Restaging the Future
Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain
Published on 31. December 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
248 pages
978-0-8101-4604-4 (ISBN)
Description
An examination of neoliberal ideology's ascendance in 1990s and 2000s British politics and society through its effect on state-supported performance practices
Post-Thatcher, British cultural politics were shaped by the government's use of the arts in service of its own social and economic agenda. Restaging the Future: Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain interrogates how arts practices and cultural institutions were enmeshed with the particular processes of neoliberalization mobilized at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
Louise Owen traces the uneasy entanglement of performance with neoliberalism's marketization of social life. Focusing on this political moment, Owen guides readers through a wide range of performance works crossing multiple forms, genres, and spaces-from European dance tours, to Brazilian favelas, to the streets of Liverpool-attending to their distinct implications for the reenvisioned future in whose wake we now live.
Analyzing this array of participatory dance, film, music, public art, and theater projects, Owen uncovers unexpected affinities between community-based, experimental, and avant-garde movements. Restaging the Future provides key historical context for these performances, their negotiations of their political moment, and their themes of insecurity, identity, and inequality, created in a period of profound ideological and socioeconomic change.
Post-Thatcher, British cultural politics were shaped by the government's use of the arts in service of its own social and economic agenda. Restaging the Future: Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain interrogates how arts practices and cultural institutions were enmeshed with the particular processes of neoliberalization mobilized at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
Louise Owen traces the uneasy entanglement of performance with neoliberalism's marketization of social life. Focusing on this political moment, Owen guides readers through a wide range of performance works crossing multiple forms, genres, and spaces-from European dance tours, to Brazilian favelas, to the streets of Liverpool-attending to their distinct implications for the reenvisioned future in whose wake we now live.
Analyzing this array of participatory dance, film, music, public art, and theater projects, Owen uncovers unexpected affinities between community-based, experimental, and avant-garde movements. Restaging the Future provides key historical context for these performances, their negotiations of their political moment, and their themes of insecurity, identity, and inequality, created in a period of profound ideological and socioeconomic change.
Reviews / Votes
"Louise Owen's often dizzyingly brilliant book makes a distinctive contribution to current scholarship on performance in the context of neoliberalization. Indeed, what is impressive is both the breadth and depth of scholarship that Restaging the Future draws on to intervene in one of the most important and pressing debates in present-day theater and performance studies." - Heike Roms, author of What's Welsh for Performance: An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales, 1968-2008More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Evanston
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
258 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8101-4604-4 (9780810146044)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
12/2023
1st Edition
Northwestern University Press
€91.99
Available for download
Person
Louise Owen is a senior lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London
Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: 'Double shuffle': dancing around entrepreneurialism
Chapter 2: 'Places, like property prices, go up and down': public art, regeneration and place
Chapter 3: 'Can culture be our weapon?': culture and value across borders
Chapter 4: 'Privatised politics': verbatim theatre in the public sphere
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
Introduction
Chapter 1: 'Double shuffle': dancing around entrepreneurialism
Chapter 2: 'Places, like property prices, go up and down': public art, regeneration and place
Chapter 3: 'Can culture be our weapon?': culture and value across borders
Chapter 4: 'Privatised politics': verbatim theatre in the public sphere
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited