Performing c are Manchester University Press Performing care New perspectives on socially engaged performance EDITED BY AMANDA STUART FISHER AND JAMES THOMPSON Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the editors and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at: https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/ 4 .0/ Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4680 9 hardback ISBN 978 1 5261 4681 6 open access First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK Cover: Photograph by Matthew Andrews To James’ daughters Hannah and Leah and Amanda’s daughters Beatrice and Tilly, who have taught us so much about care. Contents List of illustrations page ix List of contributors x Acknowledgements xiv Introduction: caring performance, performing care 1 Amanda Stuart Fisher Part I Performing interrelatedness 19 1 Care ethics and improvisation: can performance care? 21 Maurice Hamington 2 Towards an aesthetics of care 36 James Thompson 3 Performing tenderness: fluidity and reciprocity in the performance of caring in Fevered Sleep’s Men & Girls Dance 49 Amanda Stuart Fisher Part II Care-filled performance 67 4 Caring beyond illness: an examination of Godder’s socially engaged art and participatory dance for Parkinson’s work 69 Sara Houston 5 Convivial theatre: care and debility in collaborations between non-disabled and learning disabled theatre makers 85 Dave Calvert 6 Road care 103 Jen Archer-Martin and Julieanna Preston viii Contents Part III Care deficits 121 7 Clean Break: a practical politics of care 123 Caoimhe McAvinchey 8 Performing a museum of living memories: beholding young people’s experiences and expressions of care through oral history performance 139 Kathleen Gallagher and Rachel Turner-King 9 ‘Still Lives’: Syrian displacement and care in contemporary Beirut 156 Ella Parry- Davies Part IV Care as performance 169 10 Verbatim practice as research with care- experienced young people: an ‘aesthetics of care’ through aural attention 171 Sylvan Baker and Maggie Inchley 11 Acts of care: applied drama, ‘sympathetic presence’ and person-centred nursing 187 Matt Jennings, Pat Deeny and Karl Tizzard- Kleister 12 Taking care of the laundry in care homes 204 Jayne Lloyd 13 Performing the ‘aesthetics of care’ 215 James Thompson References 230 Index 247 Illustrations Figures 6.1 A woman-machine named Desiré, alert, poised, ready to start (Source: Photo by J. Archer-Martin, 2015) page 104 6.2 Desiré, a tangled pile on the pavement, face-to- face with bitumen (Source: Photo by J. Archer-Martin, 2015) 118 8.1 CYT members rehearse the lift with Bruce 150 8.2 CYT members carry Bruce aloft during the live performance 150 10.1 TVF welcome breakfast (Source: Paula Siqueira) 174 10.2 Making verbatim (Source: Josephine Pryce) 175 10.3 Sharing verbatim (Source: Paula Siqueira) 184 11.1 Person-centred nursing framework 188 Table 8.1 Overview of the Radical Hope project 2014–19 141 Contributors Jen Archer-Martin (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Pākeha) is a spatial designer, thinker and educator from Aotearoa (New Zealand). Her creative research prac- tice explores the performance of mutually caring relationships between beings, materials and places. Recent works include: ‘Performing Bitumen, Materialising Desiré’ (2019, with Julieanna Preston, Architectural Materialisms ); ‘Notes on Caring Labours’ (2018, Performance Research ); ‘Magical Agents: The Powers of Care Are Not Ours Alone’ (2017, Does Design Care ... ? ); and ‘Taking Note(s)_Performing Care’ (2017, Performing, Writing , takingnotes. performingwriting.com). Jen is Senior Lecturer of Spatial Design at Massey University, New Zealand. Sylvan Baker , FRSA, is Lecturer in Community Performance Applied Theatre at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He is an associate artist of the award-winning arts and health project Performing Medicine and former associate director of the Arts and Social Justice Research Centre, People’s Palace Projects. The focus of his research is creative methods to stimulate co- creation and inclusion among marginalised communities. As a lead investigator of the AHRC-funded research project, The Verbatim Formula , he works with care- experienced young people to support adults in providing better care and education (see www.theverbatimformula.org.uk). Dave Calvert is Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Huddersfield, where he is a member of the Research Centre for Performance Practices (ReCePP). His primary research area is perform- ance and learning disability and he has published on such artists and com- panies as Heavy Load, Mind the Gap, Susan Boyle and Back to Back. He has also written about various troupes in popular entertainment, including