Restaging the Future: Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain
Northwestern University Press, 2023
Cloth: 978-0-8101-4605-1 | Paper: 978-0-8101-4604-4 | eISBN: 978-0-8101-4606-8
Library of Congress Classification PN2044.G7O94 2023
Dewey Decimal Classification 792.0941
Cloth: 978-0-8101-4605-1 | Paper: 978-0-8101-4604-4 | eISBN: 978-0-8101-4606-8
Library of Congress Classification PN2044.G7O94 2023
Dewey Decimal Classification 792.0941
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
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