figure, explored in Chap. 4, But I’m Here for Mental Health represents the exertion of form filling, particularly depicting the emotional labour that this task creates, as all three characters portrayed in the film struggle to complete the form due to various physical and mental health impediments. When I got the form I knew I had to write everything down that I was feeling but because of my hands I had to get me mam to help me do it. She was the only one I could ask. There’s some things your mam just shouldn’t have to hear you say.

This voiceover proceeds a scene of the character of Alan responding to his mother reciting the emotionally empty questions of the assessment form to him. However, when this questionnaire points system format is

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transposed into the intimate dialogue between a mother and her son the disconnect from human interaction and the bodily assessment it attempts to undertake becomes acutely apparent and inevitably becomes more concerned with the mental and emotional impact of the task on claimants. For instance, the mother is seen putting her pen down, rejecting the medium of calculated assessment, looking directly at her son and asking ‘Well, how bad does it get?’ This scene in which Alan admits his suicidal thoughts underscores the inadequacy of the form of forms in attending to the physical and emotional disabilities people are coping with, demonstrating the stark difference in approach of the rigid questioning of the form in contrast to the responsive and caring interaction with the mother. But I’m Here for Mental Health depicts bureaucracy’s cold inadequacy in dealing with the complex nuances of mental health and physical health issues and, by extension, the failure of biopolitical systems of governance to appropriately account for the individual needs of the human, both bodily and emotionally. The proliferation of negative discourse in both statistical representation and policy rhetoric led to a heightened awareness of ESA claimants in the media and a renewed representation of them as ‘scroungers’ and ‘cheats’. In discussion with people involved in MindFULL, one participant articulated how such rhetoric affects him: There’s all this thing about scroungers. I didn’t want to be—I’m physically ill and I ended up with a mental health illness. You know, I’m trying to live my life as best I can but you’ve always got in the back of your mind ‘what are [the government] gonna come up with next? How are they going to take more money off you?’ It’s a constant struggle.71

This pervasive rhetoric has serious implications for individuals already dealing with a number of complex health issues. The online site for British newspaper The Mirror provides a microcosm of tabloid framing of this group, a selection of headlines from 2015: ‘Watch Benefit Cheat Who Claimed He was Unable to Walk RUNNING on Football Pitch’,72 ‘“Blind” Benefit Cheats Filmed Texting and Driving in Undercover Police Sting’,73 ‘Benefit Cheat Jailed After Being Caught on Camera DANCING in Rock Band’.74 Here we find the call to (digital) arms made to the public to surveil and capture footage of their fellow citizens in disgraceful states of embodied action, with two headlines even capitalising the verb to underscore the transgression of the action. Garland-Thomson identifies

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that ‘staring can also be a social act that stigmatizes by designating people whose bodies are behaviours cannot readily be absorbed into the visual status quo’.75 Part of the social nature of staring that Garland-Thomson identifies is bound up with staring as a kind of dominance and staring as the assignment of stigma.76 The act of looking creates hierarchies and acts as a form of regulation. The repeated desire is for us to bear witness, to look, through mediated images at the punitive abuses of the system by disability claimants, therefore indicating an attempt to regulate these deviant non-working bodies. If disabled citizens are scrutinised and stigmatised through such a corporeal lens, how then can the bodily practices of participatory performance intervene in this negative framing? Comparing the video of Simon Maher ‘RUNNING’ on a football pitch while coaching a local under 13’s football team with But I’m Here for Mental Health evidences the manner in which participatory arts can build a more nuanced bodily representation of welfare claimants than dominant framing of their physicality allows. The grainy footage of the Maher video is shot from a distance through the gauze of a green wire fence. The image cuts between several instances of Maher running, briskly walking, and turning at speed, all captured through the shaky aesthetic of the ‘home video’. In the corner of the screen, the date and time are logged. There is no sound. The aesthetics bespeak amateur surveillance that seeks to ‘catch out’ and criminalise its subject through the activity of their body. Contrastingly, the high production values and use of actors in the Helix Arts film lend a serious, and thoughtful tone to the work. Through a combination of internal monologue and careful mise-en-scène, the viewer is led through the process of the Work Capability Assessment as perceived by those who experience it. Thus, the Helix Arts film provides a counterimage, a reconfiguration, of the Maher video (and those like it which proliferate in wider culture). As cultural studies scholars Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn note, ‘[c]itizens, activists and conventionally marginalised populations are forging new media literacies and participatory practices and devising new modes of connectivity and expression for engaging with and challenging neoliberal strategies and agendas’.77 This engagement with media literacies enables unemployed individuals to challenge the construction of their physicality through the same forum used by those seeking to criminalise their actions. By deploying the form of the video image and disseminating it digitally across the Internet, Helix Arts locate themselves in the same canon and yet directly opposed to the filmic representations of ESA claimants on various tabloid news sites, thus making its

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argument recognisable and broadly accessible to the same publics. By 2019, the film had been viewed over 25,000 times. Beyond the parameters of disability claimants, as a film But I’m Here for Mental Health also occupies a landscape densely populated with television representations of benefit claimants. These programmes include Benefits Street (Channel 4/Love Productions, 2014–), Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole (Channel 5, 2014–), Britain on Benefits, Britain on the Fiddle (BBC, 2013–), On Benefits and Proud (Channel 4, 2013–), Saints and Scroungers (BBC, 2012–), and Nick and Margaret: We All Pay Your Benefits (BBC, 2013). The alignment of the majority of these programmes with ‘Britain’ interpolates a national duty to identify the deserving and undeserving claimants, vilifying those deemed as taking something from the nation and from you, the viewer. A clear and shared binary emerges across these depictions: individuals either have a parasitic or contributory relationship to the welfare state and these definitions of identity are rigidly set. Episodes of these programmes tend to have a thematic focus, an enforced dramatic arc that emerges from the mundane through pointed editing practices that foreground tropes of criminality, drug addiction, and abuse. Such editing practices regularly serve to narrativise the poverty of particular citizens as a result of their individual flaws, behavioural traits of particular type of person. All of the programmes listed have an off-screen narrator, not from the community being represented but instead cast as a guide to support the viewer to navigate this assumed ‘other’ space. Participation is encouraged, only through the appearance of hashtags at contentious moments, inviting viewers to respond on Twitter. Cameras linger on particularly grey streets, piles of rubbish, and spaces of disrepair. Under the guise of authenticity, people are regularly caught passingly in glimpsing interviews and rarely offered an opportunity of nuanced depiction. Such programmes, while they gesture at reality, only have time for characters not for the lived realities of people under austerity. In her exploration of acts of revolt and the resistant potentiality of those deemed ‘revolting subjects’, sociologist Imogen Tyler identifies the classification of the poor unemployed (among others) across media, culture, and politics as ‘national abjects’.78 They are more than mere stereotypes; the construction of these figures facilitates a discrimination and domination of them and functions as ‘a subjectifying force’.79 The representation of these figures in popular media thus informs unemployed identities and the perceptions of such individuals, but beyond that, as Tyler notes, ‘[t]hese abject figures are ideological conductors mobilized to do the dirty

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work of neoliberal governmentality’.80 These programmes fetishise claimants intensifying of stigmatisation of the poor and unemployed, legitimising devastating welfare reforms, which are fuelled by moral panic that is, in part, incited by such programmes. As Tyler identifies: one of the major consequences of the fabrication of national abjects such as ‘the welfare scrounger’ in public culture is the curtailing of the representational agency of those individuals and groups interpellated by these figures. Symbolic violence is converted into forms of material violence that are embodied and lived.81

Deploying such representational strategies as Benefits Street, and the slew of media depictions similar to it, disempowers the unemployed from publicly advocating for themselves and exposes them to both figurative and actual acts of violence. But I’m Here for Mental Health seeks to invert that morality by identifying the immoral mechanisms of the state which render precariously placed individuals even more vulnerable. Participants in the project are able to undertake their own ‘revolt’, reconstituting the mediatised narrative that is disseminated in television programmes about claimants and presenting a different understanding of the experiences they face. But I’m Here for Mental Health underscores a substantial change in the visibility of sickness benefits. The film highlights both the visibility of its claimants and of those delivering services to them; the hidden unemployed are increasingly viewed and seen as the government recedes into the shadows. What was once a little acknowledged element of the UK benefit system has become a field of deeply contested representations: media, government, and public, in which the fundamental nature of the claimant, and their body, is being debated.

Contesting Categorisation: Non-productive Bodies and Non-productive Performance As disability studies scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder articulate, bodies designated ‘unfit’ by capitalism can be deemed ‘nonproductive bodies’.82 Expanding my discussion of how productivity manifests in applied performance, I now turn to an exploration of how such arts practice might deploy non-productive bodies in ways that subvert or

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illuminate punitive state welfare measures. In their exploration of the radical resistance of disability activism, Mitchell and Snyder argue, whereas traditional theories of political economy tend to stop at the borders of labouring subjects, including potential laborers (i.e., surplus labour pools), the concept of nonproductive bodies expansively rearranges the potentially revolutionary subjects of leftist theory.83

But I’m Here for Mental Health depicts people who are failed by, resistant to, and unaccounted for within the state’s definition of productivity. Such representations demonstrate the revolutionary potential of the figure of the disability claimant in illuminating the state’s increasingly rigid construction of what is required of the labouring body in a capitalist regime. Further, the film demonstrates the broader violence of such a governance of labouring bodies and posits the non-productive body as a revolutionary subject able to acutely expose the state’s abject cruelty. The film represents the assertion of corporal inadequacy through the biopolitical processes deployed by the state to define people as un/fit for work. This evaluation begins with the Capability for Work Questionnaire, which claimants must complete in order to apply and qualify for the benefit. As well as a section for broad descriptions of their illness and a section on mental health and cognitive ability, the questionnaire includes the following: 1. Can you lift at least one of your arms high enough to put something in the top pocket of a coat or jacket while you are wearing it? 2. Can you pick up and move a half litre (one pint) carton full of liquid? 3. Can you use either hand to: • Press a button, such as a telephone keypad • Turn the pages of a book • Pick up a £1 coin • Use a pen or pencil • Use a suitable keyboard or mouse?84 Responses to the questionnaire are scored in accordance with a points system, which is combined with claimants’ point score at their face-to-face assessment. Assessors do not take into account claimants’ medical records or seek information from their GPs. Consequently, there is an acute

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surveillance of the body’s ability to undertake a series of predetermined embodied movements but a complete refusal to see or engage with the individual’s actual corporeality, physiology, or mental health. In such a perverse assessment arena, the absence of bodies from But I’m Here for Mental Health counters the minutiae of the claimant’s physical encounter in ESA discourse. Corporeal absence from the film underscores the absence of the actual body from the assessment process. Further, this absence advocates for the need to privilege the narrative life of claimants, rather than the skewed presentation of the material body in ESA provision, in order to reconstitute the subject as living and support the agency of participants in challenging policy. One scene depicts Alan attending his face-to-face assessment and undergoing a series of physical tasks in which he mirrors the movements of his assessor: holding his arms out, turning his hands over, touching his toes. He does not speak in the scene but is instructed by the voice of his assessor. In an accompanying voiceover, Alan explains his work history and health condition to viewers. This creates a clash of discourses, one in which the character’s narrative can be heard and one in which he can only respond on a purely bodily level. The juxtaposition in this scene is pointedly located. For example, Alan explains, voiceover: assessor:

I was unfairly dismissed. Can you touch your toes?85

The film evidences the rendering mute of this community as, within the discursive space of the assessment, a voyeuristic view of the body is privileged. This resonates with the singular voice narrating One Million: in both instances participants are voiceless. However, in But I’m Here for Mental Health, there are no acts of gestural defiance; indeed, the completely compliant body alongside the accompanying narration reveals the character’s acute anguish. The questions in the Capability for Work Questionnaire and the scene depicting the assessment construct the body and its work in the form of mechanised labour, via a series of inorganic, routinised, decontextualised processes, rather than as the dynamic and bodily enactment of productive labour. The resistance of the ‘non-productive’ body to align with state definitions of fitness to work is represented throughout But I’m Here for Mental Health. Later in the film we see characters at their face-to-face assessments being interviewed about their capacity to complete a different set of

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embodied actions. Actors perform characters perceived non-­productiveness in response to the tasks outlined by the state, while assessors persistently insist their ability to complete these tasks, to be productive. ASSESSOR:

