Hard labour and punitive welfare: the unemployed body at work in participatory performance

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the performance of labour in participatory arts projects and considers the implications of such activity on perceptions of the unemployed in the UK. Utilising a combination of biopolitical and necropolitical understandings of governance and drawing on two examples of theatre practice, Tangled Feet’s One Million (2013) and Helix Arts' MindFULL (2013), I propose that participatory performance deploys bodily strategies to disrupt the construction of the unemployed in political rhetoric. As such, in a context of austerity, I argue this arts practice can function to support the agency of participants in challenging policy and seeking to re-establish the status of subjecthood to their precarious bodies. Additionally, I posit that specificities of the unemployed as a participant group illuminate broader complexities around value exchange within participatory arts practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Unemployment
• embodiment
• social policy
• applied theatre
• participatory arts

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jenny Hughes, Jen Harvie, Caoimhe McAvinchey, and Sarah Mullan for their thoughtful guidance, energising discussion, and generous support in the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sarah Bartley is undertaking a PhD funded by the Contemporary Theatre Review Professional Development Award. Her project explores artistic representations of the welfare state, with a particular focus on participatory practices engaging unemployed people. She is also a community arts practitioner and co-founded Shifting Point, a drama project for ex-offenders run in collaboration with prison resettlement services.

Notes

1. 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 deflation in wages, reduction in social security, redundancies across public services, and raises in taxes.

2. In 2013 the number of people sanctioned topped two million people, whereas between 2001 and 2009, on average the figure was 675,000. The average duration of a ‘Job Seeker’s Allowance’ sanction is eight weeks with an average loss of income of around £530 in 2013–2014 (Tinson 2015, 5).

3. The work was performed again at Brighton Festival in May 2014 with a different group of unemployed young people.

4. In this context youth unemployment refers to 16–24-year-olds actively seeking work who are not in employment, education, or training.

5. Between November 2012 and September 2013, nearly 20,000 ESA claimants were sanctioned, three-quarters for not participating in work-related activity (Beatty and Fothergill 2015, 177).

6. Further, this allowed for the film to be shown at public events and released online. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTaezvvQfOs (Accessed March 12, 2014).