Crisis, Representation and Resilience

Perspectives on Contemporary British Theatre

Clare Wallace, Clara Escoda, Enric Monforte, José Ramón Prado-Pérez, Clare Wallace, Clara Escoda, Enric Monforte, José Ramón Prado-Pérez

• Editorial: Methuen Drama
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350180864
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoría: Scrittura di pièce teatrali

A collection of incisive investigations into the ways that 21st-century British theatre works with - and through - crisis. It pays particular attention to the way in which writers and practitioners consider the ethical and social challenges of crisis. Anchored in an interdisciplinary approach that draws from sociology, cultural theory, feminism, performance and philosophy, the book brings multi-faceted ideas into dialogue with the diverse aesthetics, practices and themes of a range of theatrical work produced in Britain since 2005. Topics discussed include: Ageing
Austerity
Gender
Migrancy
Multiculturalism
Aesthetics Companies discussed include: Theatre Uncut
Lost Dog
Camden People's People
Lung
Brighton People's Theatre
Phosphoros Theatre Playwrights discussed include: Jez Butterworth
Caryl Churchill
Tim Crouch
Vivienne Franzmann
James Graham
debbie tucker green
Ella Hickson
Charlene James
Lucy Kirkwood
Simon Longman
Cordelia Lynn
Simon Stephens
Jack Thorne
Chris Thorpe
Gloria Williams Building on recent publications in the area and engaging in dialogue with them, Crisis, Representation and Resilience considers how crisis is being re-thought and re-orientated through theatrical performance and the ways theatre invites us to respond to the many challenges of the contemporary times.

1

States of emergency: Performing crisis

Clare Wallace and Clara Escoda

‘The crisis of theatre might well be its constant condition, determined by its own fatigue and opportunism, the economic constraints of show biz, the fragility of the inspiring artistic talent tending to slide into routine, and orchestrated by the overwhelming indifference to theatre of most potential viewers. But the theatre of crisis, the theatricalization of a crisis is no fancy and no myth but a viable option, given some distance, necessary for the collective and individual memory of the traumatizing experience to settle only to be unsettled again by the strikes of the stage acts. And the theatre of crisis, be it war, hunger, epidemics or civil unrest, can make sense if the artists focus not on the unfolding tragedy itself but on the ways it is being presented, reported, perceived and metaphorized by other dominant discourses.’

(Klaić 2002: 160)

‘Don’t weep. Create the new drama.’

(Bond 2020: x)

Politically, ecologically, economically, socially and culturally, the twenty-first century is awash with crises, so much so that it is a challenge to find our bearings. From global terrorism and the subsequent so-called War on Terror to forced migration, the financial collapse of 2007/8 followed by austerity measures, associated tensions in the European Union including the Eurozone debt crisis and Brexit, the rise of far-right populism, an epidemic of misinformation in the media, entrenched racism, surging violence against women and sexual minorities, environmental disasters and climate change to a global pandemic, the list is long, rather obvious, and overwhelming. Feminist sociologist Sylvia Walby uses the word ‘cascade’ to describe the current proliferation of crises through society (2015: 14). They are overlapping, intersecting, enmeshed, sometimes nested, sometimes discontinuous, some swift, others gradual, some strike us as new, while many appear to replay historically earlier crises amid the conditions of the present producing an uneasy sense of déjà vu.

This collection of essays is the product of a collaboration that began in 2017 focused on crisis, affect and community in contemporary British theatre.¹ As we began the process of editing the various contributions at the start of 2020, we were overtaken by the then unanticipated, but now ubiquitous Covid-19 pandemic. So, while this book seizes upon crisis as a dynamic and integral feature/aspect of the post-millennial British theatre environment and its concerns, it does so, necessarily, from within, acknowledging our own immersion in evolving, unfinished, cascading emergencies, pressures and ruptures that shape our experiences of the world and, more specifically, our thoughts on theatre and performance. In this we echo the sentiments of Will Daddario and Theron Schmidt in their introductory article to the 2018 themed issue of Performance Philosophy, ‘Crisis/Krisis’. Drawing on Naomi Klein’s analysis in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), Daddario and Schmidt warn that ‘crisis works … that is, the label … is not just descriptive but performative, producing helplessness, legitimating a particular response, and pre-emptively negating the possibility of critical thought’ (2018: 1; original emphasis). Yet even while many current analyses of crisis like Klein’s, converge in their diagnoses of the ills of the neoliberal system (and we turn to this discourse shortly), we also aim to explore crisis as transformative in ways that open possibilities of transvaluation, and of interrupting the cynicism of commodification. Understanding crisis as materially experienced and discursively produced, and navigating between the perpetual and the exceptional, events and systems, we want to preserve its complexity and plurality while seeking ways of evading futility, and modes of imaginative recognition, action, resilience and repair. Our overarching concerns here are the multifaceted relationships between twenty-first-century British theatre and crisis, the potential of critical creativity and the forms it takes. How does theatrical performance intervene in this discourse in ways that enable critical thought and communal solidarity in times of social atomization, disenfranchisement? What aesthetic strategies are British theatre makers crafting to communicate the structure of feeling, ‘characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships’ (Williams 1977: 132) of the opening decades of the century?