Right, did you have a cup of tea when you woke up this morning? ALAN: A cup of tea, yes I did yes. ASSESSOR: And did you make it yourself? ALAN: I’ll live on my own you see so there’s no one else too. ASSESSOR: How full would you say the kettle was? ALAN: How full? ALAN: Well was it full to the top or half full? CLAIMANT: Half full? About half full. Yes half full. ALAN: And do you do your own shopping? ALAN: [Internal] it’s not full to top of it…yeah it’s about half. ASSESSOR: Do you do your own shopping? ALAN: The kettle is half full and I have to hold it on to the counter while I pour it. So I’ve got one hand on the counter and one hand on the kettle. ASSESSOR: Yep, and do you do your own shopping? ALAN: If I’m shopping for somebody else, it’s not so hard, but if it’s for me, I can’t make my mind up. You know I’ll think well this one’s cheaper, but it’s not as nice, and this one’s 20p more, but it’ll be better value for money because the quality will be better, but then I don’t know if I should really have the nicer one like if I deserve to have the nicer one. [Internal] 55 pence, 75 pence, 55 pence, 75 pence, 55 pence, 75 pence. It’s just 20 pence man. 55 pence, 75 pence. Don’t say it out loud, don’t say it out loud. It’s just 20 pence, it’s just 20 pence. ASSESSOR: So you do your shopping by yourself and nobody helps you? Do you do your own shopping, yes or no? ALAN: Yes. This exchange draws directly on participants own experiences of work capability assessments. The two measures of fitness to work represented in this scene being an ability to make a cup of tea and the capacity to perform the role of independent consumer. These examples identify state measures

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of productivity as anchored in the ability to reproduce your own labour through shopping and nourishing yourself, specifically through a familiar object of national identity (i.e. the cup of tea). In showing characters’ bodies as incapable and therefore non-productive, despite the assessor’s insistence of their capacity to complete these tasks, the film provides a counternarrative to the disability claimants as productive but unwilling to work. The depiction of claimants’ disabilities and illnesses, which include carpal tunnel syndrome, a chronic leg injury, heart failure, and depression, therefore stands as resistant to the state’s persistent articulation of these bodies as ‘fit enough’. Contrary to One Million, which performs a schema of embodied and energetic productivity, But I’m Here for Mental Health crucially depicts the sick and disabled body as resistant to the state’s normative framing of productivity. The film can be usefully read through crip theory, which Robert McRuer argues invokes the crisis of authority that orbits heterosexual and able-bodied norms. Specifically, McRuer asserts, ‘Instead of invoking the crisis in order to resolve it […] crip theory can continuously invoke, in order to further the crisis, the inadequate resolutions that compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness offer us’.86 Crip theory therefore offers a way to examine But I’m Here for Mental Health, and the figure of the disability claimant, as invoking the inadequacy of normalised state definitions of fitness to work. More broadly, such a critical consideration encourages a reflection on how arts practices that engage with or represent people on disability benefits might do so in ways that insist on the failure of biopolitical state systems. In representing this community of claimants, the project was at risk of reproducing the voyeuristic schematics of the welfare system it sought to critique. However, due to the pervasive fear of financial sanctioning of participants, MindFULL retained the anonymity of those involved by removing their actual bodies from the film and replacing them with actors. Kate Anderson, Head of Programme at Helix Arts, noted that there was an awareness that protecting the group’s anonymity was key to the success of the project: ‘A driver for the anonymity was, right from the outset we knew that for this to work, it needed to go to as broad an audience as possible, they understood the implications’.87 By using a participant-led creating, devising, scripting, and directing process during the MindFULL project but having actors to perform the film Helix Arts ensured the But I’m Here for Mental Health could be made available online and

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disseminated widely without worrying about the implications of exposing people’s identity. In applied performance, the possibility of substituting bodies allows for a break from the representational labour constantly being undertaken by the unemployed and counters the intense focus of claimants’ physical encounters in ESA discourse. This is in direct contrast to One Million where resistance lay in the physical presence of the participants, engaged in acts of representational labour to challenge dominant perceptions of the young unemployed as inactive. While One Million raised concerns surrounding the valorisation of labour, MindFULL used a different mode of creative labour in the gathering and presentation of participants’ personal stories. As such MindFULL elicits concerns around the ethics of representing particular subject positions and the co-optation of community-­ created stories by arts companies. These concerns were navigated by Helix through collaborating with participants to design a brief for filmmakers which outlined their project and required interested parties to apply with proposals. Helix had a number of applications that proposed different strategies to navigate the displacement of bodies including the use of animation, clay models, and actors. Participants were involved in selecting the proposal they felt utilised the best approach and thus were in control of creative decisions taken regarding the retelling of their stories. In this way, the project allowed bodies to be both represented and anonymised, present and absent. As with A Dangerous Figure, Anderson encapsulates the dilemma of participatory arts projects working with the unemployed: ‘[they] need to come up with a solution to enable these people to tell authentic genuine stories but maintain that level of anonymity’.88 As such, the removing of claimants bodies from view encourages reflection on how artists represent the materiality of unemployment and how specific participants might navigate the embodied labour of performance. As one Helix Arts participant noted: It helped, you know you felt like you weren’t gonna get collared for it. If that got back to DWP well they’d say “if you can sit there and tell your story, you can sit at a desk and do a job”. That’s their mind-set you know.89

This insight underscores the need for critical reflection on how arts projects negotiate participation in the context of shifts in the welfare system. Even when projects have activist intentions, they are at risk of evidencing the disability claimants’ readiness for work. That is, the creative,

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generative, and bodily practice of performance could be perceived as evidencing an individual’s capacity to work. While above, in relation to One Million, I have argued that such a showcasing of activity and ability to labour contests negative images of youth unemployment, this participant highlights the damage adopting a similar approach with disability claimants might incur. This identifies the necessity for arts practitioners to appropriately differentiate representational strategies in response to classifications of unemployment, particularly given the disputed categorisation of bodies in relation to labour. The anxiety cultivated by increasingly punitive government sanctions around claimants participating in any kind of work-related activity exposes both the ambiguity of the labour involvement in applied performance project and the shifting definitions of work delineated by the state. In her study of work in relation to incapacity benefits, Jackie Gulland identifies the history of ‘permitted work’ that accompanied disability benefits in the twentieth century, that is work either to support rehabilitation and a return of the worker to the labour market or work-like activities deemed ‘sufficiently trivial’ or non-productive so as not to require remuneration or threaten legitimate labour practices. Gulland’s study therefore identifies social policy as framed around supporting a return to work but also as pushing up against the very borders of what counts as work and what is permissible as non-productive labour. With the introduction of ESA in 2008 and Universal Credit in 2012, this delineation of what can be classified as work has acutely intensified. As Gulland notes, The constant surveillance of new benefits regimes may lead claimants to be wary of doing anything that could be described as work. At the same time, most claimants will be expected to carry out more work or work-like activities in order to meet claiming conditions.90

The figure of the disability claimant therefore invokes specific considerations for the labour involved in applied performance, particularly if the outcome of such performance practices involves individuals on stage ‘doing anything that could be described as work’. It is therefore strategic for companies or practitioners to locate such performance projects as either ‘trivial’, through embracing such practices as inherently unproductive within the bounds of capitalist circulations of value, or rehabilitative, in ways which support the development of transferable skills and the preparation of the labourer for a return to the workplace.

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Such strategies resonate with recurrent discourses of play and instrumentality that pervade the field of applied performance. As Mitchell and Snyder argue, ‘the potentiality of approaching disability as “nonproductive labour”—[offers] an alternative to capitalist overdeterminations of the ability to sell one’s labour power on the market as the nexus of productivity, and thus, a normative baseline of human value’.91 Exploring the specific position of the disability claimant within applied performance practice therefore exposes how some applied performance projects might inadvertently become bound up with narratives of productivity that implicitly bind human value to an individual’s productive power. Contrastingly, in relation to But I’m Here for Mental Health, applied performance practice might contribute to destabilising definitions of labour and fitness to work; this is even more significant in a period when such definitions are being vigorously asserted via the biopolitical management of populations through the welfare state. While in One Million participants’ bodily presence served to powerfully render them collectively present in a context that had reduced their materiality to mere statistics, in MindFULL’s But I’m Here for Mental Health, the gesture of absence serves to undermine the focus on bodies that has been applied to ESA claimants. Poignantly, the absence of participants’ bodies haunts the film, signifying their experience of relentless corporeal evaluation. This de-privileging of participants’ bodies in But I’m Here for Mental Health underscores the importance of the narratives which emerge in the film and avoids constantly returning to and reinforcing the negative perceptions of bodies to which those narratives are attached. Thus, corporeal absence of the subjects’ bodies from the film points to the practical need to obscure participant identities and prioritise the narrative life of ESA claimants, rather than the skewed presentation of the material body in ESA policy and provision, in order to reconstitute the subject as living.

Conclusion Applied performance has the potential to illuminate biopolitical and necropolitical constructions arising from governance systems and to support individuals in subverting dominant representations of unemployment through a politicisation of their bodies. Since 2010 an intensification of representations of the unemployed body has been coupled with a devaluing of peoples’ subjecthood. In One Million the ambiguity of apparently unproductive bodies being witnessed as productive resulted in an

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accumulation of status by those previously deemed disposable. There was an activation of bodies, both physically and politically, leading to a publicly enacted activism of bodies. Similarly, MindFULL’s film reoriented a societal voyeurism around disability claimants’ bodies, which are relentlessly objectified by welfare policy, to instead highlight and debunk our own looking. This strategy allowed narratives to emerge that were not located in the visible physicality of the sick body. Beyond this, the utility of the non-productive body emerges as a significant agent with the potential to challenge state-delineated systems of labour and also a figure through which to reflect on the productivity required of the arts participant. My consideration of what is at stake when these marginal bodies perform labour articulates how the different approaches to participatory performance’s embodied practice might provide aesthetic modes of resistance. Although participatory performance risks unquestioningly valorising labour, a self-reflexive approach to performing labour is uniquely positioned to critique it through the powerful aesthetic and symbolic tools it accesses. In the following chapter, I continue my exploration of the political, social, and artistic stakes involved in presenting and perceiving certain bodies’ performances of labour, turning to representations of women’s unemployment onstage, and considering how it differs from that of other cohorts. My analysis links such performances to historical constructions of women’s labour and unpaid care work to nuance how economies of care and precarity operate more broadly.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1978), 142–143. 2. Thomas Lemke, ‘Introduction’, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction, trans. by Eric Frederick Trump (New York and London: New  York University Press, 2011), 4. 3. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40 (12). 4. ‘Where have we Been’, Tangled Feet, http://www.tangledfeet.com/ about/where-weve-been (accessed 12 December 2017). 5. In 2017 Tangled Feet became an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. 6. Tangled Feet, unpublished ‘Take to the Streets Participation Report to Arts Council England’, 2013, p.  1. The work was performed again at

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Brighton Festival in May 2014 with a different group of unemployed young people. 7. Tangled Feet, ‘Grants for the Arts Application to ACE’, 2013, pp. 11–12. Obtained through a Freedom of Information Request. 8. Tangled Feet, unpublished ‘Take to the Streets Participation Report to Arts Council England’, 2013, 1. 9. Ibid. 10. Tangled Feet, ‘Grants for the Arts Application’. 11. Arts Council England, unpublished ‘Tangled Feet—Grants for the Arts Assessment Report’, 2013, 6. 12. ‘History’, Helix Arts, https://www.helixarts.com/history.html (accessed 12 December 2017). 13. ‘Home’, Helix Arts, https://www.helixarts.com/index.html (accessed 12 December 2017). 14. But I’m Here for Mental Health, Helix Arts and Meerkat Films (2013). See ‘Tyneside Mind WCA Film—“But I’m Here for Mental Health”’, YouTube, December 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTaezvvQfOs (accessed March 12, 2014). 15. This use of actors to protect the identities of participants involved is in line with the considerations undertaken by The BiteBack Movement, whose practice I explore in Chap. 4. 16. See Bill Davis, ‘In Safe Hands? Rethink Employment Pathways for ESA Claimants with Mental Health Problems’ (Newcastle upon Tyne: IPPR North, 2014). 17. Office for National Statistics, ‘Labour Market Statistics, November 2013’, WebArchive, 2013, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. uk/20160105160709/, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labourmarket-statistics/november-2013/statistical-bulletin.html (accessed May 14, 2016). In this context, youth unemployment refers to 16–24-year-olds actively seeking work who are not in employment, education, or training. 18. Although announced in 2015 this policy only came into force in April 2017. 19. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, 163. 20. Matthew Hancock qtd. in Michael Dathan, ‘Workers Under 25 “Don’t Deserve Living Wage Because They’re Not as Productive” Says Tory Minister’, Independent, 6 October 2015, http://www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/politics/workers-under-25-dont-deserve-living-wagebecause-theyre-not-as-productive-says-tory-minister-a6683851.html (accessed July 25, 2016). 21. Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 2–3.

