Performing Welfare: Applied Theatre,

Unemployment, and Economies of

Participation 1st ed. Edition Sarah
Bartley
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/performing-welfare-applied-theatre-unemployment-an
d-economies-of-participation-1st-ed-edition-sarah-bartley/
CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE
INTERACTIONS
SERIES EDITORS: ELAINE ASTON · BRIAN SINGLETON

Performing Welfare
Applied Theatre, Unemployment,
and Economies of Participation
Sarah Bartley
Contemporary Performance InterActions

Series Editors
Elaine Aston
Lancaster University
Lancaster, Lancashire, UK

Brian Singleton
Samuel Beckett Centre
Trinity College
Dublin, Ireland
Theatre’s performative InterActions with the politics of sex, race and class,
with questions of social and political justice, form the focus of the
Contemporary Performance InterActions series. Performative InterActions
are those that aspire to affect, contest or transform. International in scope,
CPI publishes monographs and edited collections dedicated to the
InterActions of contemporary practitioners, performances and theatres
located in any world context.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14918
 Sarah Bartley

Performing Welfare
Applied Theatre, Unemployment,
and Economies of Participation
Sarah Bartley
University of Reading
Berkshire, UK

Contemporary Performance InterActions

ISBN 978-3-030-44853-0    ISBN 978-3-030-44854-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44854-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Tangled Feet, One Million (2013) Promotion Image

Cover designed by Jey Malaiperuman

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

The caring, creative, and politically charged arts practices that intersect
with the welfare state have been a constant source of inspiration through-
out the writing of this monograph. I would like to thank Rebecca
Adamson, Naomi Alexander, Kate Anderson, Alexander Augustus, Richard
Barber, Katherine Chandler, Michael Chandler, Nathan Curry, Anna
Herrmann, Chloe Jones, Kat Joyce, Jess Pearson, Emma Waslin, Sara
Whybrew, and all of the participants I interviewed for their insights and for
allowing me to reproduce them here. Further, I will always be grateful to
Gillian Hewitson and the team at Newcastle Futures whose compassion
for all those seeking work lit the touch paper for this research.
I am enormously thankful to Jen Harvie for helping to dig out the
pockets of creative resistance amid the cruelty of austerity. I am indebted
to her relentless interrogation of social and political inequalities and her
unwavering support of me as a scholar. I am also hugely grateful to
Caoimhe McAvinchey whose boundless knowledge of practice and enthu-
siasm to sit down and talk it all through continue to energise me as a
researcher. You are both exceptional mentors and consistently model the
importance of kind and critical scholarship in equal measure.
The wider research community in the Department of Drama at Queen
Mary University has been hugely stimulating to be a part of; in particular,
I would like to thank Michael Shane Boyle, Amy Borsuk, Bridget Escolme,
Maggie Inchley, Catherine Silverstone, Philip Watkinson, Martin Welton,
Lois Weaver, Pen Woods, Martin Young, and Charlotte Young for their
contributions to both my research process and my teaching practice. Your
wit, activism, and research continue to be an inspiration. My thanks also

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

to the School of English and Drama administrative team for their warmth
and academic support.
I am also thankful to all my former colleagues at the University of
Leeds. I am particularly grateful to Aylwyn Walsh for reading drafts of this
work and for her inimitable comradeship and encouragement, Emma
Bennett for her solidarity and stimulating curiosity about absolutely every-
thing, and Kara McKechnie for keeping me together on even the longest
of days in room 101.
There are many other colleagues whose reflections informed this book,
most significantly Louise Owen and Jenny Hughes generously spent time
with this project and developed my thinking by asking incisive questions
and sharing generative conversations. Cat Fallow and Sarah Thomasson,
for reading drafts of this work, offering stimulating ideas, and for never
doubting it was worthwhile, you both helped with it all in immeasurable
ways. I am indebted to the editorial team at Contemporary Theatre Review,
Maria Delgado, Maggie Gale, Dominic Johnson, Bryce Lease, and Aoife
Monks, from whom I have learned the importance of collegiality and gen-
erosity in scholarship during my time as editorial assistant. Thanks also to
Selina Busby who set me on this path, Saul Hewish for being a mentor and
a friend, Caoimhe Mader McGuinness for her camaraderie and comrade-
ship, Sylvan Baker for always sending exciting things my way, Sue Mayo
for her support and encouragement, and to my hero Lynne McCarthy
who helped me along the journey, then, now, and hopefully always.
My thinking and enthusiasm for this project was nourished by working
with students, particularly those undergraduates on Collaborative Project
and our partners at the Wakefield Youth Association, whose exploration of
youth unemployment offered fresh perspectives and helped me to think
through many of the arguments made here. Further, the MA Applied
Theatre students at Leeds, Goldsmiths, and Central School of Speech and
Drama always offered thoughtful and passionate discussions that chal-
lenged and solidified the ideas that fill these pages.
I am thankful to Elaine Aston and Brian Singleton for their time and
support during the process of writing this monograph, particularly for the
insightful, encouraging, and thoughtful feedback Elaine offered on the
first draft of the manuscript which significantly expanded the reach of this
project. Thanks also to the excellent editorial team I have worked with at
Palgrave Macmillan, Tomas René, Vicky Bates, Shaun Vigil, Eileen
Srebernik, and Jack Heeney. Your careful guidance, patience, and atten-
tion to detail have been a great help.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii

Parts of Chap. 6 were published in ‘Gendering Welfare Onstage: Acts

of Reproductive Labour in Applied Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre
Review, 29.3 (2019), and revised for publication here. Chapter 5 is
derived, in part, from an article entitled ‘Hard Labour and Punitive
Welfare: The Unemployed Body at Work in Participatory Performance’,
Research in Drama Education, 22.1 (2017), pp. 62–75. I am appreciative
of the permission given to republish this material here and for the astute
feedback I received from the anonymous reviewers and editorial teams at
both journals.
Much gratitude to my big brother David, who has been my generous
patron since primary school. Thanks also to my parents Dave and Cynthia,
growing up in school staff rooms and Jobcentre offices instilled in me the
value of public service and civic work from the beginning. I hope you
enjoy this product of your union.
Finally, to Sarah Mullan, thank you for always trying to make sense of
me. You are a generous first editor, an insightful theatre companion, and
a remarkable accomplice in everything. Your fierce care, furious kindness,
and unerring support are absolutely unparalleled. This book is for you.
 Praise for Performing Welfare

“Sarah Bartley’s insightful investigation brings current debates about applied the-
atre and participation into dialogue with discussions of welfare in neoliberal societ-
ies. Empathetic and engaging, this study asks challenging questions about theatrical
representations of the unemployed, and considers how far theatre projects designed
for people experiencing joblessness are enmeshed in iniquitous ideas about pro-
ductivity and labour. This book addresses vital issues for our time, and positions
Bartley as a distinctive and important voice that must be heard by students, schol-
ars and theatre-makers.”
—Professor Helen Nicholson, Royal Holloway, University of London

“Performing Welfare dissects the vicious rhetoric, policy, and media and state prac-
tices of this era that violently punished so many of its most disadvantaged citizens.
It then examines an array of applied theatre practices, from large-scale extravagan-
zas to intimate installations, that, by contrast, compassionately partnered with
people who were unemployed to explore the true stories of their lives – their awful
precarity, their ambitions, and their heartfelt dreams.
Sarah Bartley’s Performing Welfare is an urgently timely book of compassion,
hope, and care by a writer paying forensic while sensitive attention to both social
injustice in the age of austerity, and the poignant reparative potential of applied
theatre.”
—Jen Harvie, Queen Mary University of London
 Contents

1 Introduction: Performing Welfare  1

2 Arts and Employability: Migrating Discourses of Skills,

Creativity, and Competition 41

3 An Aesthetics of Dependency: Models of Individual

Responsibility and Practices of Collectivity in Community
Performance 79

4 Visibility, Invisibility, and Anonymity: Materialising

Communities and Navigating the State in Collective Action117

5 Biopolitics and the Unemployed Body in Applied

Performance: Staging Labour, Disrupting Productivity,
and Contesting Categorisation159

6 Gendered Unemployment, Social Reproduction, and

Economies of Labour in Applied Performance203

xi
xii Contents

7 Conclusion: Reimagining Creative Acts Under Austerity247

Afterword255

Index261
 List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 A Dangerous Figure, ‘The Hanging CVs’ at Somerset House

2013. (Photograph courtesy of the artist) 120
Fig. 4.2 A Dangerous Figure submission page. (Photograph reproduced
courtesy of the artist) 124
Fig. 4.3 A Dangerous Figure, a portrait of youth unemployment,
Alexander Augustus and The Bite Back Movement
(Photograph courtesy of the artist) 134
Fig. 5.1 One Million, Tangled Feet, Greenwich International Festival
(2013). (Photograph courtesy of Nathan Curry) 165
Fig. 5.2 ‘Climbing the Career Ladder’, One Million, Tangled
Feet, Greenwich International Festival (2013).
(Photograph courtesy of Nathan Curry) 167

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Performing Welfare

It’s 2015 and I am in a community centre in Gateshead, a town situated

in the North East of England. I have come to interview participants of
MindFULL, an applied arts project delivered by Helix Arts and Tyneside
Mind in which participants produced a film documenting the increasingly
hostile processes encountered by disabled people who are trying to access
state-administered financial support in the UK. Two members of the
group make me a cup of tea, pull three chairs into the corner of the room,
and ask me if I liked their film, But I’m Here for Mental Health.1 The two
participants talk animatedly for an hour about their experiences with
chronic illness, unemployment, and the state welfare system; but mainly,
they speak about the process of making But I’m Here for Mental Health:
how it was joyful, how it was painful, how they wanted to show the hope-
lessness of fighting the system, how they intended to redress pervasive
representations of benefit claimants as scroungers. Throughout our con-
versation the two keep returning to the anxiety that surrounded their
participation in the arts project, encapsulated by the exasperated avowal:
‘well they’d say, “if you can sit there and tell your story, you can sit at a
desk and do a job”’.2 The ‘they’ refers to the Department for Work and
Pensions, the arm of government that oversees welfare provision in the
UK; but it also resonates with a wider increase in public attention to
activities undertaken by welfare claimants since 2010. The feeling of

© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Bartley, Performing Welfare, Contemporary Performance
InterActions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44854-7_1
2 S. BARTLEY

unease articulated by these participants lies at the heart of Performing

Welfare. Arts projects engaging unemployed people are increasingly
shaped by the challenges of representing demonised and surveilled sub-
jects. Further, the ambiguous blurring of the boundaries between partici-
pation and labour within participatory arts projects is intensified by
engaging the non-working subject, whose proximity to work—or any-
thing that might resemble work—is policed and punitively regulated by
the state and sections of the media. This book explores the uneasy terrain
socially committed arts practices occupy when state systems of work and
welfare are in flux and considers strategies that enable this unease to be
navigated or deployed in useful ways for participants. I consider how proj-
ects can enable people to tell their stories in ways which do not expose
them to disciplinary actions from the state and how arts practices pre-
mised on participation function in conditions where classifications of
labour are so loaded.
Between 2010 and 2018, levels of unemployment in the UK consider-
ably expanded and contracted, hitting record highs of 2.57 million people
in 2011 and reducing to 1.44 million people by the end of 2017.3
Concurrently the UK welfare system has been subject to its largest reform
since its inception in 1942, contributing to changing understandings of
(non-)work, significantly shifting the role of the state in supporting its citi-
zens, and invoking an onslaught of negative depictions of dependency in
both media and policy. Indeed, Philip Alston, United Nations Rapporteur
on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, recently asserted:

It might seem to some observers that the Department of Work and Pensions
has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the nine-
teenth century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens, rather than
seeking to respond creatively and compassionately to the real needs of those
facing widespread economic insecurity in an age of deep and rapid transfor-
mation brought about by automation, zero-hour contracts and rapidly
growing inequality.4

The unemployed figure is increasingly deployed by the state and the media
in ways that resonate with Victorian notions of the ‘deserving’ and ‘unde-
serving’ poor. Benefit claimants are utilised as a divisive tool, a way to
scapegoat the allegedly welfare-bloated state as partly culpable for this
period of austerity.5 In the chapters that follow, I draw attention to the
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 3

callous treatment of unemployed individuals and document applied and

socially engaged performance that seeks to stage their experiences during
a period of economic austerity and welfare retraction.6 I reflect on the
implications of the erosion of social security for socially committed arts
practices and examine how such performance intervenes in this shifting
landscape. In particular, this project explores how representational strate-
gies deployed in applied arts practice disrupt or reinforce negative con-
structions of marginalised people; concurrently, it exposes how
participation in performance, particularly by individuals deemed unpro-
ductive, nuances rigid configurations of labour and therefore blurs the
boundaries of work under a capitalist regime. Does the desire to promote
participation in the arts resonate with a move towards active labour market
policies and the accompanying mentality of the implicit value in doing, or
rather, do representations of the unemployed figure in applied perfor-
mance unsettle narrow understandings of productivity and labour?
Further, I consider how the labour at play within applied performance—
specifically, economies of participation, implications of remuneration, and
definitions of productivity—offers resistant practices within a neoliberal
labour market.
The UK Welfare Reform Acts of 2012 and 2016 introduced a series of
wide-reaching changes in state-provided social security. These reforms
included significant reductions in social housing provision and destabilis-
ing changes to social rents, a series of re-categorisations in disability ben-
efits, and increased conditionality around the obligations of claimants,
leading to an intensification of financial sanctioning (i.e. stopping people’s
benefit). Further, the Coalition and subsequent Conservative govern-
ments phased introduction of Universal Credit—an attempt to consoli-
date all working-age state benefits into a single payment—will reduce the
financial support claimants receive by £3 billion a year by 2020–21.7
These changes and their cumulative severity in instigating financial cuts to
benefits have left claimants in a position of acute precarity. In 2010–11
foodbank charity The Trussell Trust gave out 61,468 emergency food
parcels, and by 2018–19 this figure had risen to 1,583,66888; between
2010 and 2016 there was a 54% increase in homelessness in England9, and
the financial sanctioning of claimants nearly tripled during this period,
topping two million people in 2013.10 This systematic removal of funds
from state welfare means unemployed people, dismissed and precarised by
4 S. BARTLEY

the labour market, consequently find themselves dependent on state sup-

port that is itself increasingly insecure. This dispossession of the most
vulnerable in UK society has been underpinned by an ideological assault
on dependency and collective support; a pervasive scapegoating of the
poor, the young, and the disabled; and an intensification of the discursive
relationship between morality and work. The implications of these changes
are significant for understandings of the erosion of the post-war UK wel-
fare contract and also for universal understandings of how social security,
state support, and dependency are constructed in neoliberal contexts.
I was compelled to undertake this research by the intensification of
negative representations of unemployment in political and popular dis-
course following the global economic recession of 2008 and the subse-
quent implementation of economic policies of austerity in the UK. The
rapid rise in unemployment in the country brought the issue to the fore-
front of the political agenda, placing it at the centre of new public service
commissioning models. These shifts generated money for arts projects
engaging with unemployment. This resulted in unemployment not only
being a possible situation of people participating in applied and socially
committed arts practice, but the unemployed were increasingly recognised
as a participant group in their own right. In my own practice as a freelance
community artist, I was increasingly being invited to facilitate arts projects
with unemployed individuals, particularly unemployed young people,
which sought to initiate behavioural changes in order to make participants
more employable. In my experience, these projects were predominantly
focused on achieving individual change rather than interrogating any
underlying historical, cultural, and structural reasons behind unemploy-
ment. Additionally, during the period examined in this book, I was
employed by Newcastle City Council to work in partnership with Jobcentre
Plus on a four-month research project in 2012 that explored provision for
youth unemployment in the region and had two periods where I was
unemployed and claiming unemployment benefits, in 2011 and 2013.
Informed by my own experiences and the shifting social and political ter-
rain of unemployment in the UK, I interrogate the relationship between
socially committed performance and social policy to illuminate the conse-
quences of this intersection for the politics of representation and practices
of the social in performance.
I focus on performances that are created by unemployed non-­
professional performers and arts schemes that directly engage unemployed
participants. I interrogate the relationship between community, the
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 5

individual, and the arts in a context where social systems of support are
being dismantled. The practices I investigate are conceptually layered and
heterogeneously realised. In order to attend to the richness of this kalei-
doscopic arts landscape, I consider the overlapping and divergent fields of
applied theatre, community arts, and participatory performance. Sally
Mackey has noted the absence of applied and social theatre in discourse
surrounding ‘the social turn’ in visual arts and participatory performance
practices.11 This book in part redresses this absence. Further, while applied
theatre, community arts, and participatory performance intersect and
inform one another, each area interacts with the context and experience of
unemployment in distinct ways. Applied theatre offers a body of scholar-
ship that addresses the instrumentalisation of arts practices in service to
social and political agendas. Prevalent discourses of inclusion/exclusion
and collective/individual operating within community theatre provoke
pertinent questions in practices addressing unemployment. Finally, the
parallel emergence and emphasis on participation, in both the labour mar-
ket and contemporary arts practice, evidences the utility of offering an
analysis that holds unemployment and performance alongside one another.
It is essential for socially committed performance practices, which are reg-
ularly concerned with creative production and active participation, to
reflect on its relationship to the destabilising of social security contracts,
the intensification of models of productivity, and the pervasive rhetoric of
individual responsibility. My examination of the unique economies of par-
ticipation that operate within socially committed performance—by which
I mean models of participant remuneration, systems of production, and
divergent funding strategies—asserts how this mode of performance
might disrupt established organisations of labour and capital under neolib-
eralism. Such performance risks validating these hierarchical systems of
power and yet it is uniquely positioned to critique them through the aes-
thetic strategies deployed by practitioners and participants and the collec-
tive production practices it can utilise.

Labour, Unemployment, and Performance

Performing Welfare is explicitly aligned with Marxist feminist scholarship
that seeks to disrupt the way in which work is valued, and thus the unem-
ployed are devalued, at the outset of the twenty-first century. Operating
within a Marxist framework that acknowledges social relations as central to
the function of production, I highlight capitalist mechanisms of inequality
6 S. BARTLEY

and exploitation at play in the exchange of waged and unwaged labour. As

Karl Marx identifies:

if a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or

of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population
also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it
becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production.
It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as
absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.12

The unemployed function as a regulating force under capitalist produc-

tion. How such lives are deployed, dismissed and precarised, by the
demands of neoliberal labour markets, which increasingly invoke this ‘dis-
posable [post] industrial reserve army’, is the locus around which this
study operates.
Negative constructions of the unemployed emerge, in part, from the
neoliberal subject’s uncritical relationship to the value of labour. Feminist
political theorist Kathi Weeks rails against this depoliticisation of work:
‘[t]he value of work, along with its centrality to our lives, is one of the
most stubbornly naturalised and apparently self-evident elements of mod-
ern and late, or post-modern, capitalist societies’.13 Locating an implicit
value in work and its significance facilitates a deligitimisation of the unem-
ployed people. Across the diverse landscape of applied theatre and socially
engaged arts practices, there are projects that encompass narratives of
instrumentality and concern themselves with the use of arts practice to
upskill the subject and imbue them with a greater value in the neoliberal
labour market; concurrently there are practices within these fields which
operate at the fringes of productivity and labour and consequently chal-
lenge the naturalised value of work. Over the course of the book, I exam-
ine how moral and economic values affixed to the concept of work emerge
in socially committed performances that represent the experiences of, and
engage with, unemployed people.
Weeks traces the growth of the labourist work ethic in the industrial
period, identifying how it ‘constitute[d] the working class as a class, serv-
ing to render it legible’.14 Subsequently, after the middle of the twentieth
century, work was characterised as a path to individual self-expression,
self-reliance, agency, and creativity.15 Work was no longer about develop-
ing a collective identity but instead became tethered to the self. Operating
alongside the implicit value attributed to work is the assumed value work
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 7

bestows upon us, bound up as it now is with our identity. The detrimental
impact here for unemployed people is clear; they are both denied access to
the collective identity of the working class and also unable to signify their
individual identity and value. My engagement with this area is inflected
with Weeks’ assertion that work is not just championed through economic
necessity and social responsibility, ‘it is widely understood as an individual
moral practice and collective ethical obligation’.16 I explore how the
unemployed are constituted as a collective, interrogate the ways in which
this collective is rendered ‘legible’, and consider the social and political
stakes of doing so.
The UK Office for National Statistics utilises the following Labour
Force Survey definition of unemployment in order to delineate between
the working, economically inactive, and unemployed17:

those without a job who have been actively seeking work in the past 4 weeks
and are available to start work in the next 2 weeks. It also includes those
who are out of work but have found a job and are waiting to start it in the
next 2 weeks.18

