Overview

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.

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9780810146051

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Reviews

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

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

Author Information

Louise Owen is a senior lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London

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