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22. Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry, ‘Introduction—“Gesture, Theatricality and Protest: Composure at the Precipice”’, Contemporary Theatre Review 25, no. 3 (2013), 300–312, 304. 23. Nathan Curry, interview with author, London, 8 February 2015. 24. Judith Butler, ‘Vulnerability and Resistance Revisited’, Lecture at Trinity College Dublin, 5 February 2015. Available at https://soundcloud.com/ joke-dufourmont/judith-butler-vulnerability-and-resistance-revisited (accessed September 24, 2015). 25. Curry, interview. 26. Tangled Feet, ‘Grants for the Arts Application’, 15. 27. Tangled Feet, ‘Take to the Streets Participation Report’, 8–9. 28. Unpublished script for One Million (2013), 17. 29. Tangled Feet, ‘Grants for the Arts Application’, 12. 30. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwar Imaginaries (New York and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 140. 31. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Connecting People with Jobs: Activation Policies in the United Kingdom (OECD Publishing, 2014), 9. My italics. 32. For a more detailed description of these schemes and active labour market approaches, see the Introduction to this book, in particular pp. 19–22. 33. Weeks, 81. 34. For more information on the internship and exploitative labour, see Sophie Hope and Joanna Figiel, ‘Intern Culture: A Literature Review of Internship Reports, Guidelines and Toolkits from 2009–2011’, May 2013, ArtsQuest, https://www.artquest.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Intern-Culturereport.pdf (accessed 12 June 2016). I address this area in more detail in Chap. 2, pp. 54–61. 35. Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 106. 36. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 38. 37. Curry, interview. 38. Chloe Jones, interview with author, 22 February 2015, London. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. For further interrogation of economies in socially committed practice, see Molly Mullen, Applied Theatre: Economies (London and New  York: Bloomsbury, 2019). 42. I go on to discuss the particular implications of these distinctions in relation to benefit claimants and reproductive labour in Chap. 6. 43. Tangled Feet, ‘Take to the Streets Participation Report’, 3–4.

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44. Ridout, 16. 45. Tangled Feet, ‘Take to the Streets Participation Report’, 3. 46. Curry, interview. 47. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 117. 48. Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill, ‘Labour Market Adjustment in Areas of Chronic Industrial Decline: The Case of the UK Coalfields’, Regional Studies 30 (1996): 627–640; Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill, ‘The Diversion from “Unemployment” to “Sickness” Across British Regions and Districts’, Regional Studies 39 (2005): 837–854; Rowan R. MacKay (1999) ‘Work and Nonwork: A More Difficult Labour Market’, Environment and Planning A 31, no. 11 (1999): 1919–34. 49. Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill, ‘Labour Market Adjustment’. I explore contemporary examples of parking in Chap. 2, p. 51. 50. Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill, ‘The Diversion from “Unemployment” to “Sickness”’, 840. 51. Christina Beatty, Stephen Fothergill, and Robert Powell, ‘Twenty Years On: Has the Economy of the UK Coalfields Recovered?’, Environment and Planning A 39, no. 7 (2007): 1654–75. 52. James Banks, Richard Blundell, and Carl Emmerson, ‘Disability Benefit Receipt and Reform: Reconciling Trends in the United Kingdom’, IFS Working Paper W15/09, Institute for Fiscal Studies (March 2015), 2. 53. ‘The Employment and Support Allowance (Transitional Provisions, Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit) (Existing Awards) Regulations 2010’, Department for Work and Pensions (London: DWP, 2010). 54. Esther McVey, Conservative MP and Minister of State for Employment, interviewed on BBC News, 8 April 2013. 55. Ed Humpherson in a published email to Donna O’Brian on behalf of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), USKA, ‘Correspondence to Donna O’Brian’, Statistics Authority, 11 April 2014, https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/archive/reports%2D%2D-correspondence/correspondence/email-from-ed-humpherson-to-donna-o-brien%2D%2D-110414. pdf (accessed 14 June 2016). 56. There was also a great deal of criticism regarding Iain Duncan Smith, a Conservative MP and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions who brought about swathes of tough reform in the benefit system, and his inaccurate suggestion around the same time (April 2013) that the ‘Benefit Cap’ had encouraged 8000 claimants to find work through Jobcentre Plus. 57. Jonathan Portes, The Today Programme, 5 November 2013, BBC. 58. Rebecca Schneider, ‘It Seems As If…I am Dead: Zombie Capitalism and Theatrical Labour’, TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 150–162 (156).

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59. ‘Mortality Statistics: Out of Work Working Age Benefit Claimants, August 2015’, Department for Work and Pensions, August 2015, https://www. gov.uk/government/statistics/mortality-statistics-esa-ib-and-sda-claimants (accessed September 15, 2015). 60. Between November 2012 and September 2013, nearly 20,000 sick or disabled ESA claimants were sanctioned, three-quarters for not participating in work-related activity (Beatty and Fothergill 2015, 177). 61. Francis Ryan, ‘Death Has Become a Part of Britain’s Benefits System’, Guardian, 27 August 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/27/death-britains-benefits-system-fit-for-work-safetynet (accessed August 28, 2015). 62. But I’m Here for Mental Health, Helix Arts and Meerkat Films (2013). 63. Ibid. 64. In previous cases, benefit loss or reduction had been found to be a factor in deaths, but here coroner Mary Hassell stated the DWP ruling was the central factor in Michael O’Sullivan’s suicide. She also filed a Prevention of Future Deaths Report arguing action must be taken to change the current system or people would remain at risk. 65. ‘Attempted Suicides by Disability Benefit Claimants More than Double after Introduction of Fit-to-Work Assessment’, Independent, 28 December 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/disability-benefit-claimants-attempted-suicides-fit-to-work-assessment-i-danielblake-job-centre-dwp-a8119286.html (accessed 10 March 2018). See also Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey: Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing, England, 2014, https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/ publications/statistical/adult-psychiatric-morbidity-survey/adult-psychiatric-morbidity-survey-survey-of-mental-health-and-wellbeing-england-2014 (accessed 10 March 2018). 66. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring, How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 186. 67. Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill, ‘Disability Benefits in an Age of Austerity’, Social Policy & Administration 49, no. 2 (2015): 161–181 (168). 68. Harvey, p. 106. 69. For all health conditions, the figure is closer to 38%; But I’m Here for Mental Health. 70. Garland-Thomson, Staring, How We Look, 193. 71. Helix participant, interview. 72. John Shammas, ‘Watch Benefits Cheat Who Claimed He Was Unable to Walk RUNNING On Football Pitch’, Mirror, 13 February 2015, http:// www.mir r or.co.uk/news/uk-news/watch-benefits-cheat-whoclaimed-5158667 (accessed 15 March 2015).

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73. Gareth Roberts, ‘“Blind” Benefit Cheats Filmed Texting and Driving in Undercover Police Sting’, Mirror, 6 March 2015, http://www.mirror. co.uk/news/world-news/blind-benefit-cheats-filmed-texting-5285058 (accessed 15 March 2015). 74. Lucy Thornton, ‘Benefit Cheat Jailed After Being Caught on Camera DANCING in Rock Band’, Mirror, 18 July 2014, http://www.mirror. co.uk/news/uk-news/disability-benefit-cheat-jailed-after-3880251 (accessed 15 March 2015). 75. Garland-Thomson, 44. 76. Ibid., 40–46. 77. Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn, ‘Neoliberalism, Surveillance and Media Convergence’, in Handbook of Neoliberalism, ed. by Simon Springer, Kean Birch, Julie MacLeavy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 175–189 (177). 78. Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013), 9. Tyler also explores abjection in relation to asylum seekers, social class, and travellers. 79. Ibid. Here Tyler is drawing on the work of Homi K. Bhabha, particularly ‘The Other Question…The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse’, Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 16–36. 80. Tyler, 9. 81. Ibid., 26. 82. David T.  Mitchell and Sharon L.  Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Corporealities: Discourses of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2015), 214. 83. Ibid. 84. ‘Capability for Work Questionnaire’, Department for Work and Pensions, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/capability-for-workquestionnaire (accessed June 12, 2014). 85. Ibid. 86. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York & London: New York University Press, 2006), 31. 87. Kate Anderson, interview with the author, Gateshead, 2 February 2015. 88. Anderson, interview. 89. Helix participant, interview with author, Gateshead, 11 August 2015. 90. Jackie Gulland, Working while incapable to work? Changing concepts of permitted work in the UK disability benefit system, Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2017), n.p. 91. Mitchell and Snyder, 156.

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References Kate Anderson, interview with the author, Gateshead, 2 February 2015. James Banks, Richard Blundell, and Carl Emmerson, ‘Disability Benefit Receipt and Reform: Reconciling Trends in the United Kingdom’, IFS Working Paper W15/09, Institute for Fiscal Studies (March 2015). Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill, ‘Labour Market Adjustment in Areas of Chronic Industrial Decline: The Case of the UK Coalfields’, Regional Studies 30 (1996): 627–640. Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill, ‘The Diversion from “Unemployment” to “Sickness” Across British Regions and Districts’, Regional Studies 39 (2005): 837–854. Christina Beatty, Stephen Fothergill, and Robert Powell, ‘Twenty Years On: Has the Economy of the UK Coalfields Recovered?’, Environment and Planning A 39, no. 7 (2007): 1654–1675. Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill, ‘Disability Benefits in an Age of Austerity’, Social Policy & Administration 49, no. 2 (2015): 161–181. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). Judith Butler, ‘Vulnerability and Resistance Revisited’, Lecture at Trinity College Dublin, 5 February 2015, https://soundcloud.com/joke-dufourmont/ judith-butler-vulnerability-and-resistance-revisited (accessed September 24, 2015). May Bulman and Alina Polianskaya, ‘Attempted Suicides by Disability Benefit Claimants More than Double after Introduction of Fit-to-Work Assessment’, Independent, 28 December 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ uk/home-news/disability-benefit-claimants-attempted-suicides-fit-to-workassessment-i-daniel-blake-job-centre-dwp-a8119286.html (accessed 10 March 2018). Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn, ‘Neoliberalism, Surveillance and Media Convergence’, in Handbook of Neoliberalism, ed. by Simon Springer, Kean Birch, Julie MacLeavy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 175–189 (177). Nathan Curry, interview with author, London, February 8, 2015. Matt Dathan, ‘Workers Under 25 “Don’t Deserve Living Wage Because They’re Not as Productive” Says Tory Minister’, Independent, 6 October 2015, http:// www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/workers-under-25-dont-deserveliving-wage-because-theyre-not-as-productive-says-tory-minister-a6683851. html (accessed July 25, 2016). Bill Davis, ‘In Safe Hands? Rethink Employment Pathways for ESA Claimants with Mental Health Problems’ (Newcastle upon Tyne: IPPR North, 2014).

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Department for Work and Pensions, ‘The Employment and Support Allowance (Transitional Provisions, Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit) (Existing Awards) Regulations 2010’ (London: DWP, 2010). Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Capability for Work Questionnaire’, https:// www.gov.uk/government/publications/capability-for-work-questionnaire (accessed June 12, 2014). Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Mortality Statistics: Out of Work Working Age Benefit Claimants, August 2015’, August 2015, https://www.gov.uk/ government/statistics/mortality-statistics-esa-ib-and-sda-claimants (accessed September 15, 2015). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1978). Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring, How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Jackie Gulland, ‘Working while incapable to work? Changing concepts of permitted work in the UK disability benefit system’, Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2017). David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Helix Arts, ‘History’, https://www.helixarts.com/history.html (accessed 12 December 2017). Helix Arts, ‘Home’, https://www.helixarts.com/index.html (accessed 12 December 2017). Helix Arts and Meerkat Films, But I’m Here for Mental Health (2013). See: ‘Tyneside Mind WCA Film—“But I’m Here for Mental Health”’, YouTube, December 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTaezvvQfOs (accessed March 12, 2014). Helix participant, interview with author, Gateshead, 11 August 2015. Sophie Hope and Joanna Figiel, ‘Intern Culture: A Literature Review of Internship Reports, Guidelines and Toolkits from 2009–2011’, May 2013, ArtsQuest, https://www.artquest.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Intern-Culture-report. pdf (accessed 12 June 2016). Jenny Hughes and Simon Parry, ‘Introduction—“Gesture, Theatricality and Protest: Composure at the Precipice”’, Contemporary Theatre Review 25, no. 3 (2013), 300–312. Ed Humpherson in a published email to Donna O’Brian on behalf of The UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), USKA, ‘Correspondence to Donna O’Brian’, Statistics Authority, 11 April 2014, https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/ archive/reports%2D%2D-correspondence/correspondence/email-from-edhumpherson-to-donna-o-brien%2D%2D-110414.pdf (accessed 14 June 2016).