This definition positions the subject as contractually connected to the state

and—in drawing on this definition—I highlight how policy, legislation,
and performance intersect and diverge in socially committed arts practice.
Contrary to terms such as worklessness—which gained prevalence in gov-
ernment discourse post-2010 and is indicative of pathological and ideo-
logical constructions of the unemployed individual—unemployment
recognises the impact of broader considerations of business cycles and
economic conditions on the availability and obtainability of work in par-
ticular labour markets. The term exposes the existence of discourses that
promote pathologies of worklessness while offering a more comprehensive
understanding of the material conditions of the labour landscape. While I
use this definition of unemployment, I also problematise its failure to
account for non-working people engaged in forms of labour that are not
economically rewarded. The understanding of labour deployed in
Performing Welfare recognises a broad range of human activity including,
but not limited to, waged work.
Throughout the chapters that follow, I demonstrate the ambiguity of
such classifications of labour and reflect on how applied performance
might seek to radically illuminate that ambiguity. There are representa-
tions of modes of productivity operating beyond capitalist work regimes
8 S. BARTLEY

onstage, but how do such representations become acutely politicised when

undertaken by individuals the state deems as non-working/non-­
productive? Drawing on theorisations of productivity that emerge in femi-
nist, queer, and crip scholarship finds ways to trouble the parameters of
state categorisations of labouring subjects.19 Indeed, Alison Kafer has
identified resonances across queer and disabled subjects in relation to pro-
ductivity, particularly noting ‘the mechanisms of state services certainly
push one out of the logic of capital accumulation and onto the edges of
labour and production’.20 Its application here encapsulates aspects of pro-
duction and reproduction which this study unravels, particularly, in rela-
tion to reproductive labour and the diverse resistances to sanctioned forms
of productivity engendered by marginalised young, racialised, gendered,
or disabled subjects. Therefore, while I rely on a definition of unemploy-
ment that is anchored in the term ‘actively seeking work’, I problematise
this definition and identify ways in which applied performance project
might construct alternative models of labour and work that render the
unemployed ‘productive’ beyond the parameters of a capitalist work regime.
I am specifically invested in attending to the material implications and
realities of labour and participation among acutely exploited groups in a
neoliberal economy. Thinking through unemployment in tandem with
performance is bolstered by the recognition of the position of theatre
between leisure and work. A liminal position made even more germane
in performance practice undertaken by individuals outside of established
working structures. Nicholas Ridout posits the potential of theatre as ‘a
place and practice where it might be possible to think disruptively about
work and leisure’.21 Presenting the labour of the unemployed, through
participants’ public performance, offers an extension of this ‘disruptive’
challenge. Particularly relevant is Ridout’s reflection on the nature of
the ‘passionate amateur’, which he suggests illustrates the possibility of
theatrical labour to unsettle the logic of new capitalism and our ‘subju-
gation to wage labor and the labor theory of value’.22 Ridout thus iden-
tifies the potential of theatre to engage in different forms of value
exchange and conceives ‘passionate amateurs’ as ‘those who work
together for the production of value for one another (for love, that is,
rather than money) in ways that refuse […] the division of labor that
obtains under capitalism as usual’.23 Such a description can be applied to
much socially focused performance, which is often concerned with the
production of values other than the financial, as participants and artists
alike engage for passion or ‘love’ of the work. Reconstituting the
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 9

passionate amateur through the lens of the unemployed participant

amplifies conflicts surrounding labour, economies, and performance.
Performance projects that seek to cultivate alternative modes of value
illuminate ways in which the unemployed figure might be framed as a
radical force in participatory performance.
Performance occupies a distinctive position in its capacity to make prac-
tices of labour visible to publics. Increasingly, participatory arts practices
are an arena which exposes or illuminates the dynamics of the labour in the
work of artistic production. Theron Schmidt proposes a slippage occur-
ring in contemporary arts and performance between ‘work’ (labour
power) and ‘a work’ (the commodity produced and abstracted from
labour).24 He identifies the problematic assertion that acts of labour sited
in theatre and arts spaces can in some way reveal ‘real’ labour to viewers.
Although many contemporary works concerned with labour suggest they
are acknowledging and presenting the hidden labour in such spaces, they
fall back on the representational modes inherent in the space (i.e. perfor-
mance/aesthetic frames) and thus ‘real’ presentations of hidden labour
dynamics remain illusive. As such,

the frame of the theatre produces such labour as fabrication, as mimetic, as

less concrete than it may appear. […] this abstraction produces a kind of
non-productivity: No matter how much the stagehand sweeps the stage, he
or she will not sweep the stage, but only show us sweeping the stage.25

Rather than presenting access to a ‘real’ unalienated labour, such ‘works’

about work render labour ‘non-productive’; while they fail to present this
real labour, they succeed in making acutely apparent the labour of theatri-
cality. Building on this, as unemployed people are implicitly identified as
unproductive, how might aesthetically framing them as ‘at work’ unsettle
or reaffirm perceptions of their productivity?
There is a sense that audiences at cultural events ‘play at’, and indeed
pay for, labour as part of their leisure experience. Adam Alston’s interroga-
tion of when participation is ‘playing’ and when it is ‘labour’ underscores
the complexity of the kinds of activity participants engage in. I consider
whether this complexity intervenes in perceptions of the unemployed as
non-productive subjects and further examine the boundary between cre-
ative participation and creative work.26 Alston appeals for greater attention
to the implications of performing labour: ‘[w]e should also question what
it means to “reveal” labour, particularly when that revealing is itself an
10 S. BARTLEY

aesthetic process’.27 In a period where labour status is deeply contested,

performance must strive to develop a greater understanding of how it
exposes labour and critically reflect on implications of the representations
of labour it offers. Such questions are only intensified when considered in
relation to the aesthetics of performances of unemployment.

Conceptualising Welfare and Performance:

Dependency and Precarity
Arts projects addressing unemployment have a profound interaction with
the state, both in addressing prescribed social effects and responding to
policy agendas and in engaging with the community politics of place and
social responsibility of citizens. Dependence has increasingly been posi-
tioned as contrary to work in contemporary British political discourse. In
1997, at his first Labour Party Conference Speech, UK Prime Minister
Tony Blair stated: ‘[t]he new welfare state must encourage work, not
dependency’.28 Such rhetoric removes ‘dependency’ from its broader
meaning of mutual support and stability and instead locates it as what
sociologist Richard Sennett terms ‘social parasitism’.29 Sennett identifies
how during new capitalism—a period of dematerialised, globally net-
worked, and concurrently precarised neoliberalism—dependence has
become both dislocated from considerations of care or community and
reconstituted as a position of neediness of which individuals should be
ashamed. Distinguishing the unemployed as other is an act of segregation
enacted by governments, media, and working publics, in order to distance
themselves from the shame attributed to worklessness and the individual
failure it has come to signify.
Alongside the retraction of formal systems of state support, the UK has
seen a growth in informal networks of care (foodbanks, volunteer carers,
childcare collectives). Such networks might be both a locus for resistance,
where claimants can meet and organise modes of aesthetic and political
opposition, and concurrently a practice of civic participation deployed in
service of the creation and maintenance of economically active and pro-
ductive citizens. As such, Performing Welfare examines both the commu-
nal potentials arts practice can envision and the material social systems
within which participants are located. Previously, Shannon Jackson has
prompted a consideration of the support systems in which relational or
participatory performance is embedded, aiming ‘to place social systems in
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 11

the foreground of analysis despite the fact they usually occupy the back-
ground of experience’.30 Jackson proposes such a foregrounding will,
rather than echoing the ongoing binary discourse of efficacy versus aes-
thetic quality, provoke a heightened ‘awareness of our enmeshment in
systems of support’.31 Similarly, I examine how the welfare state, and its
erosion, is performed and experienced in socially committed arts practices.
This prioritises the intersection of arts practice and social systems; rather
than an emphasis on arguing for the value of specific aesthetic or social
agendas, I examine what occurs when these fields overlap. I investigate the
particular character of state sociality through the lens of the collective and
collaborative practices. Jen Harvie explores how the welfare state might
potentially incubate or challenge relational arts practice in the UK asking
‘how do these potentially socially democratic art practices and neoliberal
capitalist ideologies produce, inform, challenge and/or undermine each
other?’32 Such an investigation encourages a critique of the problematic
economic and social relations that arts projects might engender and embed
while also pointing to the potential of such arts practices to highlight the
labour dynamics which proliferate in our contemporary context.
In progressively precarious social and economic contexts, Jackson and
Harvie illuminated the position of art and performance within models of
social governance. While critiquing potential issues surrounding such rela-
tionally intentioned practice, both advocate for art forms which foster
interdependence and collective support systems, be they state-led or oth-
erwise, in contexts of receding social security. In its attentiveness to the
social context and political structures, out of which art practices emerge,
Performing Welfare locates itself in the theoretical lineage of Harvie and
Jackson. Representations of welfare in socially committed arts practices
offer an opportunity to interrogate notions of representation, depen-
dence, and production among unemployed individuals and communities.
Further, attending to arts projects engagement with unemployed partici-
pants illuminates how arts practice directly intervenes in, responds to, and
reproduces welfare policy.
As political theorist Isabell Lorey evidences, precarity is increasingly
engendered by the state through the destruction of social security. This is
justified by governments due to its apparent inevitability: ‘[i]n the course
of the dismantling of the welfare state and the rights associated with it, a
form of government is established that is based on the greatest possible
insecurity, promoted by proclaiming the alleged absence of alternatives’.33
Welfare contracts are disintegrating and political reforms continue to
12 S. BARTLEY

erode the rights of those on benefits, asserting that social security is no

longer secure; as Lorey suggests, ‘precaritization is not an exception, it is
rather the rule’.34 Lorey posits precarity as a nascent form of what Michel
Foucault has termed ‘governmentality’, which works to produce econom-
ically and socially vulnerable citizens who are unreservedly responsive to
the needs of the market.35 Insecurity is therefore an elected strategy of
control, a political choice, and one which has been electorally successful in
the UK, with the Conservative Party re-elected in national elections in
2015, 2017, and 2019 on manifestos that championed austerity policies.
Significantly, Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme
poverty and human rights, reported after a visit to the UK in 2018:

The Government paints a picture of austerity in which everyone has tight-

ened their belt together but, […] while the bottom 20 per cent of earners
will have lost on average 10 per cent of their income by 2021–2022 as a
result of these changes, top earners have actually come out ahead. This is
compounded by cuts to public spending, including on housing and educa-
tion, that have hit the lowest-income households the hardest, and in England
amount to cuts of 16 per cent or £1,450 per person.36

In the UK, austerity has been deployed to disinvest in the poorest in our
society, to encourage the shift of public services into private ownership,
and enable the transfer of wealth to an increasingly small elite.
In conjunction with the economic and social precarity identified by
Lorey, I also consider the material and embodied vulnerability of distinct
communities. Judith Butler posits the concept of ‘precarious life’ in a
post-9/11 American context of censorship and violence.37 Two central
tenets of Butler’s conception of ‘precarious life’ are that humans are
implicitly interdependent and vulnerable and that some are more exposed
to that vulnerability than others. These articulations of differently vulner-
able individuals and interdependent communities are vital to my consider-
ation of social security and discourses of community arts practice.
Foundational to this project is Butler’s acknowledgement of ‘normative
schemes of intelligibility [that] establish what will and will not be human,
what will be a liveable life, what will be a grievable death’.38 I identify how
and where these ‘normative schemes’ operate in and around the context
of participatory arts practice. Such a consideration reflects the material and
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 13

embodied vulnerability of the unemployed in a contemporary UK con-

text, where people are being corporeally impacted by welfare reforms.
While precarity can be perceived and employed as a deeply negative
entity, Lorey and Butler also identify it as a space of possibility, a banner
under which disparate communities can potentially gather and deploy
‘precarity as activism’.39 Lorey proposes that the current state of precarity
has the potential to unify a multiplicity of social and economic positions,
promoting new forms of resistance that emphasise horizontal rather than
hierarchical organising to create ‘a new form of democracy’.40 Similarly,
Butler advocates for the power of the precarious in ‘organizing themselves
without hierarchy, and so exemplifying the principles of equal treatment
that they are demanding of public institutions’.41 Precarity then might
operate as a mode through which to engender solidarity, a way to build
relations across social and economic divisions, and a mechanism to expose
the oppressive organisation of wage labour under capitalism. Arts practice
explicitly engaging with precarity might unsettle the traditional organisa-
tion of hierarchies through a privileging of the non-worker, or heighten-
ing an awareness of precarious labour contexts affecting both the publics
who witness them and the participants who perform them.
Tavia Nyong’o advocates for a critical engagement with precarity that
recognises the impact and intersection of race, gender, and capital on
encounters with vulnerability. Nyong’o articulates that acknowledging
common vulnerabilities shared across different subjects offers a potential
move towards solidarity and ‘collective and distributed agency’; however,
he cautions that in order to achieve such networks of support, ‘those who
proceed under its sign must remain scrupulously attentive to the constitu-
tive and uneven distribution of that vulnerability’.42 Developing Butler’s
persistent engagement with the precarity as layered and unequally encoun-
tered, such an application insists that we remain mindful of the ways in
which academics and activists often position precarity. Nyong’o calls for a
broadening out of the critical focus on those, often highly educated,
entrepreneurial and flexible subjects who increasingly inhabit the world of
art and performance, while:

the coeval precarity of other women’s lives consigned to “life-times of dis-

posability” elsewhere in the production cycle of global capitalism, as well as
the grounding of precarity in the domestic and unwaged servitude […] will
be correspondingly neglected.43
14 S. BARTLEY

