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Performing 'Risk' Performing ‘risk’: neoliberalization and contemporary performance Owen, Louise The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/489 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] Performing ‘risk’: neoliberalization and contemporary performance Louise Owen PhD Queen Mary, University of London September 2009 1 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the relation between ‘risk’ and ‘performance’ through analysis of examples of contemporary theatre and performance practice commissioned, developed and produced under the New Labour government. The project is multidisciplinary and materialist. It problematises constructions of risk in theatre and performance studies as either inhering in the identity of the artist, as a dynamic specific to genre or indeed a discipline-specific value. In view of the explosion of social scientific interest in ‘risk’ which gathered momentum in the early 1990s, it follows work by theorists of neoliberal governmentality, geography and cultural studies to suggest that a more productive and historically specific treatment of the concept is one informed by political economy. Neoliberal policy rejects the welfare state’s collectivisation of risk and characteristically redistributes risk to individual, entrepreneurialised subjects. New Labour, seeking to produce ‘inclusion’, has deployed a managerial cultural policy in the service of this aim, the chief concerns of which are the ‘ethical training’ of social subjects and the economic regeneration of post- industrial sites. I analyse closely the mediation of four figures of contemporary political economic concern in theatre and performance: the asylum seeker, the young person ‘at risk’, the sex worker and the entrepreneur. On the basis of these analyses, I make two key claims. Firstly, that culture’s supplementary role to the state manifests in these works in a preoccupation with ‘value’. Secondly, that their strategies of, or concerns with aesthetic realism and immersion correlate to the delegation of risk to individuals imagined to operate in a ‘community’ space. The necessary implication of social subjects not in unproblematically communal relations but in systems of production and exchange will burst through in performance in the form of theatricality – a cognizance not of an immersive ‘community’ space, but of agonistic, dialectical relations. 2 DECLARATION I confirm that the work presented in the thesis is my own and that all references are cited accordingly. ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 8 (i) Risk and uncertainty 15 (ii) ‘Governing the margins’: inclusion and exclusion 24 (iii) Regimes of value 33 CHAPTER 1: Performing ‘exclusion’: The Margate Exodus Introduction 40 I: ‘Off Limits’: Artangel’s commissioning practice 50 (i) Impresarios of the avant garde 52 (ii) Entrepreneurial subjects 67 II: The Margate Exodus 76 (i) Cultural recognition 82 (ii) Exodus Day 89 Conclusion 101 CHAPTER 2: Performing ‘inclusion’: From the favela to the world Introduction 105 I: ‘Culture is our weapon’: Grupo Cultural AfroReggae 116 (i) From the favela to the world I: cultural exchange across borders 117 (ii) ‘The Shiva effect’: creative destruction, risk and productivity 133 (iii) ‘The exchange mechanism’ 143 II: ‘Can culture be our weapon?’: The AfroReggae UK Partnership 151 (i) From the favela to the world II: cultural exchange across borders 153 (ii) ‘The spirit or integrity of the art itself’: ‘intrinsic’ and ‘instrumental’ value 156 (iii) ‘Culture is our weapon here in Shoreditch’: Immediate Theatre 172 Conclusion 178 CHAPTER 3: ‘ Homo sacer ’s ghost’: Unprotected Introduction 181 I: Verbatim theatre: from cultural action to ‘authenticity’ 191 (i) The emergence of ‘verbatim theatre’ 194 (ii) A growing canon 205 (iii) Rhetorics of the ‘real’ 212 II: ‘Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse present Unprotected ’ 222 (i) The ‘excluded exclusion’ 225 (ii) Public nuisance, zero tolerance and the production of space 231 (iii) ‘Turning headlines into human stories’ 239 Conclusion 255 4 CHAPTER 4: Enterprising subjects: La Ribot’s 40 espontaneos Introduction 258 I: ‘Not dance’: La Ribot 271 (i) ‘Still distinguished’: La Ribot’s piezas distinguidas 276 (ii) ‘There is no more representation, only presentation’: theatre, disavowed 283 (iii) Distinguished proprietors: ‘La Ribot’ on the market 293 II: ‘Mission impossible’: 40 espontaneos 296 (i) “A human exchange, about people”: ‘live art’ and ‘community dance’ collide 299 (ii) 40 espontaneos in Britain 307 Conclusion 316 CONCLUSION 323 BIBLIOGRAPHY 330 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which funded this doctoral project (award number 2005/117789). Paul Heritage and Nicholas Ridout were the joint supervisors of this project. It would have been impossible without their guidance, encouragement, generosity and inspiration and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them