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Office for National Statistics, ‘Labour Market Statistics, November 2013’, WebArchive, 2013, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/november-2013/statistical-bulletin.html (accessed May 14, 2016). Chloe Jones, interview with author, 22 February 2015, London. Thomas Lemke, ‘Introduction’, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction, trans. by Eric Frederick Trump (New York and London: New  York University Press, 2011). Rowan R.  MacKay, ‘Work and Nonwork: A More Difficult Labour Market’, Environment and Planning A 31, no. 11 (1999): 1919–1934. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006). Esther McVey, Conservative MP and Minister of State for Employment, interviewed on BBC News, 8 April 2013. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Corporealities: Discourses of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2015)). Molly Mullen, Applied Theatre: Economies (London and New  York: Bloomsbury, 2019). Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Connecting People with Jobs: Activation Policies in the United Kingdom (OECD Publishing, 2014). Jonathan Portes, The Today Programme, 5 November 2013, BBC. Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). Gareth Roberts, ‘“Blind” Benefit Cheats Filmed Texting and Driving in Undercover Police Sting’, Mirror, 6 March 2015, http://www.mirror.co.uk/ news/world-news/blind-benefit-cheats-filmed-texting-5285058 (accessed 15 March 2015). Francis Ryan, ‘Death Has Become a Part of Britain’s Benefits System’, Guardian, 27 August 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/ aug/27/death-britains-benefits-system-fit-for-work-safety-net (accessed August 28, 2015). Rebecca Schneider, ‘It Seems As If…I am Dead: Zombie Capitalism and Theatrical Labour’, TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 150–162. John Shammas, ‘Watch Benefits Cheat Who Claimed He Was Unable to Walk RUNNING On Football Pitch’, Mirror, 13 February 2015, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/watch-benefits-cheat-who-claimed-5158667 (accessed 15 March 2015).

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Tangled Feet, ‘Where have we Been’, http://www.tangledfeet.com/about/ where-weve-been (accessed 12 December 2017). Tangled Feet, unpublished ‘Take to the Streets Participation Report to Arts Council England’, 2013a. Tangled Feet, ‘Grants for the Arts Application to ACE England’, 2013b, pp. 11–12. Obtained through a Freedom of Information Request. Lucy Thornton, ‘Benefit Cheat Jailed After Being Caught on Camera DANCING in Rock Band’, Mirror, 18 July 2014, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uknews/disability-benefit-cheat-jailed-after-3880251 (accessed 15 March 2015). Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013). Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwar Imaginaries (New York and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

CHAPTER 6

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

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 © The Author(s) 2020 S. Bartley, Performing Welfare, Contemporary Performance InterActions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44854-7_6

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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

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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

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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

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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. Socialist feminists such as Elizabeth Wilson and Hilary Land in the 1970s identified the patriarchal structures of labour were embedded, if not acutely intensified, by the introduction of policies derived from the Beveridge Report of 1942 and subsequent introduction of the National Insurance Act in 1946.16 As Jeremy Colwill notes, 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

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

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definition meant that many women would be excluded from accessing this form of state support given their common position as unpaid domestic labourers. Contributions-based social security was therefore intrinsically linked to the gendered division of labour as paid or unpaid and constituted the economic structure which impeded women securing independent financial support. The ideological execution of this denial of security was more explicitly generated through the overt construction of the woman in terms of marriage, motherhood, and the family. In the report, Beveridge states, 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

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.

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Since 1946 a number of changes to enable equity across genders in their experience of welfare support have occurred in the UK: the Equal Pay Act 1970 legislated for equity between genders in regard to pay and employment conditions. The introduction of Supplementary Benefit in 1966 allowed access to non-contributory benefits; this was replaced by Income Support in 1988 which topped up low wages or other benefits claimants were receiving. The New Labour government’s introduction of the National Minimum Wage increased maternity rights and Universal Child Benefit and European policies around gender equality and discrimination have been very influential in challenging gender disparity in the UK.21 However, since 2010 welfare reforms and budget cuts, particularly in relation to caring responsibilities, risk a return to the construction of the woman as precariously placed in relation to social security. In 2010, the Coalition government froze increases in Universal Child Benefit until April 2014, inducing a real terms cut of over 10%, and in 2013 Universal Child Benefit was abolished. The Fawcett Society have stated: 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

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. Cultural theorist Beverley Skeggs provides a useful contention through which to examine this context and hold it alongside examples from applied theatre.24 Skeggs draws parallels between the historical legacy of educational ‘caring courses’ and the relationship of women, with a particular focus on working-class women, to domestic labour. She posits that, in line with the agreements laid out in the Beveridge Report, such women are ‘framed, constrained and produced’ through domestic ideals and their relation to care.25 Skeggs also identifies how the state utilised poor and

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unemployed women as a means to support the reproduction of labour supply: 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

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?

Staging Women’s Work Jenny Hicks and Jackie Holborough, driven by an urgency to initiate dialogues around women and incarceration, founded the women-only theatre company Clean Break in 1979. Based in North London but producing projects across England, the company continues to work with women, predominantly those with experiences of the criminal justice sector and/ or mental health settings. At the heart of their practice is the sharing of marginalised women’s stories and cultivating of performance by female artists and playwrights. As the company state: ‘[w]e consistently produce groundbreaking plays dramatising women’s experience of, and relationship to, crime and punishment’.27 While recognising their engagement with criminal justice settings as central to their company identity, this chapter seeks to expand the discussion of their practice beyond prison and probation sites. As Herrmann articulates, 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,

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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 In its presentation of the reproductive labour involved in producing and preparing food, Spent brings into focus feminist critiques of the uncritical ‘maintenance’ of the (male) labourer posed in Marxist thought. ‘[S]o is all labour primarily and originally directed to the appropriation and production of food?’ writes Karl Marx in Capital.33 The year of Spent’s production marked the eighth successive year where foodbank usage rose in the UK, with The Trussell Trust announcing in April that during the

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2015–16 financial year, it provided 1,109,309 three-day emergency food supplies to people in crisis.34 The depiction of food, and its value, in Spent provides new ways to challenge Marx’s material understanding of food as part of man’s regeneration of himself. The character of Denise, who is focused throughout the play on scraping together enough money to feed her daughter, exemplifies a widely felt experience of unemployment and austerity in the current UK context: DENISE:

I’ve got 75p in my pocket and a list that tells me I need bread, milk, bog roll and bananas.35

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:

Forty-nine pence and the 75p that’s in my pocket. Bread, milk, bog roll and bananas. She’s hungry.36

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:

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

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

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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. As devastating austerity measures continue to impact the most vulnerable in our society, the apparatus of social reproduction embedded in the state is failing. This is startlingly depicted in Spent, particularly in the character of the old woman who physically disintegrates as the play progresses: 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

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,

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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. 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

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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. In Chap. 3, I discussed Brighton People’s Theatre’s 2016 production, Tighten Our Belts, in which an episodic collection of theatre, movement, and musical vignettes depicted struggles in the labour market set within a broader political context of austerity. The production made no overt claim to explore gendered experiences of unemployment or labour, yet one moment spoke poignantly to women’s labour and gendered performances of care. Three cast members stand in a line on the dimly lit stage facing the audience; behind them, almost in darkness, stands a second row of three further cast members, all three of whom are women. To the left of the stage, another female cast member stands behind a music stand and reads off a relentless series of stories indicative of the effects that welfare reforms are having on people: 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.

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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 oneyear-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

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: 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

In performance, when the front row of performers begin to lull, the row behind them prop them up, push them forwards, and help them continue on. The performers represent this relentless assault but also a persevering embodiment of support. This movement builds as the stories of austerity persist and the rate of their delivery increases, with the performers in the first row collapsing but still this second row, from the darkness,

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catching them, breaking their continuous stumbles and falls, supporting them throughout. The casting of these three, literally, supporting roles as female creates a representation of reproductive labour which can be read as explicitly gendered. The performance of care here, juxtaposed against the cold presentation of statistical data which starkly depicts a government that does not care, is symbolic both in its enacting of a community dependence and in the gendered makeup of the performers and the roles they are cast in. As prominent care theorist Joan Tronto notes, 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

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. Beyond embodied performances of support, there is a persistent trope, which appears in Spent, of unemployed women utilising their bodies as a mode of production. Clean Break’s production thus highlights the economy of the female body which persists in performance: DENISE: DAUGHTER: DENISE: DAUGHTER: DENISE: DAUGHTER:

I don’t know no-one here to ask. A man what carried my pushchair up the stairs. I don’t know him. He got sugar. He’s not my friend, he just lives in the house, in a room like us. I seen you with him. He give you money.51

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This depiction of Denise in Spent resonates with understandings of sex work as care work, both in that it is a form of embodied labour and in Denise’s deployment of her body to care for her child. The implicit reference to sex work and the potential of the female body to engage in financially productive informal labour markets is a recurrent trend that occurs across representations of women in positions of unemployment or poverty.52 Spent therefore depicts how the female body is constituted as productive beyond formal cycles of capital and in fact can stand in for inadequacies in state support. As work and employment scholar Kate Hardy notes, 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

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. 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

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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

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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

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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. The rhetoric promoted by the state during this period has invoked even those suffering from the effects of austerity to draw, often incorrect, lines between the deserving and undeserving poor. The figure of the ‘single mother’ has often been target of this anger around people ‘playing the system’; however, as single parent charity, Gingerbread, reported in 2015, 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

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.

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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? James Thompson appeals to practices of care in community performance in his articulation of the ‘aesthetics of care’.61 Thompson defines an ‘aesthetics of care’ as 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

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. 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

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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. The different framework and objectives surrounding each of the two Clean Break productions, Joanne and Spent, are indicative of the kind of division of labour, of production and reproduction, and usefully speak to where we might situate applied performance in such debates. For example, while Joanne was produced commercially in partnership with the Soho Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company for paying theatre audiences, Spent was performed at conferences and universities at a cost to the institution that invited the production. In a description of Spent on the Clinks website, the production was advertised as:

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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

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

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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. Further than reproduction, I propose that this is applied performance as what Tronto might term a kind ‘[p]olitical “care work”’ in that it ‘requires that those responsible for the allocation of care responsibilities throughout society are attentive to whether or not those processes of care function’.68 Spent thus fosters the ‘attentiveness’ of those in caring roles and allows them to reflect on how their care is distributed. Recounting a performance with a mental health organisation, Clean Break producer Emma Waslin commented, 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

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.

Care-Full Economies of Participation and Reproduction Further to the dynamics of reproduction at play in performances of Spent, the position of the performers as poorly paid or unwaged labourers reliant on state welfare more deeply engenders the position of the dependent

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reproductive labourer, unacknowledged in their contribution to the cycle of capital. As participants in an arts project, these performers work outside of waged production, partly due to their position as benefit recipients. I want to return to considerations of the economies of participation and remuneration of labour that have threaded throughout the case studies examined in the book, to identify the ambivalence around the payment of participants in applied performance. Waslin explained the difficulties the company had faced in relation to the payment of graduates for performing. The three actors toured the UK, performing up to three days per week, over two months. But how can organisations remunerate such labour given the often complex position, especially in this instance, of those they are collaborating with. As Waslin commented, 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

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

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funds reach the claimant, therefore leaving them without financial support for a prolonged period. 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? Clean Break has subsequently explored self-employment, contractual employment, and the impact of these approaches on Universal Credit, but Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) advice for employing women to undertake

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temporary performance work of this nature has been unclear, while the women involved had different information again from their Jobcentre advisors. Clean Break now believes it may have found an appropriate way forward, both legally and ethically, but it is aware that what little advice exists could change at any point which would leave the Company and their performers vulnerable to punitive actions from HMRC or participants encountering difficulties in re-joining welfare support beyond a project’s production cycle.73 This process, as Herrmann notes, 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. In not being able to pay the women involved in Spent, Clean Break were required to disguise, or rather remodel, the remuneration that they were able to provide. As Thompson notes, when trying to embed care into community arts practice, [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

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

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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. 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,

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confidence, and getting qualifications. Therefore, alongside funding for travel and childcare, Clean Break offers a range of support that enables women’s involvement.79 The company is a specific example of pastoral support coupled with artistic delivery; but Clean Break are also indicative of practice occurring across the field of applied performance that borders on social provision. Included in the organisation’s strategic aims is to ‘[p]rovide a comprehensive support service for the women they work with, offering practical, financial and emotional support, in partnership with specialist organisations’.80 This demonstrates that the provision of care is a central aim of the organisation, and beyond artistic and educational objectives, they signpost participants to link up with other organisations for ‘practical, financial and emotional support’.81 The company’s 2014–15 annual report identifies the expanding need for such support in a context of austerity: 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

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.

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

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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

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struggles, discrimination against young people, mental health issues, and the balancing of paid labour with caring responsibilities. Women & Theatre gathered research participants from community projects and a range of professional industries both they and Birmingham Repertory had associations with. The organisation then worked with 50 people, conducting a range of focus groups, individual interviews, and community sessions to generate material for the production.86 This is a common practice at the company, as they stated in an application for Arts Council England funding: 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

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. Further, Starting Out depicted young women looking for, or precariously engaging in, employment in a way that I have not seen in other performance during the period of research. They explicitly framed the performance as focusing on women’s difficulties in the labour market and depicted these women as jobseekers. As such, Starting Out highlighted an underrepresented group of young, female individuals seeking paid work. However, this group is often not identified as a defined cohort in

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dominant policy discourses, and to an extent arts discourses. When discussing Starting Out, company manager Jess Pearson commented, 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

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. 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

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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

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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 Both Women & Theatre and Clean Break stand as examples of the precarity of applied performance, in this instance performance which particularly attends to the concerns of oppressed women, in current funding contexts. Further, as Herrmann notes, 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

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.

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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,

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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.

Notes 1. Katherine Chandler, unpublished script for Spent, 2016, provided by Clean Break, 17. 2. Joanne was composed of five monologues, written by five playwrights commissioned by Clean Break: Deborah Bruce, Theresa Ikoko, Laura Lomas, Chino Odimba, and Ursula Rani Sarma. 3. Anna Herrmann, Skype interview with the author, 15 January 2019. 4. Previously Clean Break’s programme was divided into three strands: Artistic, which occurred in professional venues or with professional partners; Education, which was work borne out of the educational programmes run by Clean Break; and Engagement, which is the work they do in particular settings, most often related to Criminal Justice or Mental Health. In 2018, Clean Break restructured the way in which they framed their work, moving away from the three defined strands of Artistic, Education, and Engagement to instead integrate these practices under their artistic output. While their Engagement work continues across prisons and secure sites across the UK, women who are collaborating with and accessing Clean Break at their Camden site are now defined as Members. Work produced by the Members, in collaboration with the Clean Break team and visiting artists, will constitute Clean Break’s artistic programme. This is part of an aim within the organisation to centre the voices and work of the women and also to ensure Clean Break’s work is able to occupy a diverse range of theatre and non-­theatre audiences. This centring of the women as Members of the company valuably provokes further considerations around what it is to participate in this kind of practice, blurring the boundaries of the professional/non-­professional and questioning who can be onstage and how do we frame, understand, and remunerate their work in performance. Artistic directors of the company Anna Herrmann and Róisín McBrinn discuss this structural change at length in ‘The Legacy Tapes: Clean Break’, Exeunt Podcast, 10 June

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2019, http://exeuntmagazine.com/podcasts/legacy-tapes-clean-break/ (accessed 11 June 2019). 5. The Fawcett Society, ‘The Impact of Austerity on Women’, The Fawcett Society Policy Briefing: March 2012, March 2012, 7, http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/The-Impact-ofAusterity-on-Women-19th-March-2012.pdf (accessed 20 July 2016). 6. Women’s Budget Group, ‘The Impact on Women of the 2016 Budget: Women Paying for the Chancellor’s Tax Cuts’, Women’s Budget Group, 2016, http://wbg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/WBG_2016 Budget_Response_PDF.pdf (accessed 20 July 2016). 7. Ibid., 11. 8. Ibid., 3. 9. Women’s Budget Group, ‘The Impact on Women of Budget 2014’, Women’s Budget Group, 2014, http://www.wbg.org.uk/wpcontent/ uploads/2014/03/FINAL-WBG-2014-budget-response.pdf (accessed 20 July 2016). 10. Alison Wolf, The XX Factor (London: Profile Books, 2013). 11. Feminist Fightback, ‘Cuts are a Feminist Issue’, Soundings, 49 (2011), 73–83 (77). 12. Joan Tronto, Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013), 47. 13. See Gender and Welfare State Regimes, ed. by Diane Sainsbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Gender, Welfare State and the Market: Towards a New Division of Labour, ed. by Thomas Boje and Arnlaug Leira (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); and Gillian Pascall, Gender Equality in the Welfare State? (Bristol: Policy Press, 2012). 14. Diane Sainsbury, Gendering Welfare States (London: Sage, 1994), 2. 15. Women’s Budget Group, ‘The Impact on Women of the 2016 Budget’, 3. 16. See Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London: Tavistock, 1977), and Hilary Land, ‘The Family Wage’, Feminist Review, 6 (1980), 55–78. 17. Jeremy Colwill, ‘Beveridge, Women and the Welfare State’, Critical Social Policy, 14.41 (1994), 54–78 (p. 55). 18. For those unable to pay into the contributions system, the National Assistance Act 1948 was introduced to replace the Elizabethan Poor Law 1601. This act sought ‘to make further provision for the welfare of disabled, sick, aged and other persons’ and provide accommodation and assistance to those that were deemed destitute. See National Archives, ‘National Assistance Act 1948’, Legislation.gov.uk, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/11-12/29 (accessed 14 January 2017). 19. William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (London, Cmd 6404, HMSO, 1942), paras 108 and 117.

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20. Colwill, 56. 21. Pascall, 53–54. 22. The Fawcett Society, 30. 23. Ibid. 24. Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender (London: Sage, 1997). 25. Ibid., 41. 26. Ibid., 13. 27. National Portfolio Application, Clean Break, 2014, unpublished Freedom of Information Request, 3. 28. Anna Herrmann, Skype interview with the author, 15 January 2019. 29. Ibid. 30. National Portfolio Application, Clean Break. 31. These venues included London College of Fashion, National Associations Active in Criminal Justice AGM, Leeds Beckett University, University of Kent, University of Lincoln, and University of Roehampton. 32. Lydia chose to be listed by her first name only on material relating to the production. 33. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin [1867], 1976), 714. 34. The Trussell Trust, ‘Foodbank Use Remains at Record High’, The Trussell Trust, 15 April 2016, https://www.trusselltrust.org/2016/04/15/ foodbank-use-remains-record-high/ (accessed 13 December 2017). 35. Katherine Chandler, unpublished script for Spent, 2016, provided by Clean Break, 12. 36. Ibid., 14. 37. Ibid., p.  16. Dynamo is the stage name of Steven Frayne, an English magician who had a TV show of the same name that aired during the time of the rehearsal and production of Spent. 38. Marx, 158. 39. Tracy Shildrick, Robert MacDonald, Andy Furlong, Johann Roden, and Robert Crow, ‘Are “Cultures of Worklessness” Passed Down the Generations?’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, December 2012. 40. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 92. 41. Chandler, Spent script, 12. 42. Anna Taylor and Rachel Loopstra, ‘Too Poor to Eat: Food Insecurity in the UK’ (The Food Foundation, 2016), 1, available at http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/files/FoodInsecurityBriefing%20 May%202016%20FINAL(1).pdf (accessed 15 May 2017). 43. Kayleigh Garthwaite, Hunger Pains: Life Inside Foodbank Britain (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016), p. 63.

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44. Philip Alston, ‘Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, United Nations Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. 23 April 2019. Available at https://undocs.org/A/ HRC/41/39/Add.1 (accessed 22 May 2019). 45. Graham Whitham, ‘Child Poverty in 2012: It Shouldn’t Happen Here’ (Save the Children, 2012), 2–8, available at http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/resources/online-library/child-poverty-2012-it-shouldnthappen-here (accessed 5 May 2017). 46. Federici, 92–93. 47. Ibid., 96. 48. Unpublished script for Tighten Our Belts, Brighton People’s Theatre (2016), 28–29. 49. Ibid., 28. 50. Tronto, 174–175. 51. Chandler, Spent Script, 22. 52. My reading of Clean Break’s work, through a lens of poverty and austerity rather than criminality, locates Spent as entwined with labour policy rather than criminal justice. This is in keeping with former sex worker, activist, and writer Melissa Gira Grant’s call to acknowledge sex work as a form of labour and one which has the regulation and regimentation of broader practices of informal labour. Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (London: Verso, 2014). 53. Kate Hardy, ‘Uneven Divestment of the State: Social Reproduction and Sex Work in Neo-developmentalist Argentina’, Globalizations, 13.6 (2016), 876–889 (877–887). Hardy also notes the contribution of sex work to informal modes of education and collective unionisation which, while not relevant to my analysis here, is apparent in networks of sex workers across the UK.  See, for example, Sex Workers Open University, http://www.sexworkeropenuniversity.com/ (accessed 2 December 2016). 54. Hardy, 886. 55. Ibid., 882. 56. Office for National Statistics, ‘Full Story: The Gender Gap in Unpaid Care Provision: Is there an Impact on Health and Economic Position?’, Office for National Statistics, 16 May 2013, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandwellbeing/ articles/fullstorythegendergapinunpaidcareprovisionisthereanimpactonhealthandeconomicposition/2013-05-16 (accessed 20 March 2017). 57. It is notable that while Clean Break’s remit is to create work by women, Joanne also speaks to the feminisation of public sector roles and the prevalence of women undertaking low-paid care work.

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58. As of 2018, this is no longer the case and all strands of Clean Break’s work falls under the company’s artistic output. 59. Gingerbread, ‘Paying the Price: Single Parents in the Age of Austerity’, Gingerbread, October 2015, 2. https://gingerbread.org.uk/content/1813/Paying-the-price [accessed 5 February 2017]. 60. See Chap. 2, 73–79. 61. James Thompson, ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Care’, RIDE: Research in Drama Education, 24 (2015), no. 4, 430–441. 62. Ibid., 437. 63. Ibid., 438. 64. Carol Gilligan, Joining the Resistance (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 23. 65. Anna Herrmann, email exchange with the author, 15 March 2018. 66. Clinks, ‘Clinks Member’s News: Using the Arts to Support Women’, Clinks, 22 January 2016, http://www.clinks.org/clinks-light-lunchissue-422-22nd-january-2016#memnews4 (accessed 20 December 2016). 67. Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6. 68. Tronto, 55. 69. Waslin, interview. 70. Ibid. 71. Spent Budget, Clean Break, 2016. 72. Waslin, interview. 73. Herrmann, interview. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Thompson, 438. 77. This raises considerations around the employment of ex-offenders and how this status operates as a further obstacle in an already saturated labour market which, though beyond the remit of this study, are pertinent to recognise. 78. 2013–14 Management Accounts, Clean Break. 79. Carole Jarvis, interview with author, 1 December 2016. 80. Clean Break Programme 2012–15, Clean Break. 81. Annual Report 2014–15, Clean Break, 31 March 2015, 10. 82. Ibid. 83. Women’s Resource Centre, ‘Factsheet: Women and the Cuts 2012’, Women’s Resource Centre, October 2012, 2–3, http://thewomensresourcecentre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/women-and-the-cuts.pdf (accessed 15 May 2017). 84. Jess Pearson, interview with author, 9 August 2016. 85. Susie Sillett, ‘Starting Out’, YouTube, 4 October 2016, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=CE9c7L_KZjg (accessed 7 February 2017).

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86. ‘Project Funding Application  – Arts Council England’, Women & Theatre, 2015, 10. 87. Ibid. 88. Rosalyn Norford, ‘Starting Out – The Cast’, YouTube, 6 October 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ue_Qf7PcTo (accessed 7 February 2017). 89. Pearson, interview. 90. Starting Out Interim Arts Council England Report, Women & Theatre, 2016, 6. 91. Ibid., 8. 92. Ibid., 9. 93. Ibid. 94. Other major funders of Clean Break include Big Lottery, City and Islington College, Borough of Camden, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, and John Lyon’s Charity. 95. Annual Feedback Letter—National Portfolio Organisation, Clean Break, unpublished Freedom of Information Request. 96. Adrian Harvey, ‘Funding Arts and Culture in a Time of Austerity’, Arts Council England, April 2016, 10, http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/ default/files/download-file/Funding%20Arts%20and%20Culture%20 in%20a%20time%20of%20Austerity%20(Adrian%20Har vey).pdf (accessed 15 May 2017). 97. Financial Committee Document, Clean Break, 2016. 98. Herrmann, interview. 99. ‘Troubled Arts Venues get £14m Arts Council Bail-out’, BBC News, 28 May 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27518118 (accessed 20 March 2017). 100. Feminist Fightback, 78.