the British Pierrot tradition and the Rat Pack. He is currently chair of the UK- based theatre company Dark Horse. Pat Deeny is Senior Lecturer in Nursing at Ulster University and Senior Fellow with the Higher Education Academy in the UK. He specialises in simulation and human-factor training for nurses and helps prepare health xi Contributors care professionals and postgraduate journalist students for work in disaster and conflict zones. Kathleen Gallagher is Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto. In 2017, she won the inaugural University of Toronto President’s Impact Award for research impact beyond the academy. In 2018, she won the David E. Hunt Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Dr Gallagher has pub- lished several award-winning books and articles on theatre, youth, pedagogy, methodology and gender, and travels widely giving international addresses and workshops for practitioners. Her multi-sited, collaborative ethnographic research continues to focus on questions of youth civic engagement and art- istic practice and the pedagogical and methodological possibilities of theatre. Maurice Hamington is Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. He is a care ethicist who has authored or edited twelve books including: Care Ethics and Poetry (2019, co-written with Ce Rosenow); Care Ethics and Political Theory (2015, edited with Daniel Engster); Applying Care Ethics to Business (2011, edited with Maureen Sander-Staudt); Socializing Care (2006, edited with Dorothy C. Miller); and Embodied Care (2004) For more information on his other works see pdx.academia.edu/MauriceHamington. Sara Houston is Principal Lecturer in Dance at the University of Roehampton, UK. Her primary research interest is in community dance and specifically the experience of dancing for those marginalised or excluded in society. Her work on dance and Parkinson’s won her a BUPA Foundation Prize in 2011 and she was a finalist in the National Public Engagement Awards in 2014 in recognition of how she engaged the public internationally with that research. Her monograph, Dancing with Parkinson’s , was published in 2019. Sara chairs the Board of People Dancing, the UK’s national support organisation for community dance. Maggie Inchley is Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary University of London. Her publications include Voice and New Writing: 1997– 2007 (2015), which is concerned with the inclusion, represen- tation and performance of marginalised voices in British theatre. She researches the intersections of aesthetics, gender and other aspects of identity in vocal performance. As principal investigator of AHRC-funded research project, The Verbatim Formula , she works with care-experienced young people to support adults in providing better care and education (see www.theverbatimformula.org.uk). Matt Jennings is Lecturer in Drama at Ulster University. Based in Northern Ireland since 2001, Matt has worked as an artist and teacher in Australia, Ireland, the UK and France. In 2010, he completed a PhD on the impact of community drama in Northern Ireland since 1998. Matt also provides com- munication training for health professionals, particularly within the Ulster University School of Nursing. xii Contributors Jayne Lloyd is course leader of the MA in Inclusive Arts Practice at the University of Brighton. She is an artist and researcher working across sculp- ture, drawing, film and performance. She has over fifteen years of experience delivering creative projects in a range of health and social care, education and community settings. In 2016 she completed a practice-based PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, which explored the role of partici- patory art practices in the lives of care home residents living with dementia. Caoimhe McAvinchey is Professor of Socially Engaged and Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary University of London. Prior to this, she established the MA Applied Drama programme at Goldsmiths, University of London. Publications include: Theatre & Prison (2011); Performance and Community: Case Studies and Commentary (2013); and Phakama: Making Participatory Performance (2018, with Lucy Richardson and Fabio Santos). Caoimhe is currently working on a monograph marking forty years of Clean Break theatre company. Ella Parry-Davies is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, where her research addresses relationships between performance, urban space and memory making in contexts of transnational migration. She holds a PhD jointly funded by King’s College London and the National University of Singapore. She is editor of Contemporary Theatre Review ’s Interventions plat- form and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. She