both. Many artists and organisations gave me their time, access to archival resources and to projects in process during my research. I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of: Cressida Hubbard and Michael Morris of Artangel; Anna Cutler; Lucy Pardee; Pauline Aitken, Bill Calder, Dixon Graterol, Jonathan Hillier, Emma Impett and Anthony Johnson; Carla Martins and Damian Platt of AfroReggae; Malin Forbes of the Barbican; Richard Ings; Derek Richards; Jo Carter of Immediate Theatre; EJ Trivett; Chris Westwood and Damian Atkinson of the Shoreditch Trust; Karen Taylor of Arts Council England; Rachel Sanger of People’s Palace Projects; Helen Wood of Stoke Newington School; Nicola Baboneau of the Learning Trust; Peter Leigh of Sound Connections; Canan Salih of the Brady Centre; Gabin Sinclair of Rising Tide; Suzanne Bell of the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse; Esther Wilson; the Everyman Archive at Liverpool John Moores University; Maria Ribot; Nicky Childs of Artsadmin; Nicky Molloy and the staff of Dance4; Colin Richardson-Webb of New Moves International; Brendan Keaney and the staff of gDA; Mark Waugh; Myra Fulton; Mary Bendall; and the Live Art Development Agency. Drama at Queen Mary, University of London has been a wonderful place to pursue postgraduate research. I would like to thank Jen Harvie and Michael McKinnie in particular for their support and advice, and my fellow postgraduate students in Drama and other departments in the college for their friendship and solidarity. My colleagues at CSSD, University of London were very supportive during the writing up process. My thanks also to Sophie Nield and Joel Anderson, who read work in progress and gave invaluable feedback; likewise, James Jackson and Helen Moore, who camped out with me for a full day near the end. My thanks and love to my friends and family, in particular my parents Beryl and Roger Owen and my sister Clare Owen, for their love and support. Most of all, my love, gratitude and appreciation to Alex Bowen, who shares his life with me and as a consequence knows this project inside out. 6 NOTE ON THE TEXT The text of this thesis follows the conventions recommended by the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA). Where a page number is absent in the source document cited, I indicate this with the abbreviation ‘npg.’. The bibliography lists works cited in alphabetical order. In addition, I list ‘Primary documents’ (items which are not readily available in public or university libraries or online) and ‘Personal interviews’ (interviews I conducted with artists and other workers connected with the projects in question). 7 INTRODUCTION In 1996, the second ever edition of the British theatre and performance studies journal Performance Research was published, entitled ‘On Risk’. Following the cultural survey of ‘The Temper of the Times’, it staged a clear statement regarding the conceptual importance of ‘risk’ for the discipline of theatre and performance studies in Britain and a definitively global field of reference. Claire MacDonald’s introduction meditated on her experience of touring as a performer with Impact Theatre to Warsaw in 1986, a tour which the explosion of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl had brought to an abrupt end. In a melancholic, confessional mode, MacDonald describes how she and her co-workers fled; Geiger-countered at the German border, officials advised that on her return to the UK she should destroy her clothing and rub down her luggage with sticky tape. She chooses this scenario to frame the work of the issue, which she goes on to consider in a sociological register: We now live in a risk society. Risk assessment, risk management, the time bomb of environmental risk and the volatility of political systems combine to create an environment of extreme uncertainty, and a sense that the metaphors we have used to describe the world are no longer adequate to account for a situation of such inconstancy. All artists take risks: it comes with the territory . While art comments on society by its very nature, the form which that comment takes and its relationship to the real life of the artist continue to change. There is a poem by W. H. Auden in which he talks about art and suffering. In ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ Auden notes the way in which suffering is depicted in the work of the old masters, how it often happens off-centre, almost out of sight in a corner, in what he calls ‘some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life’. Auden saw the artist as someone who observed ‘the doggy life’ – since the 1960s we have come to expect the artist to live it. Performance art, above all, has carved out a space of transgression and 8 risk in which a dynamic meeting of the social and personal can take place. (first emphasis mine, second in original) 1 These remarks execute a number of familiar critical moves.
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