In establishing the experience of the unemployed across society more

broadly, rather than purely focusing on trends in the arts industry, I seek,
in part, to address the lack of critical attention on experiences of insecurity
at the margins. While the geographical parameters of this study limit its
focus to the UK, I direct particular attention to unemployed people who
are cast by the state as ultimately more ‘disposable’ and acutely exposed to
punishing contemporary welfare reforms. I am committed to exploring
such lives through the framework of performance and thus advocating for
the utility of some ‘artworlds’ over others as a way to examine ‘life times
of disposability’. Therefore, through invoking the term precarity, this
book seeks to examine the consonance between socially and economically
insecure individuals and arts practice.44

The Welfare State and Socially Committed Arts

Practice: A History
Performing Welfare asserts the intertwined ideologies and histories of
social welfare and socially committed arts provision. In 1946 the National
Insurance Act, the cornerstone of the UK welfare state, was implemented
and The Arts Council of Great Britain was founded. These coinciding
events, indicative of a post-World War II appeal to social equality and cul-
tural accessibility, stand as symbolic of the parallel histories of welfare and
arts provision which sought to cultivate communities of co-dependency,
mutual support, creativity, and cultural democracy. In this section, I trace
historical shifts in welfare ideologies alongside the emergence of employ-
ment as an important signifier of effective social arts practice. The reforms,
policies, and arts agendas I outline here form the social and cultural back-
drop of the research undertaken in this book and are indicative of the
progressively worsening economic and material hardships faced by indi-
viduals reliant on destabilising state systems of support.
Jenny Hughes has previously traced the lineages of applied theatre and
Victorian workhouse entertainments, excavating ‘fledgling social theatres
of the nineteenth century’ and drawing attention to potential historical
lineages of applied performance in Christian discourses bound up with
social regulation of citizens’ utility.45 Hughes illuminates how these work-
house entertainments resonate with twenty-first-century cultures of wel-
fare, drawing fruitful parallels between these latent histories and
contemporary theatre projects which ‘might both work with and against
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 15

(neo)liberal welfare regimes that require individuals to take responsibility

for lifting themselves out of pernicious networks of economic inequal-
ity’.46 The characteristics of self-improvement, individual responsibility,
and social support within applied theatre’s histories are threaded through-
out my analysis of contemporary examples.
In the UK, state intervention into the provision of economic and social
support for its citizens emerged at the outset of the twentieth century
when the government adopted an increased level of responsibility for pro-
viding pensions, unemployment insurance, healthcare, and a range of
other economic systems of support. Despite emerging out of a number of
disparate schemes of support and assistance that had developed over the
first half of the twentieth century, the foundation of the welfare state is
largely attributed to the 1942 ‘The Social Insurance and Allied Services
Report’ produced by William Beveridge and commonly known as the
Beveridge Report.47 In September 1944 the White Paper on Social
Insurance set out the government’s response to the Beveridge Report;
subsequently the National Insurance Act 1946 established the first com-
prehensive social security system in the UK.48 This act formed the blue-
print for the welfare state and is merited with founding the National
Health Service and implementation of a coherent universal social security
system in the UK. A range of benefits (sickness benefit, unemployment
benefit, retirement pension) were made available to all those of a working
age who made weekly contributions. Significantly, this contributions-­
based model did not offer unemployment provision for those with dis-
abilities, non-working or married women, or the elderly who had not
accrued contributions.49 The National Assistance Act 1948 further broad-
ened social security to all, even if one had not previously made National
Insurance contributions.50 This established a universal and comprehensive
system of state support that acknowledged the equal right of all citizens to
freedom from poverty. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, this system
worked reasonably effectively, though at times contentiously, with leading
political parties seeking to further develop and amend provision in order
to offer citizens protection from the abject poverty experienced during the
interwar years.51
Towards the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, the post-war welfare
contract was exposed to growing scrutiny. As the economy began to stag-
nate and inflation grew, the UK was rendered increasingly precarious in a
global market unsure of the nation’s financial security. As economic histo-
rian Jim Tomlinson notes, the 1970s were a turning point for economic
16 S. BARTLEY

policy in post-war Britain.52 This period of economic ‘stagflation’, coupled

with a marked increase in unemployment, led to the UK government bor-
row from the International Monetary Fund in order to meet public spend-
ing needs.53 This resulted in a challenge to the legitimacy of a Keynesian
economic policy, a fiscal model that sought to offer full and extensive
social and economic protection to all citizens. The subsequent change in
attitudes to welfare was amplified over the following decades by the emer-
gence of neoliberal ideology and its accompanying economic policies.
Concurrently, the 1960s and 1970s saw socially committed, non-­
hierarchical, and culturally embedded collaborative arts practices thrive,
most clearly encapsulated by the blossoming of the Community Arts
Movement—a shifting co-operative of artists and organisations broadly
making work that attended to similar ideologies and practices. Alison Jeffers
and Gerri Moriarty have vividly documented these practices, drawing the
temporal parameters of the Community Arts Movement as 1968–86 to
indicate a period of intense interest in collaborative practices and cultural
democracy.54 Community arts practices across this period were regularly
committed to experimentation, in form and content; cultural engagement
and a desire to embed artistic practice within communities; and finding
new modes of accessible creative play. Further, as Jeffers’ historical tracing
of the Community Arts Movement in particular attests, there were strong
links between community arts practice and the broader UK labour move-
ment during this period. Most notably, the artistic practices utilised in eco-
nomically vulnerable and disenfranchised coalfield communities, and other
industrial communities encountering high unemployment and a lack of
state investment.55 However, by the mid-1980s the social, cultural, and
economic landscape of the UK had dramatically changed and the once bur-
geoning Community Arts Movement was struggling to define its fluid
ideological underpinnings and navigate a scant funding landscape.
State welfare models were similarly besieged; from the 1980s onwards,
social security systems across Europe were criticised for the region’s slow
economic growth and poor productivity. Protections embedded in welfare
contracts were reframed as expensive social insurance measures. In the
UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in
1979 marked a significant shift in approaches to unemployment, work,
and state welfare. This was underpinned by a slowing of post-war financial
growth leading to periods of recession, an increasingly post-industrial
labour market and subsequent high levels of unemployment, and an age-
ing population resulting in an increasing social welfare and pension bill.
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 17

This led to a reduction of state support and a reattribution of responsibil-

ity to the citizen. Increased social fragmentation proliferated due to the
breakdown of industries, affecting whole communities and sending them
into economic turmoil. Mass unemployment and resulting financial hard-
ship reframed the debate surrounding policy, and cultural policy, perma-
nently. Conservative employment policy in the 1980s adopted a benefit
control model, bringing a more strategic, financially driven, and active
labour market policy approach to the fore.56 This culminated in the Social
Security Act 1989, which amended the law to bind financial support for
the unemployed to claimants’ ability to evidence their attempted partici-
pation in the labour market. Where ‘availability to work’ had previously
been the key indicator of eligibility to claim benefit, the term ‘actively
seeking work’ was inserted into the law, denoting an ideological shift in
what the state required of claimants:

Where it has been determined that a person is to be deemed in accordance

with regulations to be actively seeking employed earner’s employment in
any week, the question of his actually doing so in that week may be subse-
quently determined on a review of the determination as to his deemed
doing so.57

The intensive determination of activity became primary, marking a turn

towards participation in labour markets as ‘actively seeking employment’
became the central focus on which conditionality was evaluated and,
therefore, on which access to financial support was achieved.
Against a debilitated economic and employment backdrop, a financial
argument for the arts emerged as significant. John Myerscough’s 1988
report The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain marked an ideologi-
cal step change as he demonstrated for the first time in the UK that public
funding of the arts had a direct correlation to increased spending and job
creation, leading to enhanced wealth.58 As cultural researcher Michelle
Reeves notes:

The Report set the stage for a generation of impact studies, and other analy-
ses […] which sought to document and argue the case for the role of the arts
and creative industries as important agents for economic development and
urban renewal, and begin to measure this impact in quantitative terms.59
18 S. BARTLEY

The first to engage with economic discourse, the report repositioned the
arts in terms of investment, multipliers, and indicators, thus shifting
vocabularies in the field from the aesthetic and social to the economic,
appealing to the sensibilities of the burgeoning neoliberal order.
Employment was a central tenet of this argument for the arts: evidence of
job creation throughout the sector was a powerful signifier of the impor-
tance of the industry in a context of receding industrial employment. The
narrative of the arts as a valuable employer has since threaded through
cultural policy from Myerscough to the present day.
New Labour came to power in 1997 with a landslide victory under-
pinned by their Third Way ideology, an attempted synthesis of market-­
oriented economic approaches and communitarian social and cultural
policies. Their policy approach was characterised by efforts to achieve
social equality, increase representation and community cohesion, and pro-
mote economic prosperity in a globalised marketplace. Inflected by these
plural objectives, the government installed their flagship employment pol-
icy New Deal as soon as they took office. The policy was considered highly
successful, bringing unemployment below one million for the first time in
25 years by March 2001.60 New Deal targeted groups who were deemed
as having multiple obstacles to accessing the labour market; there were
specific strands for young people, lone parents, disabled people, those who
were classified as long-term unemployed, and people over 50. This pro-
gramme is indicative of the wide-reaching and targeted support offered by
New Labour; however, underpinned by the Third Way ideology, New
Deal also emphasised a rebalancing of ‘rights and responsibilities’. Where
previously as a citizen you had a right to social security, New Labour fur-
ther engrained rhetoric that asserted claimants had to demonstrate them-
selves responsible to the state in order to earn their benefit. Aligned with
this, and directly building on the policies of the previous Conservative
government, New Labour established the Jobseeker’s Allowance and
accompanying Jobseeker’s Agreement. This agreement introduced finan-
cial sanctions of varying severity that could be imposed on claimants who
refused ‘suitable’ employment, failed to actively seek work, or became
unavailable for work. Towards the end of the New Labour government,
the Welfare Reform Act 2009 signified a further drive towards workfare
schemes and a push for a tougher sanctioning process.61 This Act was the
culmination of the decade-long emphasis on responsibility over right by
New Labour. An ideological stance subsequently advanced by both the
Coalition and Conservative governments.
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 19

