Restaging the Future

Louise Owen's study examines how neoliberal ideas took hold in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s, looking at the role that state-supported performance played in that shift. After the Thatcher years, the government put the arts to work for its social and economic aims, and theater and cultural institutions became closely tied to the push to market social life as the century ended.

Owen explores the uneasy relationship between performance and this commercialization of everyday life. Her case studies range from European dance tours and projects in Brazilian favelas to street work in Liverpool. Across participatory dance, film, music, public art and theater, she considers how each work responded to its moment and what it suggested about the future that followed. Along the way, she finds surprising connections between community-based, experimental and avant-garde practice.

The book supplies historical background for these productions and the political climate in which they were made. It also tracks their treatment of insecurity, identity and inequality during a period of deep ideological and economic change.