Freshly Printed - allow 7 days lead
Couldn't load pickup availability
Restaging the Future
Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain
Louise Owen (Author)
9780810146044
Paperback / softback, published 15 December 2023
248 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.258 kg
“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, 1968–2008
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.
Double shuffle’
: dancing around entrepreneurialism
Places, like property prices, go up and down’
: public art, regeneration and place
Can culture be our weapon?’
: culture and value across borders
Privatised politics’
: verbatim theatre in the public sphere