From the outset, Labour leader Tony Blair made apparent his aim to
put the arts to work as part of his government’s cultural strategy.62
Characteristic of New Labour’s policy initiatives was the reframing of arts
and culture through a rhetoric of social inclusion.63 Social inclusion poli-
cies sought to tackle deep rooted and interdependent modes of exclusion
such as high levels of unemployment, crime, ill-health, and poor educa-
tion.64 The publication of François Matarasso’s ‘Use or Ornament’ in
1997 provided a methodological approach for examining social impact in
the arts and arguing beyond the financial for ‘economics in its deeper
sense’.65 Seven of the 50 social impacts of participation in the arts outlined
by Matarasso were directly related to employment/employability; if soft
skills development is included, this adds a further four.66 This spoke to the
appetite for marrying social inclusion and economic productivity within a
Third Way Model and identified the arts value within such a framework.
Alongside this, the government established 18 Policy Action Teams
(PATs) to research and implement solutions in specific areas of social
exclusion. Having begun to demonstrate and document its social impact,
PAT 10 was established in order to explore how best to utilise arts, sport,
and leisure to challenge poverty. In 1999, the PAT 10 report concluded
that arts, sports, cultural, and recreational activity ‘can contribute to
neighbourhood renewal and make a real difference to health, crime,
employment and education in deprived communities’.67 Within the same
year, the Scottish Arts Council found ‘art plays a critical part in empower-
ing communities, providing jobs, skills and training’.68 The arts were thus
recognised as successful providers of skills, training, and employability
provision. In addition to aligning with discourses of social inclusion
throughout the New Labour years, the arts and cultural sector maintained
a focus on productivity and employment provision. The inception of the
Creative Industries in the UK coincided with New Labour coming to
power.69 The Creative Industries Task Force was conceived in 1997, work-
ing across government departments it sought to evaluate and strategise
performance throughout the creative industries in order to maximise
effectiveness. Producing Creative Industries: 1998 Mapping Document and
later repeating the evaluation in 2001, the Creative Industries Task Force
signalled its focus on statistical analysis of employment in the sector,
thereby providing a justification for the arts that was reliant on its capacity
for job creation. This served to further entwine the value of arts practice
with the promise of employment.
20 S. BARTLEY

When the Coalition government came to power in 2010 (and later the
Conservatives in 2015), they introduced increased conditionality for those
claiming unemployment benefits, and subsequent increase in sanctioning,
implemented through the new Claimant Commitment.70 This has resulted
in a more punitive and disciplinary system of welfare. In 2016 the govern-
ment introduced a four-year freeze across Jobseeker’s Allowance,
Employment Support Allowance, and Universal Credit, meaning that they
would not rise in line with inflation and resulting in a 6.5% real terms cut
in financial support.71 An increased vulnerability to economic hardship
and financial crisis for those relying on state assistance has characterised
welfare reform introduced by governments since 2010. In part this has
been due to the faltering and costly introduction of Universal Credit, the
most ambitious attempt at a system and culture change within the state
welfare structure. Universal Credit aims to assimilate all six working-age
benefits and intends to revolutionise the manner in which people encoun-
ter unemployment and receive financial support from the state.72 Further,
it intends to enable claimants to roll on and off benefit if they undertook
short-term or zero-hour contracts. Universal Credit was due to be nation-
ally in operation by 2017; however, beset by system and IT failures, it has
been rescheduled seven times and is forecast to be fully rolled out by 2022
at a cost of £15.8 billion.73 Further, cuts to Universal Credit by the trea-
sury in 2016 mean the benefit will be significantly less than its predecessor
with 1.2 million families on Universal Credit set to receive an average
reduction of £41 a week in financial support.74 This shift not only affects
the unemployed but the working poor with 1.3 million working families
currently entitled to support in the tax credit system no longer entitled to
any in-work support, leaving them on average £42 a week worse off.75
Additionally, claimants have to wait five weeks between applying for
Universal Credit and receiving any financial support. The Advanced
Payment facility enables claimants to access a government loan from the
point of making their claim; however, this often leaves people with little
money left once their government loan repayment is deducted each
month. MPs launched an inquiry in 2017 into the roll out of the service
as claimants faced lengthy delays in payments, resulting as Labour MP
Frank Field states ‘claimants falling into debt and rent arrears, caused
health problems and led to many having to rely on food banks’.76 The
system has been widely condemned across the political parties, the charity
sector, support services, and by the United Nations due to it regularly
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 21

leading to increased social, economic, and physical precarity for those

dependent on it.
Alongside these financial changes, there has been a shift in the delivery
of employment support with the Coalition government launching their
five billion pound flagship welfare-to-work scheme in June 2011. The
Work Programme was a mandatory work and employability scheme tar-
geted at the long-term unemployed that outsourced contracts for employ-
ment support to a combination of private, public, and third sector
organisations. Participants in the Work Programme are evaluated and
agencies supporting them are funded through a payment-by-results
scheme which, as I go onto discuss in Chap. 2, has led to a significant
disparity in the quality and amount of support people receive. Between
June 2011 and December 2015, only 28.5% of people (503,106) on the
Work Programme were supported into a job.77 The Work Programme ran
between 2011 and 2017 and was the central vehicle for unemployment
provision over the period of research.78
The economic recession of 2008 and decade of austerity measures have
brought the financial argument for the value of the arts back into focus.
Scything cuts and the promotion of mixed economy funding models
throughout the sector have engendered the need to revisit the dialogue of
investment and return in justifying public spending on the arts. In a key-
note speech at the British Museum in April 2014, Conservative MP, and
then Culture Secretary, Maria Miller called for the Arts to present its case
as a valuable economic powerhouse:

I come to you today and ask you to help me reframe the argument: to ham-
mer home the value of culture to our economy […] some simply want
money and silence from Government, but in an age of austerity, when times
are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture’s eco-
nomic impact.79

This Conservative tactic of demanding a financial justification in a fiscally

fragile Britain echoes the period in which Myerscough was writing in
1988. Arts Council England responded to this call by commissioning the
Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) to write an inde-
pendent report examining the macroeconomic contribution of arts in
Britain.80 The CEBR report returned to and refreshed the economic argu-
ments of the 1980s; once again there was a strong emphasis on job cre-
ation as a benefit of supporting the Creative Industries. In July 2018 the
22 S. BARTLEY

Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced that 1 in every 11

jobs in the UK was now in the creative industries.81
These parallel histories demonstrate the UK government’s shifting rela-
tionship to welfare, collective support, and dependency; concurrently, the
arts sector has encountered new discourses of instrumentalisation which
seek to emphasise the social and economic utility of arts practice. The
period investigated in the chapters which follow marks an acute accelera-
tion of the destruction of the welfare state under an economic policy of
austerity. However, this programme of social support has been progres-
sively eroded since the UK’s economic difficulties in the 1970s and dein-
dustrialisation in the 1980s; more widely, the last 40 years have been
marked by a neoliberal economic model which persistently undermines
social security systems and ideologies. The utility of focusing on the wel-
fare state as an object of study rests in its implicit link to the financial,
labour, and social structures which operate in the UK.

Working Through Performing Welfare

The unemployed are not a homogenous group. It is pertinent to demar-
cate the diverse experiences of individual claimants and the different types
of benefits people access. Particularly as the effects of austerity have been
disproportionately felt by young people, women, racial and ethnic minori-
ties, and disabled people. In the UK youth unemployment (classified as
16–24-year-olds who are not in education or employment) rapidly
increased after the global economic crash of 2008; at the same time, young
people were increasingly excluded from accessing state welfare.82 Exploring
youth unemployment is central to developing an understanding of the
representational strategies deployed by the state and arts organisations
given the prominence of this growing cohort and the specificities of their
claimant status between 2010 and 2018. I also investigate representations
of people claiming Employment Support Allowance (ESA). ESA is avail-
able to people who are unemployed due to illness or disability. Changes in
ESA have been a key area of welfare reform since 2012, garnering signifi-
cant media and political attention.83 Given the deeply contested represen-
tations of ESA claimants, and their experience as characteristic of this
period of reform, it is pertinent to consider how these individuals are
engaging with, and being represented in, performance. Beyond state-­
delineated cohorts, it is important to perceive unemployment in relation
to other identity markers. Race and gender (examined in Chaps. 4 and 6,
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 23

respectively) have a significant impact on individuals’ experiences of the

labour market, and consequently their encounters with unemployment. I
underscore the impact of different identity markers on individuals’ partici-
pation in labour markets and arts provision. While attending to the speci-
ficities of these particular cohorts or identity groups, I also address broader
changes to conditionality for those receiving Jobseeker’s Allowance and
other more generic state benefits. Examining these wider shifts enables an
exploration of how the state reconstituted its relationship to work, wel-
fare, and the individual during this time.
I have sought to capture the breadth of arts practice being undertaken
in urban contexts across the UK; however, due to my London location
and relationship to geographically sited community arts ecologies, the
main examples I examine are located in England, specifically in Birmingham,
Brighton, London, and Tyneside.84 I particularly focus on London and
the North East, where unemployment has been persistently high through-
out the period this research examines. The North East was the region with
the highest unemployment rate (7% as of February 2017), London stood
as the third highest (5.5% as of February 2017) in the UK.85 The time
period investigated (2010–18) has been delineated by the introduction of
severe and far-reaching economic policies of austerity in the UK since
2010, the growth in unemployment with rates peaking at 8.4% in 2011,
and the introduction of significant welfare reforms in 2012 and 2016.86 In
2018 at the Conservative Party Conference, then UK Prime Minister
Theresa May shimmied onstage to ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’ and declared
‘austerity is over and [the public’s] hard work has paid off’.87 Despite this
claim, the damaging disinvestment in the UK’s poorest communities is
ongoing and public services continue to be forced into catastrophic saving
measures. These eight years therefore mark a significant period in the UK
during which social provision and collective support were under sustained
attack. At the same time, the perception of the welfare claimant has
become increasingly stigmatised and individualised. While this book
examines the particular dismantling of the welfare state in the UK during
this period, it is more broadly concerned with intersections between state
constructions of dependency and ideologies of applied performance, strat-
egies of making visible marginalised subjects, the resonances of policy
rhetoric and performance practices, and the implications of staging (non-)
productivity in socially committed performance.
As Performing Welfare foregrounds critical considerations of represen-
tation and practices of labour, the book is organized into five chapters,
24 S. BARTLEY

arranged into three distinct sections: language, image, and embodiment.