References Philip Alston, ‘Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, United Nations Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. 23 April 2019. https://undocs.org/A/HRC/41/39/Add.1 (accessed 22 May 2019). Arts Council England, unpublished ‘Annual Feedback Letter—National Portfolio Organisation’ 2015a, Clean Break Theatre Company. Arts Council England, unpublished ‘Project Funding Application’, Women & Theatre, 2015b. William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (London: HMSO, 1942). Brighton People’s Theatre, unpublished script for Tighten Our Belts, 2016. Katherine Chandler, unpublished script for Spent, provided by Clean Break, 2016.

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Clean Break, unpublished ‘National Portfolio Application’, 2014. Clinks, ‘Clinks Member’s News: Using the Arts to Support Women’, Clinks, 22 January 2016, http://www.clinks.org/clinks-light-lunch-issue-422-22nd-january-2016#memnews4 (accessed 20 December 2016). Jeremy Colwill, ‘Beveridge, Women and the Welfare State’, Critical Social Policy, 14.41 (1994), 54–78. The Fawcett Society, ‘The Impact of Austerity on Women’, The Fawcett Society Policy Briefing: March 2012, March 2012, 7, http://www.fawcettsociety.org. uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/The-Impact-of-Austerity-onWomen-19th-March-2012.pdf (accessed 20 July 2016). Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012). Feminist Fightback, ‘Cuts are a Feminist Issue’, Soundings, 49 (2011), 73–83 (77). Kayleigh Garthwaite, Hunger Pains: Life Inside Foodbank Britain (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016). Gender and Welfare State Regimes, ed. by Diane Sainsbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Gender, Welfare State and the Market: Towards a New Division of Labour, ed. by Thomas Boje and Arnlaug Leira (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (London: Verso, 2014). Carol Gilligan, Joining the Resistance (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). Gingerbread, ‘Paying the Price: Single Parents in the Age of Austerity’, Gingerbread, October 2015, 2. https://gingerbread.org.uk/content/1813/Paying-theprice (accessed 5 February 2017). Kate Hardy, ‘Uneven Divestment of the State: Social Reproduction and Sex Work in Neo-developmentalist Argentina’, Globalizations, 13.6 (2016), 876–889, (877–887). Adrian Harvey, ‘Funding Arts and Culture in a Time of Austerity’, Arts Council England, April 2016, 10, http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/ download-file/Funding%20Arts%20and%20Culture%20in%20a%20time%20 of%20Austerity%20(Adrian%20Harvey).pdf (accessed 15 May 2017). Anna Herrmann and Róisín McBrinn, ‘The Legacy Tapes: Clean Break’, Exeunt Podcast, 10 June 2019, http://exeuntmagazine.com/podcasts/legacy-tapesclean-break/ (accessed 11 June 2019). Anna Herrmann, email exchange with the author, 15 March 2018. Anna Herrmann, Skype Interview with the Author, 15 January 2019. Hilary Land, ‘The Family Wage’, Feminist Review, 6 (1980), 55–78. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976 [1867]). Rosalyn Norford, ‘Starting Out – The Cast’, YouTube, 6 October 2016, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ue_Qf7PcTo (accessed 7 February 2017).

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Office for National Statistics, ‘Full Story: The Gender Gap in Unpaid Care Provision: Is there an Impact on Health and Economic Position?’, Office for National Statistics, 16 May 2013, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandwellbeing/articles/fullstorythegendergapinunpaidcareprovisionisthereanimpactonhealthandeconomicposition/2013-05-16 (accessed 20 March 2017). Gillian Pascall, Gender Equality in the Welfare State? (Bristol: Policy Press, 2012). Jess Pearson, interview with author, 9 August 2016. Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Diane Sainsbury, Gendering Welfare States (London: Sage, 1994). Tracy Shildrick, Robert MacDonald, Andy Furlong, Johann Roden, and Robert Crow, ‘Are “Cultures of Worklessness” Passed Down the Generations?’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, December 2012. Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender (London: Sage, 1997). Susie Sillett, ‘Starting Out’, YouTube, 4 October 2016, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=CE9c7L_KZjg (accessed 7 February 2017). James Thompson, ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Care’, RIDE: Research in Drama Education, 24 (2015), no. 4, 430–441. ‘Troubled Arts Venues get £14m Arts Council Bail-out’, BBC News, 28 May 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27518118 (accessed 20 March 2017). Anna Taylor and Rachel Loopstra, ‘Too Poor to Eat: Food Insecurity in the UK’ (The Food Foundation, 2016), 1, available at http://www.nuffieldfoundation. org/sites/default/files/files/FoodInsecurityBriefing%20May%202016%20 FINAL(1).pdf (accessed 15 May 2017). Joan Tronto, Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013). The Trussell Trust, ‘Foodbank Use Remains at Record High’, The Trussell Trust, 15 April 2016, https://www.trusselltrust.org/2016/04/15/foodbank-useremains-record-high/ (accessed 13 December 2017). Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London: Tavistock, 1977). Graham Whitham, ‘Child Poverty in 2012: It Shouldn’t Happen Here’ (Save the Children, 2012), available at http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/resources/ online-library/child-poverty-2012-it-shouldnt-happen-here (accessed 5 May 2017). Women’s Budget Group, ‘The Impact on Women of the 2016 Budget: Women Paying for the Chancellor’s Tax Cuts’, Women’s Budget Group, 2016, http:// wbg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/WBG_2016Budget_Response_ PDF.pdf (accessed 20 July 2016).

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Women’s Budget Group, ‘The Impact on Women of Budget 2014’, Women’s Budget Group, 2014, http://www.wbg.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2014/ 03/FINAL-WBG-2014-budget-response.pdf (accessed 20 July 2016). Women’s Resource Centre, ‘Factsheet: Women and the Cuts 2012’, Women’s Resource Centre, October 2012, http://thewomensresourcecentre.org.uk/ wp-content/uploads/women-and-the-cuts.pdf (accessed 15 May 2017). Alison Wolf, The XX Factor (London: Profile Books, 2013).

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Reimagining Creative Acts Under Austerity

Through engaging with the unemployed figure in a context of austerity, Performing Welfare exposes the persistence of work as an acutely contested site and illuminates how performance interventions in this area might reconstitute notions of work in socially constructive ways. It argues for the importance of a considered politics of visibility operating within arts practice and champions the informal networks of care that emerge in applied, community, and participatory arts projects, warning that such reproductive labour must not be undervalued or precarised, but recognised and supported. The significant shift in welfare reform that occurred during the period investigated exposes how value-laden understandings of work are constantly being posed and challenged and asserts how performance can intervene in constructions of labour, interdependence, and the social. The unemployed figure (and their multiple intersecting identities) in socially committed performance holds a dual potential: to unsettle the construction of labour under late capitalism and to illuminate the ambiguities of participation and labour embedded in applied, community, and participatory performance. This concentration on unemployment, and focus on the accompanying context of austerity operating in the UK, enables the materialities of the relationship between performance and labour to emerge more visibly and so usefully calls attention to economies of participation operating in this practice. Additionally, it provides a critical reflection on the relationship of arts-based employment schemes to

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state agendas of active labour market provision. This provokes urgent considerations around how performances of participation can be utilised in order to question dominant understandings of productivity and affirm the various forms of labour that may be elided or devalued in current narrow perceptions of work. The dominant narrative that emerges from the examples surveyed in this book is the persistent and unrelenting labour involved in unemployment. Participatory arts practices in this field regularly seek to make visible and call attention to the amount of unrecognised labour being undertaken by unemployed people. That is both the labour of applying for jobs and the seemingly relentless work involved in maintaining access to monetary support from the state. In particular, I point to examples where such labour is materialised: The Bite Back Movement’s mass display of CVs and job applications in the gallery space and embodied in One Million through unemployed bodies actively engaged in labour as a political strategy. This underscores the heterogeneous strategies utilised by arts practitioners to make experiences of unemployment visible and material post-2010. Beyond manifesting the labour of unemployment, I present the unique position of socially committed performance with unemployed people to challenge, nuance, and assert understandings of labour that falls outside of formal employment structures. In But I’m Here for Mental Health, the disability claimant can be read as resistant to punitive frameworks of state productivity, instead performing the position of the non-productive body as a revolutionary subjectivity, which is able to acutely expose the state’s abject cruelty. Further, representations of women’s unemployment on stage are persistently linked to their role as reproductive labourers underpinning the continuation of capital accumulation and its attendant inequalities. As discussed in the previous chapter, in highlighting the labour undertaken by non-working women, applied performance practice has the potential to reconstitute understandings of the figure of the unemployed woman, particularly the single mother. Performing Welfare therefore offers three distinct readings of performance and labour: the potential for performance to make visible the daily work involved in maintaining one’s status as unemployed; the utility in deploying performances of labour and/or non-productivity as strategies to disrupt dominant constructions of unemployment; and the persistence of hypergendered representations of non-working identities in performance. I have sought to describe how dominant discourses of individual responsibility pathologise unemployment, eliding broader considerations

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of the labour landscape or particular personal circumstances, consistently rendering the individual at fault for their non-working status. Such representations are pervasive and have led to the emergence of acutely negative rhetoric around the unemployed. I have argued that the strategies, and accompanying performance vocabularies, deployed in specific productions—Benefit and Tighten Our Belts—interpolated different understandings of responsibility and community in relation to the unemployed figure. Beyond evidencing the responsiveness of arts projects to particular political discourses, I have identified how performance can inadvertently model social policy in its practice. Deploying performance analysis to examine policy identifies how certain policy agendas might be enacted onstage. Given the breakdown of state-supported social security networks, the role of arts organisations in fostering social provision is increasing. However, as I have identified, an overzealous turn towards cultural commissioning has the potential to deprivilege arts practices in order to fulfil the rhetoric and requirements of public service provision. This expands on previous constructions of socially committed arts practice as instrumentalised. By contextualising projects through the social and cultural policies which cultivate them, I identify the ways in which pervasive economic vocabularies contaminate arts practices. Contrastingly, I also illuminate the ways in which arts organisations might intervene in the dehumanisation or monetisation of individuals within policy structures and social provision. The examples examined in this book enable a reflection on specific instances where performance is resistant to the marketisation of employability schemes and, on the other hand, where it is implicated in the ideologies and practices of open public services. My analysis of performance practices that cultivate acts of collectivity as a political strategy asserts the value of performing moments of community while also outlining the concurrent instrumentalisation of the term in social policy. Holding the sites of collective gathering in the outdoor performance One Million alongside the modes of collective representation in The Bite Back Movement’s A Dangerous Figure underscores the plural capacities of socially committed arts practices to bring disparate individuals together. In collaborating with a group of participants often isolated or individualised by negative rhetoric and financial constraints, Performing Welfare reasserts the value of community performance as a way to affirm shared marginalised identities. To undertake an arts project with a group of unemployed 18-year-olds in the UK in 2019, you are collaborating with young people who do not remember a time before austerity, do not

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necessarily understand or know what has been lost in the fight to defend those in extreme poverty, and who may have a very different experience with social systems and what they look like. Given the dismantling of state systems of support, it is crucial that arts practitioners cultivate collective action and community attachments in order to publicly perform acts of dependency, thereby highlighting interdependence as a pressing social issue and useful political strategy in an increasingly individualised neoliberal context. There is a need for a diversity of representational approaches under the punitive welfare regime that currently operates in the UK.  I have documented strategies of anonymity, such as those deployed in A Dangerous Figure and But I’m Here for Mental Health, as tactics which facilitate critique of state systems while also protecting participants from exposure to financial sanctions or social projections of shame. Similarly, my analysis of Tighten Our Belts identifies the production’s reliance on third-­person narratives as an aesthetic strategy to ensure participants’ protection. Each of these examples also points to the success of representational strategies that allow distance between participant and content in enabling affects of anger or threat to emerge in socially committed arts practice. Across the chapters, I underscore the tension in arts practices that require people to express their own experiences, in a context where sharing their stories leaves them vulnerable or exposed to social, physical, or economic rebuttals. This book documents new representational strategies to safeguard participants, which enable communities and individuals who are acutely precarised, oppressed, and marginalised to critique and rage against the systems in which they exist from a position of safety. In the case of unemployed people, this exposure to vulnerability results in a need for increased provisions of care by practitioners and arts organisations collaborating with this participant group. My interrogation of remuneration and participation underscores the increasing precarity and material struggles unemployed people endure. I trace the desire of different companies—Tangled Feet, Immediate Theatre, and Clean Break—to give participants some type of financial remuneration in order to ‘recognise’ their presence at workshops and their creative work. In turning to modes of exchange, this book nuances the specificities of offering financial remuneration to unemployed people, evidencing how their dependence on an inflexible benefit system presents difficulties to arts organisations who want to offer payment for their work. This highlights approaches

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organisations can adopt in order to navigate state welfare systems and pay participants while not causing disruption to their benefits. More broadly, this allows us to re-examine understandings of how participants benefit from their work on a creative project and prompts the discussion of material considerations in participatory practice. Beyond financial payment, Performing Welfare also identifies the important work applied and community theatre companies engage in through the provision of support that stretches beyond their remit as performance makers and recasts what we understand as the social role of arts organisations. My exploration of Clean Break demonstrates the extensive support they offer in terms of food and travel provision for participants, the inclusion of social welfare services delivering support at their Camden main site, and the role and financing of the support team. Immediate Theatre provide food vouchers for their participants; similarly Brighton People’s Theatre provide lunch at sessions, because many of the people participating require it. The depiction of foodbank usage across the case studies I have examined speaks to the increasing level of food poverty in the UK. Benefit, Tighten Our Belts, and Spent all address the increase in foodbank usage and depict people who are struggling to survive in an increasingly precarised system of state support. Arts organisations are therefore extending their remit beyond the creation of performance work, and in some cases beyond the stated social outcomes of their project, to include the provision of basic items such as food, childcare, and access to warm space. It is vital that this work is documented in order to highlight the acute challenges people are dealing with and foreground these pastoral and organic interventions that often remain occluded from critical discussions of arts organisations.

