Amateur Performance and the Labour of Love or cultural reproduction ‘after’ the collapse of capitalism

Abstract

The term ‘amateur’ is bound up with love. Performers, cultural workers and other community members devote time out of ‘love’ to engage in and with creative embodied pursuits. ‘Love’, however, responds to changing social orders and modes of sociality. It plays a seminal role in cultural reproduction. Thinking through the performances of a social circus group as they collapse a ‘capitalist pyramid’, and the calls of a performance artist to create a collective ‘manifesto of love’ during an event memorializing a six-month-long student strike and the activist performances that had successfully challenged a 75 per cent tuition hike, this piece asks: What is the role of love in twenty-first-century amateur performance? Love is here explored as a fusional force of devotion and transformation, as well as a trap through which institutions draw on un- or underpaid labour to promote social cohesion. Amateur performance, it suggests, highlights what is not being performed within professional contexts, as well as who has the time and ability to perform without pay, and who cannot afford not to perform.