Broadly, these three sections examine how performance draws attention to
neoliberal shifts in language describing the unemployed, documents and
analyses the proliferation of often negative images of the unemployed, and
exposes the necropolitical forms of governance operating within the wel-
fare state. My methodological framework draws on a hybrid of strategies
of performance analysis predominantly guided by cultural materialism and
critical discourse analysis. This project synthesises a diverse range of mate-
rial across performance practices and social and cultural policy; therefore,
it is informed by research practices in theatre and performance studies,
economics, and political science.
Cultural materialism is central to my methodological approach given
the Marxist underpinnings of this project and its concern with construc-
tions of labour and unemployment in policy and performance.88 Marx, in
his identification of the relation between material production and cultural
experience, recognises the socially constitutive nature of material life. My
engagement with cultural materialism is guided by Harvie’s assertion of
‘culture as always enmeshed in social, material and historical conditions;
contributing to the production of ideologies; and therefore important to
consider in the construction of social relations, especially hierarchies of
class’.89 Harvie’s emphasis on the ‘production of ideologies’ and socially
stratified power relations resonates with important areas of investigation in
this research. Therefore, I utilise Harvie’s work as a model through which
to interrogate the politics of labour in contemporary performance and
explore the social, political, and cultural implications of participatory arts
projects. Further, my research adopts Ric Knowles’ approach of ‘historicis-
ing the here and now’, documenting the plurality of representations
emerging around unemployment between 2010 and 2018.90 In so doing,
it challenges the stability of dominant narratives of welfare provision that
may appear significant in future histories of the period.91 My intention to
highlight, document, and provoke instances of ‘dissident’ practices within
socially engaged and applied arts uses the methodological framework of
cultural materialism to anchor and activate my critique of the distribution
of power in labour markets, social policy, and performance. Utilising a
cultural materialist approach engenders a space for oppositional interven-
tion and illuminates how such representations function within neoliberal
modes of governance.
Alongside cultural materialism, I use critical discourse analysis to engage
with linguistic, visual, and embodied texts deployed by different
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 25

stakeholders in relation to unemployment. Social semiotician Theo van

Leeuwen notes, critical discourse analysis has ‘moved beyond language,
taking on board that discourses are often multimodally realised, not only
through text and talk but also through other modes of communication
such as images’.92 Therefore, alongside close readings of policy and articu-
lations of state and artist agendas, my interrogation of imagery and
embodied performance is also informed by critical discourse analysis. This
approach is fundamentally concerned with tracing how discourse is formu-
lated through social and cultural practices while asserting that discourse
also produces social relationships. I am concerned with the dialogic con-
struction of discourses around unemployment, investigating where arts
practice is ideologically and practically inflected by dominant discourses
and also where it might hold the potential to reconstitute prevalent repre-
sentations of the unemployed.
At its core critical discourse, analysis is concerned with what Ruth
Wodak and Michael Mayer have termed ‘de-mystifying’ the distribution of
power, hegemonic ideologies, and institutional structures through pro-
moting close evaluations of the semiotic encounters that enact and articu-
late these outcomes.93 As linguist Jane Mulderrig states, it is ‘[a] form of
intervention in social practices and social relationships’, which hopes to
highlight and challenge social inequalities.94 This desire to expose social
inequalities and identify how such inequalities are enacted threads
throughout this book; I aim to underscore latent ideologies that serve to
naturalise, neutralise, and maintain unequal power relations. Applied per-
formance is implicitly concerned with engaging groups to co-produce rep-
resentations of their context; it is therefore necessary to reflect how such
projects co-create discourses and to consider the effect of the linguistic
frames practitioners construct on participants. The critical methodologies
of this project therefore focus on neoliberal labour systems and state wel-
fare through a materially informed and semiotic analysis of policy docu-
ments, performance practices, and media representations, in order to
understand how various elements function together to construct identities
of unemployed individuals.
Chapter 2 explores shifting agendas in arts funding and engages with
growing debates around potentially exploitative and exclusionary working
conditions in the arts sector. I analyse public service policies and strategic
arts funding in order to map out the marketisation of state services over
the past decade and identify the arts sector’s increasing investment in cul-
tural commissioning. In particular, I explore how arts organisations have
26 S. BARTLEY

engaged with both state-funded welfare-to-work schemes and a renewed

government emphasis on apprenticeships since 2010. I focus on two
nationally funded arts-based employability projects, the Creative
Employment Programme (2013–15) and Talent Match (2014–). Through
examining the potential instrumentalisation and linguistic co-optation of
arts practice in the service of employability agendas, I consider how the
economic vocabularies of state-sanctioned discourse can effectively con-
taminate ideologies of community which may exist in socially engaged
performance. However, I also highlight the desire across arts organisa-
tions to make positive interventions in employment practices including
rejecting the monetisation of learners, cultivating community practice,
and encouraging collaborative working.
Chapter 3 tracks contested notions of community in political rhetoric
and models of social welfare through an analysis of increased individual-
ism, eroding networks of dependency, and moments of collective action. I
argue that shifts in discourse and policy impact on community arts practice
and thus provoke a need to reconsider how community is politicised, pre-
sented, and encountered within such projects. Underpinned by Lauren
Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, the chapter considers how the dis-
courses of individual transformation and empowerment, which operate
within some community performance, might render participants at fault
for their failure to correctly carry out their function within a post-Fordist
capitalist society.95 I explore two performances—Cardboard Citizens’
Benefit (2015) and Brighton People’s Theatre’s Tighten Our Belts
(2016)—to argue that the strategies and accompanying performance
vocabularies deployed in these productions interpolated different under-
standings of responsibility and community in relation to the unemployed
figure. This chapter draws on emerging scholarship addressing care in per-
formance and stresses the importance of reflecting on how formal
approaches to community practice foster networks of dependency and col-
lective accountability in performance.96 Further, I undertake a perfor-
mance analysis of policy that identifies how certain policy agendas might
be enacted onstage and also where we might usefully examine perfor-
mance practices alongside policy documents in order to see where these
two fields conflate and conflict.
Chapter 4 focuses on The Bite Back Movement’s A Dangerous Figure
(2013), the only visual arts project examined in the book, to explore how
artistic representations of unemployment utilise tactics of visibility and
invisibility in order for participants to negotiate policy, social
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 27

constructions of shame, and a context of civil unrest. Exploring the hyper-

visibility of young claimants—particularly young Black people and people
of colour—after the economic collapse of 2008 and the England Riots of
2011, this chapter identifies the complexities attached to appearing unem-
ployed. I engage with the construction of threat in relation to images of
youth, race, and the ‘underclass’, both highlighting the demonisation of
these groups and utilising that demonisation as an affective strategy to
activate change. My discussion is rooted in queer and feminist articula-
tions of navigating violent arenas of representation, drawing on José
Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification, Peggy Phelan’s nuancing of
visibility, alongside an interrogation of Jacques Rancière’s ‘distribution of
the sensible’.97 By holding Rancière, Phelan, and Muñoz together, I tease
out the complexities of, and paradoxes within, visibility and invisibility in
arts practice with marginalised or stigmatised communities.
In Chap. 5, I examine how the welfare system is underpinned by the
concept of biopolitics—the governance of life processes and populations—
in order to expose the acute contention between the living body of the
unemployed individual and the legal status of the benefit claimant.
Drawing on two examples, Tangled Feet’s One Million (2013) and Helix
Arts’ MindFULL (2013), I propose that applied performance deploys
bodily strategies that disrupt the construction of the unemployed in politi-
cal rhetoric and unsettle rigid definitions of labour in neoliberal work
regimes. In particular, I consider three different intersections of produc-
tivity, the body, and labour: (1) the radical potential of reanimating unem-
ployed bodies as productive in performance, (2) the problematic
valorisation of labour in participatory arts practice, and (3) how depictions
of unproductive bodies that reject, and are rejected by, reductive state
definitions of labour might present new models of resistance in arts prac-
tice. Although participatory performance risks unquestioningly valorising
labour, a self-reflexive approach to performing labour is uniquely posi-
tioned to critique it through the powerful aesthetic and symbolic tools it
accesses.
Chapter 6 recognises that representations of, and encounters with,
unemployment remain overtly gendered. I examine Spent (2016) and
Joanne (2016) by Clean Break Theatre Company, alongside the work of
Woman and Theatre, to reflect on key issues in feminist performance
examining austerity, work, and welfare. I draw on Silvia Federici’s writing
on social reproduction to read representations of women’s unemployment
onstage alongside understandings of labour beyond waged work. In
28 S. BARTLEY

tracking the remuneration of participants, I highlight economies of par-

ticipation and document developing strategies to navigate state welfare
systems and pay participants while not causing disruption to people’s ben-
efits. I utilise this specific context to ask: Does applied performance as a
discipline echo or disrupt the value systems attributed to waged labour
and unwaged acts of care or reproduction? This chapter asserts applied
performance’s capacity to both perform acts of care and, as a discipline,
embody a care-­full practice which unsettles traditional forms of exchange
but also locates applied performance itself as a precariously placed practice.
By looking at applied and socially committed performances of unem-
ployment, Performing Welfare examines economies of participation and
reveals how such projects might reconstitute notions of work and non-­
work. It reflects on the material realities of labour and participation among
exploited groups under later capitalism and within applied performance.
Further, given my particular focus on welfare reform, this research under-
scores the relationship between government policy and arts practice,
where the two coalesce and conflict and how both participants and artists
are inflected by this relationship. Finally, in engaging with unemployed
individuals, it offers an urgent perspective on practices of visibility and
invisibility being deployed in socially committed performance practices
with marginalised subjects.