Social Committed Performance in a Time of Social Need What does an arts practice premised on the social do when macro structures of the social are under attack? Over the past decade, ideologies of community and dependency have been weakened by government policies that have eroded the network of support available for the most vulnerable in society. This has been accompanied by an increase of insecure working conditions and a pervasive discourse of individual responsibility promoted by sections of the media and successive governments. Anna Herrmann,

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Co-Artistic Director of Clean Break, articulated an anxiety that I have heard echoed by many artists and academics working in the field of socially committed arts in the UK in 2019: I find it debilitating and frustrating that practically there is such a great need, and I’m not involved in fulfilling that need because I’m involved in creating theatre. And I think, god I just need to go out and protest. I need to go out and be part of some sort of direct action because sometimes it feels like making theatre is not enough.1

When making socially focused performance in contexts where once collectively shared resources are being retracted, you are regularly collaborating with people who are in positions of acute need. When I was starting out as a community arts practitioner, I used to joke that participants came to my sessions just for the biscuits; this is now a reality. Depending on your project or organisation’s body of work, participants might be at a session for the arts practice, but they also may be there for the tea and snacks, for the support with form filling, for the warmth of the space, for knowing someone will have the time to listen, for the travel money that enables them to be in a room with other people for the first time in weeks. These aspects of community practice have always been an appealing element of the work for participants, increasingly they are a need. These are moments in which the binary argument of art for art’s sake or art for social value is invoked, but it is no longer an abstract reflection, rather a negotiation at the messy intersection of the two. You have to respond to the basic human needs of the people whom you are working with; and that response, that act of care, can be material and artistic. Arts practice can offer both new ways to envisage social support and contest the destruction of structures of social security.2 In the same interview, Herrmann went on to assert that Clean Break’s value lies in the artistic approaches it takes to ‘changing systems and challenging constructs’.3 In its nature, socially committed performance offers distinctive modes of collaboration, representation, and embodied encounters that have a specific value for those participating in its creation and those audiences witnessing its outcomes. Further, it is dependent on those delivering and reflecting on these practices to establish the parameters of what we consider to be ‘the practice’ and also to ensure that it attends to the needs of the people we are working with in a genuine and concrete sense. I am not suggesting that we transform all arts organisations into foodbanks,

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citizens’ advice bureaus, welfare services, or housing support offices—each of these services has its own discrete and vital practice that we must invest in and fiercely protect. Instead, I am asking that we consider what socially committed performance practice might offer people utilising these services when it really listens to and responds to the needs of that group of people. Part of this offer is certainly the engagement of artistic practices in order to reorient discussions of unemployment; but it is also the care-full and relational practices that underpin applied and community performance. In the examples examined here, this care-full practice is concerned with particularly responding to the harsh social and economic conditions encountered by participants. Such considerations demand that socially committed arts practice addresses material realities in a way which is attentive to the effects of economic austerity. I have indicated some potential ways practitioners can make specific interventions around people’s immediate needs; however, this also demands a structural shift in the way socially committed arts practice is conceptualised and delivered. On a practical level, we need to develop funding bids that account for the bureaucratic labour undertaken by arts organisations trying to navigate welfare systems, bids that include food and material provision in their budget line, bids that account for embedded specialist support workers or the provision of staff time to cultivate relationships with organisations in health, welfare, and education. Such considerations broaden understandings of the parameters of what we class as artistic practice. Are we making art when we are filling in people’s benefit forms? Is my navigation of the benefit system in order to pay my participants part of my arts practice? Is funding childcare or travel money to encourage participation in sessions an artistic decision? Is my provision of food and tea an act of creativity? I would say yes, these are artistic practices because they are part of the realisation of creative project, but they are also all creative acts that reimagine what it means to participate in something collective, to be cared for, to be supported. Over the past decade, ideologies of community and dependency have been weakened by government policies that have eroded the network of support available for the most vulnerable in society: a global neoliberal labour market promoting increasingly insecure working conditions and an increasingly pervasive discourse of individual responsibility promoted by sections of the media and successive governments. It is vital that we reflect on the impact of such an erosion, in the material sense that I allude to above, but also in terms of the ideological shift such a disinvestment

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attempts to assert within this structure. People’s understanding of the social and relational is inescapably inflected by the way these concepts are constructed by macro systems in which they exist. If the state devalues, and persistently attacks, a social structure of support such as the welfare state, the economic capacity of the system is reduced, but beyond that, citizens’ understandings of social support—and what is reasonable and what is collectively shared—are affected. It is therefore crucial for us to contextualise socially engaged, community, and applied arts practices within the social systems that surround them. We must and be attentive to how shifts in those social structures can be traced through our work in order to cultivate arts practices that harness the desire for the social, resist the destruction of systems of collective support, and create new representational paradigms through which to destabilise fixed understandings of labour and value.

Notes 1. Rebecca Atkinson-Lord interview with Anna Herrmann and Róisín McBrinn, ‘The Legacy Tapes: Clean Break’, Exeunt Podcast, 10 June 2019, http://exeuntmagazine.com/podcasts/legacy-tapes-clean-break/ (accessed 11 June 2019). 2. See Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), and Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, eds. Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, Dominic Willsdon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 3. Ibid.

References Rebecca Atkinson-Lord interview with Anna Herrmann and Róisín McBrinn, ‘The Legacy Tapes: Clean Break’, Exeunt Podcast, 10 June 2019, http://exeuntmagazine.com/podcasts/legacy-tapes-clean-break/ (accessed 11 June 2019). Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York and London: Routledge, 2011). Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, eds. Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, Dominic Willsdon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).



Afterword

April 2020 As this book goes to print, we are in the midst of a global pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of people have died of coronavirus and many more are sick. Across the world, responses to COVID-19 have exposed and entrenched existing social and economic inequalities. The UK government’s initial response, which aligned with a strategy of herd immunity, cast people deemed ‘unproductive’ or ‘unskilled’ under late capitalism as ultimately disposable in service of the economy.1 This mode of necropolitical governance put the country’s poorest, sickest, oldest, and most insecurely employed at acute risk. Their position was revised on 16 March when the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team demonstrated its catastrophic implications: approximately 250,000 people would die in the UK if more significant restrictions were not imposed.2 The country finally went into lockdown on 23 March. This disregard for the vulnerable was underscored by the failure to properly report data on people dying from coronavirus in care homes in England. The devaluing of marginalised lives, and erasure of deaths, is not a significant step change for the current government, but witnessing it concentrated in a singular catastrophic event illuminates the blatant violence of the UK state.3 Throughout the pandemic the government has intensified its rhetoric of individual responsibility: you must stay home, you are responsible for saving lives, you must not unduly burden the NHS. While it is reasonable to ask people to take every action they can to protect themselves and others, this persistent and singular emphasis on the role of the individual as paramount © The Author(s) 2020 S. Bartley, Performing Welfare, Contemporary Performance InterActions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44854-7

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to the UK’s response to the virus distracts from the numerous failures of the government: the failure of the UK government to procure enough ventilators despite multiple opportunities to collaborate with European partners to do so, the failure of the UK government to provide personal protective equipment to frontline workers, the failure of the UK government to address the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black people and people of colour, the failure of the UK government to implement community testing and contact tracing, the failure of the UK government to follow World Health Organization guidance and take timely steps to lock down the country, and the failure of the UK government to protect many of the most vulnerable people in our society through sufficient shielding and support services. As the economic fallout of the pandemic begins to unfold, Jobcentres have become another frontline of the crisis, supporting people to access social security in order to/and survive the impact of job losses or wage reductions. Between 16 March and 6 April the Department for Work and Pensions received 1.2 million Universal Credit claims, they would normally expect 100,000 claims a fortnight. To fortify the economy, Rishi Sunak, the current Chancellor, introduced a £1000 per annum increases in both Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit payments and reversed the freeze on Local Housing Allowance for 12 months from March 2020. However, the freeze on benefit payments since 2016 means people are still struggling to survive on insufficient funds. Further, the five-week wait between applying for Universal Credit and receiving money has consistently been shown to lead to extreme hardship. The huge influx in people claiming Universal Credit has brought greater scrutiny to the welfare system as those made redundant as a result of COVID-19 cannot access immediate or sufficient funds to deal with the crisis. This failing system is all we have to stop millions of people laid off due to coronavirus shutdowns falling into abject poverty, joining those whose prior encounters with Universal Credit have already firmly locked them into destitution. For those in employment, the government have pledged to pay 80% of workers’ wages up to £2500 per month for staff furloughed by their employer, in a bid to assuage companies moving to make many more redundant. Latterly, self-employed workers (with a year of tax return data) were also supported under the same policy, although they will have to wait until June to access any subsidised wages. To date, short-term and zero-­ hour contract workers so celebrated for their agility in the neoliberal labour market have been abandoned by the government and left vulnerable by precarious working conditions. With a disintegrating social security net and a lack of employment regulation, precarious workers and

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claimants have been left disenfranchised, impoverished, and acutely exposed to the impact of COVID-19. In the cultural sector, an industry predicated on freelance and gig economy workers, Arts Council England have made £160 million of emergency funding available for organisations and individuals to weather the financial impact of the virus. While artists and producing theatres have been making performances available to audiences online, much socially committed arts practice is intrinsically premised on conditions the virus prevents (community gathering and embodied collective action). Yet such projects occupy a distinctive position between social provision and creative work, so are better placed to intervene in communities in moments of crisis. Across the UK, there has been a concerted effort among socially committed arts organisations to amplify the social work which they undertake. Health and social care staff have made desperate pleas for the personal protective equipment they need in order to be safe at work. In response, Tangled Feet have donated scrubs from their 2015 production Care, one of many arts organisations donating costumes to staff in need. This bears repeating; during a global health crisis, theatre companies are donating costumes to provide protection for healthcare workers due to the insufficiency of response from the UK government. Tangled Feet have also moved their mindfulness project for young people experiencing anxiety or isolation online; Clean Break Theatre Company have instigated Write2Connect, a new project sending messages of solidarity to incarcerated women who are now in their cells for 23 hours a day due to the outbreak. Helix Arts and Women and Theatre have moved materials online, the former delivering Make It Happen (a training programme for artists wanting to learn about running community-led projects) and the latter releasing audio recordings of monologues from Starting Out on Spotify. Beyond the organisations I have looked at in this book, women’s theatre company Open Clasp are collaborating with partners on Scran4theFam, a soup delivery service for older people and families in the West End of Newcastle. Slung Low, a theatre company based in Leeds, are now the lead organisation in their area responding to referrals from Leeds Council helpline.4 Throughout the UK, socially committed arts practitioners are finding creative ways to respond to community need and cultivate direct action. More broadly there has been a renewed appetite for collective action, most clearly manifested in the establishment of COVID Mutual Aid groups across the country.5 This level of grassroots community

