Valuing Ecologies of Performance: Culture and capital in a neoliberal world

Abstract

‘Ecologies of Performance’ is an essay shared among four authors who bring their research and creative practices to questions of place, culture and capital. Addressing widely divergent habitations of performance, we consider the relationship between culture and capital in United Kingdom, South Africa and Japan. Dominic Gray, the Projects Director of Opera North at Leeds, charts the itineraries of opera in England over the last decade. He advocates a radical rethinking of opera, which urges its audiences to engage with the politics of place and time. Mike van Graan considers theatre in the context of contemporary democratic struggles and offers an account that threads together the Arab Spring, Millennium Development Goals and the African Renaissance. For van Graan, the blurred and complex constellations of power, race and class rather than the moral dichotomies of black and white provide the post-Apartheid terrain for creative and political interventions. Peter Eckersallquestions what it means to say that we value something and expect that something such as the arts will provide value-added functionality. He offers a snapshot of his experience of Leeds, UK in the 1980s. He then considers examples of how artists have responded to the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima in Japan. Here artists have made renewed claims to imagination in dealing with the aftermath of disaster. Finally, Jisha Menon links these perspectives to disciplinary questions in performance studies. In a performative vein, we aim to shift the ‘value’ of performance from what it means to what it does.