Performing ‘risk’: neoliberalization and contemporary performance
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.
Authors
Owen, LouiseCollections
- Theses [3834]