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mobilisation is unparalleled in recent times. Further, while problematic, the government’s programme of fiscal support has constituted a substantial investment in the welfare state and a deepening understanding of its vital importance. There are then some pockets of radical potential in the tragic circumstances we find ourselves. It is possible that citizens will refuse to return to established patterns of work, consumption, and underresourced welfare systems. Calls for the implementation of a universal basic income across the world, and closer to home in Scotland, are increasing. There is a broader awareness of the punitive nature of the social security system as increasing numbers of the population discover the safety net of the welfare state has been severely eroded. The proportion of vital frontline workers who would not qualify for residence in the UK under the government’s new points-based immigration system has both underscored the systemic racism and hostility experienced by migrant workers and our dependence on these same people. The manifold possibilities of more accessible home working for those with disabilities or caring commitments are now irrefutable. The public demand for greater investment in our health and social care systems, and the people who work within them, alongside an increased awareness of the insufficiency of the social security safety net could lead to significant pressure to invest in the state once more. Standing on the precipice of social change, we could usefully look to the body of artistic practice produced over the last decade to understand how we might resist the demonisation of the poor, use cultural practice to cultivate collective action, deploy anonymity as a representational strategy, and use performance as a way to reorient our relationship with work and welfare. Above all, we must go further and use every resource (creative or otherwise) at our disposal to support one another, revitalise social welfare systems, and hold the governments to account. We should, however, remain vigilant to the co-opting of this crisis by the ruling world order. As we feel our way through these uncertain times, the reach for parallels becomes increasingly alluring and offers the potential to equip ourselves for the fight that is to come. Given the seismic shock coronavirus has inflicted on the global economy, the financial crisis of 2008 looms large in discussions of the economic fallout to come. We must remember how that crisis was retrospectively packaged—not as an exposure of the exploitation and inequality that underpins a neoliberal structure—as just a blip in the machine: banks were bailed out, order was restored, economic and social inequality increased, poverty was punished,

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people at the bottom paid (and still are paying) the price. In April 2020 UK banks have been empowered by government loan guarantees to offer mortgage holidays to homeowners, business interruption loans for small businesses, and interest-free overdraft and credit facilities for the duration of the crisis. Once again individuals and small businesses will have to take on substantial amounts of private debt, to shoulder the burden of this crisis, while banks, landlords, and large corporations stand to profit from it. As we move towards a global recession and prolonged period of high unemployment, renewed talk of austerity programmes has begun to take hold. Even as the government writes off historic NHS debts, injects resources into the welfare system, and dishes out money to save the economy, it does so with the proviso that high taxation and cuts to public spending mean we will all be paying it back for years to come. We must resist this burdening of those at the bottom, we must act collectively and reformulate the distribution of wealth, and we must demand a welfare system that protects us all.

Notes 1. David Halpern, chief executive of the government-owned Behavioural Insights Team, gave the first indication that the government were pursuing a ‘herd immunity’ strategy on 11 March. See Mark Easton, ‘Coronavirus: Care home residents could be “cocooned”’, 11 March, BBC, https://www. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51828000 [accessed 10 April 2020]. 2. The government’s position was revised on 16 March, suggesting where possible to reduce non-essential contact with others. On 23 March these measures were intensified and people were asked to remain in their homes, essentially shutting down the country. 3. See Chap. 5 in particular. 4. ‘HomePage’, Slung Low, https://www.slunglow.org/ [Accessed 10 April 2020]. 5. A grassroots goodwill that has since been co-opted by the government through the establishment of the NHS Volunteer Responders scheme to generate a network of people to support the chronically and systematically underfunded healthcare system.

Index1

A Adamson, Rebecca, 61, 62, 65 Alexander, Naomi, 83–85, 89, 90, 98, 102, 103, 131 Alston, Philip, 2, 12, 214 Apprenticeships, 26, 46–50, 54–61, 67, 68, 71n40, 231 Arts Council England (ACE), 21, 43, 45, 46, 49, 59, 60, 82, 84, 161, 162, 168, 169, 172, 173, 231–235, 257 Augustus, Alexander, 119, 121, 124, 125, 129, 131, 134, 137, 140, 141, 147 Austerity, 2–4, 12, 21–23, 27, 29n6, 83, 84, 91, 98, 100, 101, 105, 122, 139, 159, 169, 178, 183, 203, 204, 207, 211–213, 215, 216, 219–222, 224, 228, 230, 236, 240n52, 247–254

B Baker, Sarah, 56, 57, 60 Balfour, Michael, 41, 44 Beatty, Christina, 176, 196n60 Benefit, 26, 81–83, 85, 92–94, 96, 100, 102, 106, 107, 249, 251 Berlant, Lauren, 26, 80, 87, 94, 106 Beveridge, William, 15, 88, 89, 105, 207–209 Big Society, 89 Biopolitics, 27, 159–192 BiteBack Movement, The, 26, 118, 119, 121, 123, 128, 129, 133, 134, 136–138, 140–142, 146, 248, 249 Blair, Tony, 10, 19, 88, 89 Boal, Augusto, 81, 92 Brighton People’s Theatre, 26, 81, 83–86, 89, 90, 100–104, 106, 214, 215, 251

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

But I’m Here for Mental Health, 1, 28n1, 163, 175–186, 188, 191, 248, 250 Butler, Judith, 12, 13, 167, 178, 179 C Cameron, David, 89, 117, 127, 138 Cardboard Citizens, 26, 81, 82, 92, 94, 95, 161, 172 Care, 10, 26, 28, 43, 45, 61, 79, 103, 107, 161, 179, 192, 205, 206, 209–213, 215, 217, 218, 222–225, 228–230, 234, 236, 237, 247, 250, 252, 255, 257, 258 Chandler, Katherine, 211 Chandler, Michael, 94, 100, 101 Clean Break Theatre, 27, 203, 257 Coalition Government, 20, 21, 43, 89, 91, 96, 138, 139, 209 Conservative Party, 12 Creative and Cultural Skills, 46, 59 Critical discourse analysis, 24, 25 Crowd Psychology, 126–128 in-group/out-group, 129 Cultural commissioning, 25, 41, 43–45, 222, 230, 249 Cultural Commissioning Programme (CCP), 43–45 Cultural materialism, 24 Curry, Nathan, 161, 165, 167, 168, 171, 173 D A Dangerous Figure, 26, 118–126, 128–140, 142–148, 168, 180, 189, 249, 250 Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), 1, 43, 47, 48, 64, 91, 139, 177, 189, 196n64, 227, 256 Dependency/dependence, 2, 4, 10–14, 22, 23, 26, 79–107, 130,

161, 203, 208, 217, 250, 253, 258 Disability, 3, 15, 22, 28n1, 93, 96, 107n2, 163, 175, 179, 181–185, 188–192, 204, 248, 258 E Economies of participation, 3, 5, 28, 171, 206, 225–230, 247 Embodiment, 24, 101, 166, 215–219 Employment Support Allowance (ESA), 20, 22, 163, 175, 177–182, 186, 189–191, 196n60 England Riots, The, 27, 117, 121, 126, 138 F Fairclough, Norman, 42, 44, 91, 94, 106, 146 Federici, Silvia, 27, 208, 213–215 First Door, The, 61, 64, 66, 70n29 Flinn, Andrew, 142, 144 Food, 3, 172, 211–215, 251, 253 foodbank, 3, 10, 20, 83, 84, 211, 213, 214, 251, 252 Forum theatre, 79, 81–86, 101, 106 G Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 179–182 H Hamel, Sonia, 101 Harvie, Jen, 11, 24 Helix Arts, 1, 27, 159, 163, 174, 182, 188, 189, 257 Herrmann, Anna, 204, 210, 211, 223, 227, 228, 235, 237n4, 251, 252 Hesmondhalgh, David, 56, 57, 60 Homelessness, 3, 101, 223

 INDEX 

Hughes, Jenny, 14, 166 I Immediate Theatre, 42, 46, 50, 51, 61, 62, 64–68, 171, 172, 250, 251 Instrumentalisation, 5, 22, 26, 41, 90, 107, 175, 249 Invisibility, 26–28, 117–149, 174–184, 220 J Jackson, Adrian, 81 Jackson, Shannon, 10, 11 Jeffers, Alison, 16 Joanne, 27, 203, 206, 211, 219–221, 223, 224, 231, 232, 237n2, 240n57 Jobseeker’s Allowance, 18, 20, 23, 33n72, 176, 226 Jones, Chloe, 52, 53, 62, 64, 66, 67, 171 K Kafer, Alison, 8 Kershaw, Baz, 85, 86, 106 L Labour division of labour, 60, 205, 208, 223 labour market, 3, 5–7, 16–18, 23, 24, 29n17, 42, 47, 48, 51, 54, 56, 57, 59, 65, 71n32, 80, 83, 91, 106, 120, 122, 140, 142, 144, 145, 147–148, 160–162, 164, 166, 170, 174, 176, 190, 194n32, 204–209, 215, 218,

263

231–233, 241n77, 248, 253, 256 reproductive labour, 8, 206, 208, 211, 217–221, 223–225, 229, 234, 236, 237, 247 M Marx, Karl, 6, 24, 164, 211–213 Marxist, 5, 24, 213 Matarasso, François, 19, 32n63, 87 May, Theresa, 23 Mulderrig, Jane, 25, 65, 95 Muñoz, José Esteban, 27, 119, 131, 132, 135, 145, 148 N Necropolitics, 160, 175 Neelands, Jonathan, 103, 104 Nyong’o, Tavia, 13 O One Million, 27, 159, 161–175, 177, 186, 188–191, 248, 249 Open Public Services, 43–45, 48, 49, 51, 222, 230, 249 P Participation, 1–3, 5, 8–10, 17, 19, 23, 28, 54, 90, 92, 97, 105, 106, 126, 130, 137, 162–164, 170–174, 183, 189, 206, 219, 221, 225–230, 232, 236, 247, 248, 250, 253 Phelan, Peggy, 27, 118, 119, 126, 132, 148 Post-Fordist, 26, 80, 162 Poverty, 12, 15, 19, 91, 122, 125, 126, 136, 183, 211, 213, 214,

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218, 224, 240n52, 250, 251, 256, 258 Precarity, 3, 10–14, 21, 57, 80, 83, 160, 168, 171, 178, 192, 232, 235, 236, 250 Productivity, 3, 5–9, 16, 19, 27, 159–192, 236, 248 R Rancière, Jacques, 27, 118, 119, 123, 130, 148 Remuneration, 3, 5, 28, 171, 174, 190, 226–229, 250 Responsibility individual responsibility, 5, 15, 65, 79–107, 248, 253, 255 social responsibility, 7, 10, 81, 220 Ridout, Nicholas, 8, 170, 173, 224 S Sennett, Richard, 10, 96 Shame, 10, 27, 56, 118, 121–126, 130, 136, 139, 250 Social reproduction, 27, 203–237 Spent, 27, 203, 206, 211–214, 217, 218, 220, 223–229, 236, 240n52, 251 Starting Out, 206, 231–233, 257 Storytelling, 97, 98, 102, 103, 107 T Talent Match, 26, 42, 45–47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 61–63, 66–68, 70n29, 74n85, 171, 172 Tangled Feet, 27, 159, 161, 162, 165, 167–169, 171–173, 192n5, 192n6, 250, 257

Thompson, James, 97, 222, 228 Tighten Our Belts, 26, 81–86, 97, 98, 100–107, 111n83, 215, 217, 249–251 Tronto, Joan, 206, 215, 217, 225 Tyler, Imogen, 183, 184, 197n78 U Universal Credit, 3, 20, 170, 190, 227, 228, 256 V Visibility, 26–28, 98, 117–149, 164–169, 174–184, 247 W Wages Living Wage, the, 57 National Minimum Wage, the, 49, 209 Waslin, Emma, 225, 226 Weeks, Kathi, 6, 7, 170 Welfare the Welfare Reform Acts, 3, 18 welfare state, 10, 11, 14–24, 79, 88–89, 160, 183, 191, 206, 207, 214, 254, 258 welfare system, 1, 2, 27, 28, 43, 83, 88, 93, 95, 97, 102, 130, 138, 160, 179, 188, 189, 205, 206, 221, 228, 229, 251, 253, 256, 258, 259 Wiggan, Jay, 91, 146 Women & Theatre, 206, 231–233, 235 Women’s Budget Group, 204, 205, 207, 233

 INDEX 

Work, 2, 41, 45, 79, 119, 159, 204, 210–215, 248, 257 care work, 192, 206, 218, 222, 224, 225, 230, 237, 240n57 Work Programme, the, 21, 48, 51, 170, 178

265

Y Youth unemployment, 4, 22, 45, 58, 61–62, 119, 120, 123, 130, 132–134, 137, 138, 141–144, 146, 147, 150n9, 154n78, 161, 162, 173, 190, 193n17, 204, 206