Notes
1. But I’m Here for Mental Health notably preceded Ken Loach’s much her-
alded 2016 film drama I, Daniel Blake that also represented the disability
benefits process in the same area of Tyneside.
2. MindFULL participant interview with the author, Gateshead, 11
August 2015.
3. Office for National Statistics, ‘UK Labour Market Statistics: Dec 2011’,
WebArchive, December 2011, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.
uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-
market-statistics/december-2011/statistical-bulletin.html (accessed 10
March 2017); Office for National Statistics, ‘UK Labour Market:
Jan 2018’, ONS, January 2018, https://www.ons.gov.uk/employ-
mentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/
bulletins/uklabourmarket/january2018#unemployment (accessed 2
February 2018).
4. Philip Alston, ‘Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland’, United Nations Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 29

Rights, United Nations General Assembly, 23 April 2019, https://undocs.

org/A/HRC/41/39/Add.1 (accessed 22 May 2019).
5. Michel Faber, ‘Poverty in Britain: Parasites and Piety’, Guardian, 8
October 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/
oct/08/deserving-poor-cameron-speech-victorians (accessed 10
May 2017).
6. The programme of austerity currently in place in the UK is a group of
economic policies that aim to tackle the budget deficit through successive
cuts to public spending and tax benefits, reduction in social security, redun-
dancies across public services, and raises in taxes.
7. David Finch, ‘Universal Challenge: Making a Success of Universal Credit’,
Resolution Foundation, May 2016, p. 7.
8. The Trussell Trust, ‘End of Year Stats’, The Trussell Trust, https://www.
trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/end-year-stats/ (accessed 20
May 2019).
9. Department for Communities and Local Government, ‘Statutory
Homelessness, January to March 2016, and Homelessness Prevention and
Relief 2015/16: England’, 30 June 2016, https://www.gov.uk/govern-
ment/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/533099/
Statutory_Homelessness_and_Prevention_and_Relief_Statistical_Release_
January_to_March_2016.pdf (accessed 1 May 2017). Between 2001 and
2009, the average annual figure stood at 675,000.
10. Christina Beatty, Mike Foden, Lindsey McCarthy, and Kesia Reeve,
‘Benefit Sanctions and Homelessness: A Scoping Report’, Centre for
Regional, Economic, and Social Research in Collaboration with Crisis,
March 2015, http://socialwelfare.bl.uk/subject-areas/services-activity/
poverty-benefits/crisis/1723562015_SanctionsReport_FINAL.pdf
(accessed 1 May 2017).
11. Sally Mackey, ‘Applied Theatre and Practice as Research: Polyphonic
Conversations’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied
Theatre and Performance 21, no. 4 (2016): 478–491 (483).
12. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben
Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 784.
13. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Marxism, Feminism, Antiwork Politics
and Post Work Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011), 43.
14. Ibid., 59.
15. Ibid., 51.
16. Ibid., 11.
17. The Labour Force Survey was introduced when Britain became part of the
European Community in 1972 and has been gathering comprehensive
data on labour market changes ever since. The terms of the Labour Force
30 S. BARTLEY

Survey are internationally agreed and contribute to the International

Labour Organization’s data collection.
18. Office for National Statistics, ‘Unemployment’, ONS, https://www.ons.
gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment
(accessed 13 June 2015).
19. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability:
Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (University of
Michigan Press, 2015).
20. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2013), 40.
21. Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 4.
22. Ibid., 83.
23. Ibid., 15.
24. Theron Schmidt, ‘Troublesome Professionals: On the Speculative Reality
of Theatrical Labour’, Performance Research 18, no. 2 (2013): 15–26.
25. Ibid., p. 22.
26. Adam Alston, ‘Performing Labour in Look Left Look Right’s Above and
Beyond’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and
Performance 20, no. 1 (2015): 50–61 (50).
27. Ibid., 60.
28. Tony Blair, Labour Party Annual Conference, Brighton, 30 September 1997.
29. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of
Work in the New Capitalism (London: W.W. Norton, 1998).
30. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New
York and London: Routledge, 2013), 6.
31. Ibid., 45.
32. Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4.
33. Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. by Aileen
Derieg (London: Verso, 2015), 2.
34. Ibid., 1.
35. Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, in contrast with a disciplin-
ary approach to sovereign power, is concerned with the management of
populations through a range of less invasive strategies and insidiously
asserts control in collaboration with the actions of the self-governing
citizens.
36. Alston, 15.
37. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
(London and New York: Verso, 2004).
38. Ibid., 146.
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 31

39. Judith Butler, ‘Foreword’, in Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government

of the Precarious, trans. by Aileen Derieg (London: Verso, 2015), x.
40. Lorey, 109.
41. Judith Butler in ‘Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant,
Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović’,
TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 163–177 (168).
42. ‘Introduction: Situating Precarity Between the Body and the Commons’,
Women and Performance, Special Issue, ‘Precarious Situations: Race,
Gender and Globality’ 23, no. 2 (2013): 157–161 (158).
43. Ibid.
44. Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider, ‘Introduction’, Precarity and
Performance Special Issue, TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 6.
45. Jenny Hughes, ‘A Pre-History of Applied Theatre: Work, House, Perform’,
in Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. by Jenny Hughes and Helen
Nicholson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 41.
46. Ibid.
47. William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (The Beveridge
Report) (London, 1942).
48. HM Government, ‘National Insurance Act 1946’, Legislation.gov.uk,
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1965/49/schedule/1/cross-
heading/the-national-insurance-act-1946 (accessed 12 October 2014).
49. For more information, see Jameel Hampton, Disability and the Welfare
State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy (Bristol: Polity Press,
2016). Additionally, I explore the specific relationship between women,
work, and welfare policy in Chap. 6.
50. HM Government, ‘National Assistance Act 1948’, Legislation.gov.uk,
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/11-12/29/contents
(accessed 12 October 2014).
51. From its implementation, Conservative and Labour parties adopted differ-
ing views on the provision, and indeed, members from within each party
regularly clashed on policies related to the welfare contract. For further
information, see Robert Page, Revisiting the Welfare State (Berkshire:
Open University Press, 2007), 54–56.
52. Jim Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 55.
53. Ibid.
54. Particularly, see Alison Jeffers, ‘The Community Arts Movement
1968–1986’, in Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art: The British
Community Arts Movement, ed. by Alison Jeffers and Gerri Moriarty,
35–63 (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2017).
55. Ibid.
56. David Price, The Office of Hope (London: Policy Studies Institute, 2000),
236–257.
32 S. BARTLEY

57. HM Government, Social Security Act 1989, Legislation.gov.uk, http://

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/24/contents (accessed 12
June 2015).
58. John Myerscough, The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain
(London: Policy Studies Institute, 1988).
59. Reeves, 8.
60. John van Reenen, ‘No More Skivvy Schemes? Active Labour Market
Policies and The British New Deal for the Young Unemployed in Context’,
The Institute for Fiscal Studies, 5 May 2001, https://www.ifs.org.uk/
wps/wp0109.pdf (accessed 10 October 2014).
61. HM Government, The Welfare Reform Act 2009, Department for Work
and Pensions, 2009, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/24/
contents (accessed 10 October 2014).
62. Labour Party Manifesto 1997, ‘New Labour Because Britain Deserves
Better’, http://labourmanifesto.com/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.
shtml (accessed 12 May 2016).
63. There were a number of reports seeking to examine this fertile new area;
see Charles Landry, ‘The Social Impact of the Arts’ (Stroud: Comedia,
1993); Susan Galloway, ‘Changing Lives—The Social Impact of the Arts’
(Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 1995); Charles Landry and François
Matarasso, The Art of Regeneration: Urban Renewal Through Cultural
Activity (London: Social Policy Summary 8, March 1996); François
Matarasso, Defining Values: Evaluating Arts Programmes, Social Impact of
the Arts Working Paper 1, (Stroud: Comedia, 1996).
64. Social Exclusion Unit, ‘Bringing Britain Together: A National Strategy for
Neighbourhood Renewal’, Cabinet Office, January 2001, http://dera.
ioe.ac.uk/9947/1/National_strategy_for_neighbourhood_renewal_-_
Policy_Action_Team_audit.pdf (accessed 12 May 2016).
65. François Matarasso, Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation
in the Arts (Stroud: Comedia, 1997), vi.
66. Matarasso, Use or Ornament?, 1.
67. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ‘Policy Action Team 10: Report
to the Social Exclusion Unit—Arts and Sport’ (London: DCMS, 1999).
68. Alan Kay, ‘Art and Community Development: The Role the Arts Have in
Regenerating Communities’, Community Development Journal 35, no. 4
(2000): 414–424.
69. Creative Industries was defined by the Department for Culture, Media and
Sport (DCMS) in 2001 as ‘those industries which have their origin in indi-
vidual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and
job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual prop-
erty’. ‘Creative Industries: A Mapping Document’, Department for
Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS: London, 2001), 4.
 1 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING WELFARE 33

70. ‘Your Claimant Commitment’, Department for Work and Pensions, 11

April 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/universal-
credit-and-your-claimant-commitment-quick-guide/universal-credit-and-
your-claimant-commitment (accessed 23 May 2016).
71. Andrew Hood and Agnes Norris Keiller, ‘A Survey of the UK Benefit
System’, Institute for Fiscal Studies, November 2016, https://www.ifs.
org.uk/bns/bn13.pdf (accessed 15 December 2016).
72. There is currently a staged roll out of Universal Benefit across the UK. It
will eventually combine Jobseeker’s Allowance, income-related employ-
ment and support allowance, income support, working tax credit, child tax
credit, and housing benefit.
73. Rajeev Syal and Rowena Mason, ‘Labour Says Universal Credit Will Take
495 Years to Roll Out as Costs Rise £3bn’, Guardian, 25 June 2015,
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/25/labour-says-uni-
versal-credit-will-take-495-years-to-roll-out-as-costs-rise-3bn (accessed 12
April 2016).
74. Finch, ‘Universal Challenge: Making a Success of Universal Credit’, 7.
75. Ibid.
76. Frank Field, ‘Universal Credit Rollout: Inquiry Re-Launched’, 21 February
2017, https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-
z/commons-select/work-and-pensions-committee/news-parlia-
ment-2015/universal-credit-re-launch-16-17/ (accessed 23 March 2017).
77. ‘Work Programme: Background and Statistics’, Briefing Paper, Number
6340, 21 March 2016, House of Commons Library, file:///C:/Users/
lew582/Downloads/SN06340.pdf (20 April 2017).
78. The government is preparing to close the programme in 2017, which will
be replaced by a new Work and Health Programme targeting ‘harder-to-­
reach’ clients.
79. Maria Miller, ‘Testing Times: Fighting Culture’s Corner in an Age of
Austerity’, 24 April 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/
testing-times-fighting-cultures-corner-in-an-age-of-austerity (accessed 4
November 2014).
80. ‘The Contribution of the Arts and Culture to the National Economy’,
Centre for Economic Business Research (London: CEBR, 2013).
81. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, ‘DCMS Sectors Economic
Estimates 2017: Employment’, gov.uk, 18 July 2018, https://www.gov.
uk/government/statistics/dcms-sectors-economic-estimates-2017-em-
ployment (accessed 30 March 2019).
82. Office for National Statistics, ‘Labour Market Statistics, November 2011’,
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://
www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/novem-
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Ida Aalbergista voi liioittelematta sanoa, että hän valloitti
Tukholman, ja näin on kaikilta tahoilta tunnustettukin. Kun
jälkeenpäin ajattelee noita unohtumattomia iltoja, joita hänen
taiteensa on meille lahjoittanut, tuntuu verraten vähän
mielenkiintoiselta toistaa sitä, että hän on onnistunut. Kysymys, joka
meitä liikuttaa, ei ole enää questio an — puhuakseni »Välskärin
kertomuksien» miehekkään kapteenin Larssonin tapaan — vaan
pikemminkin questio quo modo. Taikka toisin sanoen — mikä olikaan
Ida Aalbergin taiteessa se kohottava voima, joka ilmeni niissä
draamallisissa näytännöissä, jotka alkoivat syyskuun 1:nä päivänä
Vaasa-teatterissa ja loppuivat 10:nä kuninkaallisessa oopperassa.

