Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Performance Interventions)

The type of pluralist community relational art might offer, Morgan suggests, is that evoked by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms ‘being-with’, ‘being-in-common’ and ‘being-with-each-other’, which accommodate difference in mutuality (ibid., pp. 16 and 26; see, for example, Nancy, 2000).

socially – by inviting those audiences to participate, act, work and create together; observe one another; or simply be together. This

Harvey argues that ‘[t]he present economic difficulties in both the US and Britain, as well as throughout Europe, are essentially being deepened for a political reason rather than out of economic necessity. That political reason is the desire to have done with capital’s responsibility to cover costs of social reproduction’ (ibid., p. 269),

‘relational aesthetics’

agree with Morgan that participation is not intrinsically politically progressive. Thus, though I seek these practices’ democratic potential and look for ways they extend equal opportunities for social engagement, I also pay attention to ways they constrain or suppress those opportunities.

We need some ‘fellow feeling’, some social sympathy, to check unreserved self-interest.

I explore what models of social relation and community these practices can produce, while I remain wary of models that either fetishize a myth of a unified singularity and thereby obliterate difference, or propose an unresolved multitude. I seek models of community that recognize people’s social interdependence without assimilating their distinctiv

Socially turned theatre and performance, likewise, actively engage their audiences.

to extend this invitation to engage socially very widely, across all audiences equitably, perhaps even democratically.