Proportion, position, time

Before going further with our reflections on these relationships and issues, let us first take up the matter of definition. Crisis is a troublingly floating signifier, a term that accrues a multitude of meanings in adjectival combination. And there is clearly an incongruity between its diffuse and increasingly ubiquitous circulation, and its Greek etymology, κρίσις, that still bears the residual connotation of judgement and decision. Yet in current usage, crisis most frequently refers to pathology – the decisive point in the progress of a disease resulting in either death or recovery – or is used figuratively to signify, ‘A vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point; also, a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent; now applied esp. to times of difficulty, insecurity, and suspense in politics or commerce’ (OED Online 2021). As is obvious even from such a standard dictionary denotation, thinking about crisis intrinsically means thinking about proportion, position. Approaching the topic from a social theory perspective Walby identifies, ‘A crisis … as an event that has the potential to cause a large detrimental change to the social system and in which there is lack of proportionality between cause and consequence’ (2015: 14). Crisis, then, is not merely a synonym for change, though change is invariably brought by crisis. Rather it signifies change wrought by excess and disproportion, that develops in a non-linear manner and ruptures structures of control or efficiency within a system social or otherwise. Such definitions become meaningful when positioned in relation to causes, effects and contexts; a task that entails various perspectives and rationales. Throughout this book our focus on crisis corrals the aesthetic and performative with the social and political. Yet even looking back only as far as the twentieth century, it is clear that sociopolitical upheaval is hardly novel, neither are aesthetic ruptures of representational practice, so the crucial question is what is new or specific to the crises of the present?

The interleaving of modernity with an experience of crisis so central to the philosophical work of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School is an intellectual heritage deeply imprinted on many subsequent considerations of contemporary conditions. More precisely, thinking crisis through and alongside the development of modern capitalism and, latterly, neoliberal globalization has become a major trajectory in current theorizations, and one that directly and indirectly informs the critical vocabularies of the contributors to this volume. By the turn of the century diverse economic, sociological and political scholarship converged on the ways in which crisis generation was intrinsic to the operations of an increasingly globalized neoliberal model. For instance, Ulrich Beck’s influential 1980s research, published in English as Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1992), contends that this new modernity is characterized by risk production: ‘Averting and managing these can include a reorganization of power and authority. Risk society is a catastrophic society. In it the exceptional condition threatens to become the norm’ (24; original emphasis). Critiquing its normative economic rationale, Pierre Bourdieu’s Acts of Resistance (1998) dissects neoliberalism as a utopian project, but one that presents itself as a ‘scientific description of reality’ (94). For Bourdieu, it is more accurately understood as a fantasy of boundless exploitation, facilitated by ‘a programme of methodical destruction of collectives’ (95–6; original emphasis). David Harvey similarly has illuminated the confluence of transformations wrought by capital in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries throughout his contributions to anthropology, economic and political geography in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989), A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) and The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (2010) among others. In particular, Harvey highlighted the disruptive force of postmodernity’s accelerated ‘time-space compression’ (1989) alongside the erosion of values bound to the metastasis of contemporary consumer society. He has gone on to expose the ways neoliberalism equates individualism and entrepreneurialism with freedom and prosperity (2005: 2) despite the accumulation of evidence to the contrary (see 2010).

Unsurprisingly, the global financial crisis in 2007/8 concentrated unprecedented attention on the nature and costs of these developments. Sylvia Walby’s socioeconomic analysis of crisis identifies the modalities of risk, catastrophe and disaster. She begins with the financial collapse of 2008 (in the UK) through its economic, fiscal, democratic and social impacts (2015). Walby sources the current crisis in unregulated finance and reminds us of the gendered realities of those who create and profit from such systems, as well as those who bear the brunt of the austerity policies introduced when failure occurs. In a more dynamically popular vein, activist Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007) lays the blame with deregulated capitalism, a system that she argues ‘has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies. The history of the contemporary free market – better understood as the rise of corporatism – was written in shocks’ (18–19). Klein continues to map the destructive toll of the Western economic system on the environment in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014). Indeed, as this century progresses the realities of human-produced ecological change are increasingly devastating, and yet continue to elicit grossly insubstantial governmental and industrial responses.

