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.

Fugitive knowledge: Performance pedagogies, legibility and the undercommons

“…In this regard Scott's theories are obviously influenced by Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1977) in relation to theories of spectacle and the means by which citizens are absorbed into these operations: of registers, records, ledgers and files that to the bodies of state stand in for our actual presence. This is also discussed in Sarah Bartley's (2017) examination of participatory performance and the unemployed body's relation to its value to the state in the UK. It is not an enormous leap to consider how incarcerated bodies are made legible to the State through the process of law-breaking, sentencing, and punishment.…”