is a founding co- convenor of the After Performance research group, and of the PSi working group on performance and critical social praxis. Julieanna Preston explores the vitality of natural and synthetic mater- ials in site-responsive live art performances. This artistic research often finds another form in performance writing as artist pages, essays, poems, scripts and scores. Recent works include: Vital Tones (2019, Sweden); RPM Hums (2018, NZ); Murmur (2017, UK); ‘On Duration/On During’ (2018, Performance Research ); ‘Performing Bitumen, Materialising Desiré’ (2019, with Jen Archer- Martin, Architectural Materialisms ); and ‘Four Castings’ (2018, Performance Research ). She is Professor of Spatial Practice at Massey University, New Zealand. Amanda Stuart Fisher is a reader in contemporary theatre and perform- ance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research inter- ests focus around the relationship between performance and care and the dramaturgy of testimonial and verbatim theatre. She has published articles in Performance Research , Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance , Studies in Theatre and Performance and TDR . Her monograph Performing the Testimonial: Rethinking verbatim dramaturgies will be published in 2020 by MUP. xiii Contributors James Thompson is Professor of Applied Theatre at the University of Manchester. He researches all aspects of applied theatre, recently focusing on care and performance. He was the founder of In Place of War – a pro- ject supporting arts programmes in war and disaster zones and he has developed and run theatre projects in Africa and South Asia (principally DR Congo and Sri Lanka). He has written widely on socially engaged arts and his most recent books are Performance Affects (2009) and Humanitarian Performance (2014). Karl Tizzard-Kleister is a PhD researcher in drama and nursing at Ulster University. His research explores how drama can be used in nursing educa- tion. Recently his research has explored how applied drama creates creative spaces to experience risk and vulnerability for student nurses. Rachel Turner- King is Assistant Professor of Creativity, Performance and Education at the Centre for Education Studies, University of Warwick. She is course leader of the MA in Drama and Theatre Education. Her main research interests are: eco-pedagogy and education for sustainable devel- opment using drama; the theory and practice of hospitality and conviviality in public spaces; devising performance with young people, specifically the creative processes of collaborative theatre making. Her research on youth theatre practice has been published in edited works by Kelly Freebody and Michael Finneran (2016), Michael Anderson and Michael Finneran (2019) and in Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance (2018). Acknowledgements The ideas informing this edited collection were initially developed at a round table event in 2016 and the editors would like to thank Maurice Hamington, Caoimhe McAvinchey, Jonathan Petherbridge, Pam Smith, Robert Stern and Lois Weaver for their participation, being such good crit- ical friends and so generously responding to our invitation to join us in this highly productive dialogue about the relationship between perform- ance and care ethics. We would also like to thank all those who contributed to the Performing Care Symposium at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in December 2016, particularly Maurice Hamington who gave such an engaging keynote. We would also like to thank Maria Delgado, Dan Hetherington and Central’s research office for their invaluable support for these events and the development of the edited collection. Our thanks are also extended to Sally Baggott for her excellent editing skills, to Adelina Ong and James Rawson for their help with the referencing and indexing process and to Tony Fisher for being a source of support throughout in so many ways. We would also like to thank David Harradine for his thoughtful input and Fevered Sleep for granting us permission to use the wonderful image from Men & Girls Dance . Our thanks also go to Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance , for kindly per- mitting us to republish James Thompson’s article. Finally, we would like to send our warmest thanks to Matthew Frost and Manchester University Press for working with us on this project and supporting our desire to ground this book in an interdisciplinary interrogation of performance and care. Caoimhe McAvinchey would like to thank Clean Break for supporting her access to the company, particularly Lucy Perman for her generous re- flections and Anna Herrmann and Deborah Bruce for kindly giving permis- sion to quote from the unpublished text, Hear (2016). Ella Parry- Davies would like to thank Dima el Mabsout for sharing such generous insight into her work over several years and for her comments on Ella’s critical responses to it. Ella also extends her thanks to Zeina Assaf, Kélina Gotman, Jane Rendell, Fiona Wilkie, Liang Peilin and Matthew xv Acknowledgements Yoxall for their comments at various stages of the writing of her chapter, and to interlocutors at PSi 2015 in Lebanon and PSi 2016 in Australia. Matt Jennings, Pat Deeny and Karl Tizzard-Kleister would like to thank Luke Merritt and Harrison McCallum, who contributed to the development of Chapter 11 and Mary Findon-Henry, Lecturer in Mental Health and Forensic Healthcare, School of Nursing, Ulster University for her support and guidance with the project. newgenprepdf Introduction: caring performance, performing care Amanda Stuart Fisher Kate: Ok, so the Home Office are saying you’re more than 16. Tariq: I am 16. Kate: They think that the way you look and behave makes you older than that. So you’d be an adult, not a minor. Tariq frowns, shakes his head. Kate: you know what that means, yeah? That we wouldn’t need to look after you, give you the same support. If you were a grown- up living here [at this supported accommodation] we’d ask you to leave. [...] Tariq: You think I am lying too? Kate: It doesn’t matter what I think. I am on your side – they have to be apart – objective. That means making the right decisions without their emotions all muddying it. (Extract from Dear Home Office , Harrison et al ., 2016: 20– 1) Devised and performed by unaccompanied minor refugee actors, Dear Home Office was the inaugural production of the newly founded Phosphoros Theatre. 1 In the extract above, we see Kate, a key worker at the housing asso- ciation that supports Tariq, trying to explain the UK asylum system’s assess- ment processes and the culture of suspicion and distrust that pervades it. It is a poignant moment in the play, highlighting both the somewhat arbitrary limits of the UK’s care and support of young asylum seekers and the prac- tical difficulties that confront any young accompanied minor refugee who is required to prove they are under the age of eighteen, and are therefore tech- nically a child and ‘vulnerable’ in the eyes of the law. 2 In the production of Dear Home Office at the Pleasance Theatre in 2016, the actor playing Tariq appeared visibly to be an adolescent, caught somewhere in-between a boy and a young man. The real identity of the actor playing Tariq heightened the poignancy of the scene. Tariq emerged as a typical teenage boy, concerned not so much about the important legalities of the asylum system but of what Kate, his key worker, thought of him. The scene is all the more affecting because we, as audience members, are aware that the actor playing Tariq 2 Performing care is likely to have also confronted these kinds of issues in ‘real life’, where, of course, the stakes are so much higher. In real life, a wrong answer or a false step can mean all care being removed, deportation back to punishing and brutal political regimes or a precarious existence living on the streets. The character of Kate in this scene was played by Kate Duffy, one of the directors, who, at the time the play was made, was a key worker for a housing association that supports refugees and migrants from different parts of the world resettle in the UK. Throughout Dear Home Office , we learn more about the lived experience of the protracted, complex and highly politicised assessment processes of Britain’s asylum system to which Tariq is subject and in which Kate and her colleagues are implicated. Audiences witness the carelessness of this process through the eyes of the young men, who are not only living it in ‘real life’ but who have become the actors in this play to share their experiences and stories with us. The stories are personal, moving and on occasion shocking as the focus shifts from arrival in the UK to accounts of life in the young men’s home countries, where they were the victim of forced illegal conscription into armies, imprisonment without trial and beatings. There were also moments of humour as we witness the many errors the young men themselves made during the asylum process, such as mixing up the number of the day and month on a form and ending up appearing one year older. These simple but potentially catastrophic mis- takes are very familiar to anyone who lives with teenagers, who are prone to slip-ups as they find their way in the world, and, in the play, these moments also serve effectively to remind us just how young and vulnerable these young men actually are. The personal narratives of refugeeism and asylum are juxtaposed with video footage revealing the creation of the project itself. The footage depicts a residential trip for the cast to Derbyshire, where the young actors are seen rehearsing, walking and playing together in the countryside. Through glimpses of teenage buffoonery and moments of the cast relaxing and experiencing some quirky British cultural traditions together, such as an impromptu Christmas dinner and an Easter egg hunt, new and multi- dimensional representations of unaccompanied minor refugees emerge. These representations and the narratives accompanying them serve to chal- lenge and replace the all too often threatening and negative stories about child refugees that have tended to dominate popular media in recent years. 