Representation, agency, imagination

Crisis, then, concerns representation in several interleaved senses from political subjectivity, social identity to cultural practices. Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bordoni suggest that what marks contemporary crisis lies at the intersection of the state, modernity and democracy. For Bauman, ‘the present crisis differs from its historical precedents in as far as it is lived through the situation of a divorce between power and politics. That divorce results in the absence of agency capable of doing what every “crisis”, by definition, requires: choosing a way to proceed, and applying the therapy called for by that choice’ (2014: 12; original emphasis). This leads to a state, described compellingly by Lauren Berlant as ‘crisis ordinariness’ that is ‘not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming’ (2011: 10). Berlant is attentive to representation beyond the strictly political senses debated by Bauman, Bordoni or Walby, to modes of aesthetically presenting and performing (in the midst of) ‘crisis ordinariness’ that are emblematic of a structure of feeling in the present. The wider resonances of Berlant’s reading of diminished capacity and temporalities of dispossession are further refined by Winnie Balestrini, Leopold Lippert and Maria Löschnigg in a 2020 crisis themed issue of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. They trace the affects of crisis formations through Alain Ehrenberg’s work on ‘fatigue, exhaustion, and depression as physical and psychological states that have been deeply normalized in contemporary neoliberal societies’ to Isabell Lorey’s theorizing of ‘precarization [that] … entails assessing the cultural techniques individuals and communities develop and refine in order to live and cope with the contingencies created by a state of permanent crisis’ (2020: 4–5). Their differing respective approaches notwithstanding, each of these sources underscore how the tensions between the utopian promises of ever more freedom, wealth, comfort, quality of life, and the realities of finite resources, extreme inequality, suffering, global conflict and environmental destruction are increasingly unignorable.

Such political and existential impasses are mirrored in cultural imaginaries, and have been amassing for some time. It is useful to recall Arjun Appadurai’s ‘theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its two major, interconnected, diacritics’ in Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), where he surveys ‘their joint effect on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity’ (3; original emphasis). Appadurai’s focus on ‘the imagination as social practice’ (1996: 31) does not disregard the roles of global capital flows and commodification, but addresses an expanded network of forces and activities at play across ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes (1996: 33) in ways that continue to resonate more than two decades later even when globalization has lost so much of its allure.

Indeed, Appadurai’s mapping of the representational and affective economies of globalized modernity provides a route towards a cluster of publications that engage with imagination and identity within a complex and irregularly experienced neoliberal present. Mark Fisher (2009), Eric Cazdyn with Imre Szeman (2011), Neal Curtis (2013), Max Haiven (2014) and Jim McGuigan (2009, 2016) each have picked out the current contours of this ideational space, and, most importantly for our focus here, the challenges of imagining otherwise. As Fisher so lucidly puts it ‘[w]hat we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture’ (2009: 9; original emphasis). Curtis tracks the ways privatization infuses culture to produce personal individualism that is paradoxically perpetually performed in public but undermines the communal. Like Fisher, Cazdyn and Szeman provocatively focus on the temporal and conceptual foreclosure of neoliberal globalization, and the challenge of conceptualizing what might come next. Analogously, Haiven also concludes that ‘[t]he failure to acknowledge that the many global crises we now face are, inherently, crises of capitalism, represents a massive failure of the imagination’ manifest in the ‘parochialism’ of the global north, dogmatic adherence to ‘necroliberalism’ and the normalization of an idea of ‘ourselves as essentially isolated, lonely, competitive economic agents’ (2014: ch. 1).

Despite Gerard Delanty’s warning that ‘we must not forget that neo-liberalism … is not simply one thing that has remained constant but forms a constantly chang[ing] ensemble of ideas, discourses and practices’ (2014: 212), these diverse works substantiate a sense of the magnitude and modalities of crisis in the twenty-first century. Acknowledging the plurality of origins and formations, Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey consequently describe crises as ‘over-determined’, occurring when ‘“relatively autonomous” sites – which have different origins, are driven by different contradictions, and develop according to their own temporalities – are nevertheless “convened” or condensed in the same moment’ (2010: 59–60). The confluence of heterogeneous economic, ecological phenomena, with social and political crises of value, amplify their respective affects and effects, to the extent that in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, whether labelled as late, post, reflexive or liquid modernity, we might speak of a new ecology of crisis.

British conjunctures

Developments in a British context are usefully discussed by Hall with Massey who, drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci, view the present through conjuncture, as ‘a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a s...

Índice

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 States of emergency: Performing crisis
• Part 1 Corporealites
• Part 2 Collective action
• Part 3 Nationscapes
• Part 4 Contact zones
• Part 5 New directions
• Index
• Imprint