Managing applied theatre: Negotiating tangled webs and navigating murky terrain

Abstract

Funding and financial relationships have significant implications for the aesthetics, pedagogies, politics and ethics of applied theatre practice. This research addresses concerns about the way in which such relationships constrain and compromise socially committed theatre making. Dependency on external funding can make theatre companies and practitioners more likely to align with the agendas of those who financially support their work. Aesthetic-pedagogic experimentation and radical political aspirations can be limited by the requirement to demonstrate effectiveness in ways that can be measured. Ultimately, accepting funding from the state and other donors is seen to compromise both the aesthetic ideal of artistic autonomy and the social ideal of serving the needs and interests of participants. Looking critically at such concerns with practitioners in applied theatre companies, this research identifies possibilities for negotiating a way through the tangled webs of economic arrangements and the murky terrain of relationships with particular funders. Following a multi-sited ethnographic approach, fieldwork took place with three theatre companies in different national contexts, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the UK. In each company the research questions were addressed with key practitioners and through participant-observation of their day-to-day work. The three ethnographic narratives at the heart of this thesis provide a practice-based perspective on the ways in which applied theatre practices intersect and interrelate with local and globalised economies. Drawing on feminist economics and performance theory, these narratives examine the nuances and dynamics of particular relationships as they develop over time, making an array of economic practices visible, and revealing the coexistence of a plurality of values. Taking elements of J. K. Gibson-Graham’s work on postcapitalist politics, this research proposes that managing diverse economic practices can involve ‘resocialising’ financial and funding relationships. Theatre companies attend to the political and ethical implications of funding and financial relationships and how they connect their practice into wider networks of interdependencies. In applied settings, then, management is not limited to rational models and practices, driven by profit and efficiency and carried out by designated ‘managers’. It can also consist of arts-led, care-based practices, distributed throughout an organisation and sustained by particular kinds of love.