3 In this way, the play dismantles the label of ‘unaccompanied minor’, trans- forming these young men into people with whom we can relate and, cru- cially, care for . Furthermore, the play moves beyond simple representations of acts of caring. Methodologically and dramaturgically, Dear Home Office performs a mode of care for its actors and a deep respect for these young men’s experiences. Borrowing from theatre maker Peter Sellars the play moves beyond ‘the furtive and presumptuous look of the culture of surveil- lance’ and instead generates an ‘eye-to- eye meeting of equal beings’ (2016: viii), inviting audiences to recognise unaccompanied minors simply as young people they can relate to and who are in need of their support. In this 3 Introduction sense, caring within this play emerges not only as part of its material content but also as an aesthetic practice. The caring structures of the play’s develop- ment process, visible through the video footage, also reveal how perform- ance of care can enact a mode of resistance to ‘care-less’ state processes that are structured around the concept of care as quantifiable economy and are designed to be measured and distributed only according to tightly predeter- mined formulas. Refugees and asylum seekers are, of course, not the only care receivers to be subjected to this form of bureaucratised form of state care. As govern- mental care services across the world are increasingly being determined not by need or quality of care but by a politics of austerity and cost reduction, it is a timely moment to reflect not on how care is to be distributed and measured, but how care might be understood as an embodied, practised and artful phenomena. Theorisation developed by care ethicists defines care as incorpor- ating both ‘practice and value’ (Held, 2006) and, while the concept of care denotes certain affective labours, acts and gestures, it also therefore incorp- orates intrinsic values, determining how we ought to act in relation to other people. In her work with Berenice Fisher, Joan Tronto defined four ‘ethical elements of care’, which are useful to our exploration of how care and per- formance can operate together and that incorporate: ‘attentiveness, respon- sibility, competence, and responsiveness’ ([1993] 2009: 127). Pointing to interrelational modes of being, care ethics acknowledges the value of inter- human relationality and dependency, invoking the affective qualities of ‘attentiveness, sensitivity, and responding to needs’ (Held, 2006: 39). Placing care in dialogue with performance, in the critical engage- ments that follow, contributors examine how some performance work that addresses itself to the care and support of other people enacts a form of resistance to the ‘care- lessness’ of contemporary life. The contributors to this edited collection are interested in how performances can be caring, respon- sive and attentive but also how social, medical and ecological practices of care can be understood as being artful, aesthetic, rehearsed and performa- tive. Correlatively, the critical discussions in this book also call for reflection on performance practices that are uncaring , that are not constructed around an affective attentiveness towards the other and that devalue relationships of interdependence; for example, practices that instrumentalise participation or that inadvertently predetermine or enforce certain narratives of change and transformation upon unsuspecting communities. In this sense, this edited collection also considers how theories and practices of care might challenge some of the assumptions made about socially engaged perform- ance and the way efficacy is defined and measured within this field. This introduction now turns to further consider some definitions of care by examining some of the theorisation in this area developed within care ethics. Building on the concept of care as ‘embodied’ knowledge (Hamington, 2004) and a form of ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 2012), the discussions of care in this edited collection position care both as a form