Ettei se ollut yhteisnäyttely, itsensä näytäntöjen

kokonaisvaikutelma, on jo kerta toisensa perästä — ja täydellä syyllä
— tullut sanotuksi. Rouva Aalberg on tehnyt n.s. tähtikiertueen
saadakseen oman voimakkaan taiteensa tunnetuksi, ohjelmistossa
oli melkeinpä yksinomaan loisto-osia, ja pääasiallisesti herra
Molanderin ohjausta saatiin kiittää siitä, ettei kokonaisvaikutelma
tullut vieläkin huonommaksi kuin miksi se todellisuudessa tuli. Sillä
epäsointu kuuluisan vieraan ja hänen ympäristönsä välillä oli
todellakin suuri, vaikka muitakin osia toisinaan saatettiin suorittaa
ansiokkaasti, ja kappaleiden valinta osoitti sekin, että oli koeteltu
hakea sellaisia, joissa naisellinen pääosa hallitsi muiden
kustannuksella.

Tahdon heti huomauttaa, että täydellisesti yhdyn siihen

käsitykseen, jonka mukaan nykyaikana vallassaoleva
tähtinäytteleminen, joka antaa yhdelle taiteilijalle tilaisuuden —
kaikesta muusta välittämättä — tehostaa omaa persoonaansa,
vaikuttaa suuressa määrin vahingollisesti koko draamallisen taiteen
ymmärtämiseen. Yleisö tulee senvuoksi siihen käsitykseen, että
näytteleminen, suoritus, on pääasia, kirjallinen tuote sivuasia.
Tähtikiertue sekoittaa yhä enemmän ennestäänkin sekavia käsitteitä
siitä, mitä mystillinen nimitys »suuri taide» sisältää, ja sen johdosta
meidän teatterinjohtajamme tunnustavat yhä ehdottomammin
totuutta, että jos vain on käytettävissä suuri, ensi luokan näyttelijä,
yleisö sulattaa kaikki puutteet sekä ohjelmistossa että
yhteisnäyttelyssä.

Toiselta puolelta on tunnustettava, että, jos yleensä jokin

ajankohta on suopea Ida Aalbergin tapaiselle taiteilijalle ja hänen
voitolliselle esiintymiselleen, niin juuri nykyinen, jolloin
pääkaupungillamme ei ole ainoatakaan todellista tragédienneä.
Antaa ilmaus suurille intohimoille, täyttää salonki intohimon
myrskyllä, virralla ja hulluudella, joka saa jokaisen sydämen
väräjämään kauhusta ihmisluonnon mahdollisuuksien vuoksi, kuvata
suuresti intohimoa ja intohimon valtaa — kaikki tuo on meidän
oloissamme niin tavatonta, että se on vaikuttanut mieliin kuin
puhdistava rajuilma oman teatterimme banaalisuudessa ja on, kuten
usein ennenkin, pystynyt näyttämään, että yleisössä — kaiken
pinnallisen tähtipalvonnan ohellakin, johon jo aikaisemmin on viitattu
— on toinen ja syvempikin tarve, joka on ilmennyt
suosionosoituksissa Ida Aalbergille. Juuri tuon tarpeen kieltävät ne,
jotka uskovat, että yleisö tahtoo vain nauraa.

Ensimmäisenä vetovoimana on ollut Ida Aalbergin omituinen

persoonallisuus ja taide, jossa tämä persoonallisuus ilmenee ja jolla
se hurmaa. Sillä Ida Aalbergia ei tarvitse nähdä monta kertaa,
ennenkuin huomaa, että hänen persoonallisuuttaan ja taidettaan
yhdistävät vahvat siteet.
 Ida Aalbergin taide on kehittynyt aina taituruuteen asti. Mutta ei se
ole estänyt minua usein jäämästä kylmäksi. Voi tehdä paljon
huomautuksia, vaikkapa olisi nähnyt minkä tahansa niistä
suorituksista, joita Tukholman yleisölle on tarjottu. Nämä
huomautukset voidaan yleensä sisällyttää yhteen ainoaan
väitteeseen, joka olisi se, että hänellä sekä liikkeissään että
puheessaan on taipumusta poosiin, teennäiseen asenteeseen, joka
omituisella tavalla ehkäisee vaikutuksen kokonaiselta sarjalta
mestarillisesti esitettyjä sielunliikkeitä. Plastiikassa huomaa tämän
parhaiten hänen komeilevasta tavastaan, joka vetoaa
näyttelijätaiteen hienoimpiinkin hienouksiin, ottaa asentoja ja asemia,
jotka eivät aina sovi tilanteeseen, ja puheessa tämän taipumuksen
huomaa näyttelijättären pyrkimyksestä toisinaan alleviivata mitä
jokapäiväisimpiä repliikkejä tavalla, joka on teatraalinen ja jonka
pelastaa vaikuttamasta piinalliselta vain hänen voimakkaasti tehoava
persoonallisuutensa. Tarvitsee muistuttaa vain kohtausta
»Kamelianaisen» toisessa näytöksessä, jossa hän keskustellessaan
kreivin kanssa saa kiivaan kirjeen Armandilta. Rouva Aalberg antaa
kirjeen pudota lattialle, palvelustyttö ottaa sen ja kysyy: »Tuleeko
vastausta?» Ja tähän kysymykseen Marguerite vastaa: »Ei, ei tule
vastausta» Jos on kuullut rouva Aalbergin lausuvan nämä
yksinkertaiset sanat voimakkain painotuksin ja laahustavin
korostuksin, on tuskin voinut säästyä vaikutelmalta, että luonnoton
vuoropuhelu johtuu mitä helpoimmin kiihkeästä halusta saada aikaan
efektiä. Samanlaisena esimerkkinä voisi käyttää äkillisiä repliikkejä
kauniista ilmasta, jotka keskeyttävät saman näytöksen
loppukohtauksen Margueriten ja Armandin välillä. Niin, jos tarkkaan
tutkisi Ida Aalbergin esitystä kaikissa niissä osissa, jotka tämän
vierailun aikana olemme nähneet, löytäisi monta kohtaa, joihin
nähden tuntisi kiusausta käyttää vanhaa yleistä sanontatapaa »liian
paljosta ja liian vähästä». Sillä Akilleskantäpää rouva Aalbergin
taiteessa lienee siinä, että hän verraten usein haluaa antaa liian
paljon, ja tässä suhteessa on häneen verrattava August Lindberg,
joka häntä näyttelemistä valtaan muutenkin varsin usein muistuttaa
— sekä pahassa että hyvässä.

Mutta semmoisissa luomissa kuin Ida Aalberg meille antoi, voi

vain ohimennen viipyä virheissä. Ne kyllä havaitaan ja ne kyllä
muistetaankin. Mutta äärettömän paljon suuremmalla intensiteetillä
muistetaan rikkautta ja voimaa taiteessa, joka näyttää hallitsevan
koko asteikkoa suuresta taituruudesta suureen tunteeseen saakka.
Hänen persoonallisuutensa vaikuttaa kaikissakin osissa jollakin
tavoin hermostuneelta, ärsytetyltä, kiihkoutuneelta. Rauha, joka
johtuu näyttelijätaiteen kaikkien keinojen täydellisestä
hallitsemisesta, vallitsee suurissa kohtauksissa, joissa taiteilija on
koonnut koko sielunvoimansa saavuttaakseen vaikutelman, joka
panee vavahtamaan, tai vallatakseen katsojan kokonaan. Mutta
kuumeinen, mittaamaton intohimo näyttää olevan päämaali, johon
tämä taide pyrkii, ja juuri tämän esittämisessä Ida Aalbergin taide
saavuttaa huippukohtansa.

Niistä harvoista osista, jotka olemme täällä nähneet, voi löytää

kaksi vastakkaista puolta: mitä suurimman taituruuden ja vakavan
korkean taiteen, joka melkein vaikuttaa vaikenevan hiljaisuuden
syvällä voimalla. Hänen taituruutensa on äärimmilleen kehittynyt,
joten tuntuu luonnolliselta, että semmoinenkin osa kuin Scriben
vanha pöyhkeilynumero, Adrienne Lecouvreur, voi vetää tätä
taiteilijaa puoleensa. Kuten tunnettua, kuolee Adrienne kukkavihosta
saamastaan myrkystä, erään kilpailijansa myrkyttämänä, ja hänen
kuolinkamppailunsa, ainakin semmoisena kuin ranskalainen kirjailija
on sen kuvannut, muodostuu voimanäytteeksi jokaiselle esittäjälle.
Se muodostuu siksi varsinkin senvuoksi, että koko tuo kohtaus on
uskomattoman rajamailla.

Ida Aalberg esitti tämän kohtauksen semmoisella

hämmästyttävällä taituruudella, että mieleen johtui pianovirtuosi, joka
saattaa yleisön kuumeeseen vain hirvittävän sorminäppäryytensä
valtavalla voimalla. Oli hetkiä, jolloin hänen fyysillinen tuskansa
vaikutti vain kauhistavasti ja masentavasti jokaiseen katsojaan, ja
hän esitti sen ohessa kokonaisen sarjan sielunliikkeitä ja
mielenliikutuksia, jotka vain hänen varma taiteensa ja itse
persoonallisuuteen taipuisa energia saivat pysymään koossa. Kun
hänen »Kamelianaisen» kolmannessa näytöksessä piti kuvata
suurta tuskaa, joka kirjailijan esityksessä on saanut matalan ja
nolostuttavan yleispätevän ilmauksen, niin tässäkin Ida Aalbergin
taide vangitsi kuulijakunnan ja sai sen uskomaan, että tuon
komedian ylen teennäisten ajatelmien takana olisi ollut inhimillistä
intohimoa, komedian, jonka henkilöt ovat tyyppejä. Ja kun »Kirsti
Flemingin» toisessa näytöksessä näimme hyljätyn naisen epätoivon
ja tuskan, ilmaisi hän tuon kohtauksen näyttelemisessä hurjuutta ja
tehoa, jolla oli käytettävissään kaikki keinot ja joka ei hetkeksikään
lakannut tekemästä tarkoitettua vaikutusta.

Kaikki nuo voimakohtaukset epäilemättä ovat enemmän kuin

mikään muu kyenneet varmistuttamaan sitä triumfia, joka Ida
Aalbergilla oli kaikkien esiintymisiensä jälkeen suuren yleisön
silmissä. Mutta niin loistava kuin taiteilija tuommoisina hetkinä olikin,
oli hänellä kuitenkin kohtia, joissa hän pääsi vieläkin pitemmälle.
Hänen näyttelemisessään yleensä oli kummallisesti sekaantuneina
taituruus ja aito, vaikuttava taide, ja olisi sääli, jos muisto edellisestä
himmentäisi muiston jälkimmäisestä. Omasta puolestani uskon, että
koko »Kirsti Flemingin»[25] paljon ihailtu toinen näytös ei kuitenkaan
vastaa niitä yksinkertaisia, suuria vuorosanoja, joissa hän saman
kappaleen kolmannessa näytöksessä riemuitsee tietoisuudesta, että
on tulemassa äidiksi rakastettunsa lapselle. Voitollinen riemu, joka
tuona hetkenä säteilee vuorosanasta, ilmeistä ja liikkeestä, oli itse
asiassa taiteilijan triumfi. Ja semmoiset hetket merkitsevät enemmän
kuin pisimmällekään menevä teknillinen taito. Ne näet saattavat
huomaamaan sisäisen taiteilijavoiman, jonka puuttuessa kaikki
taituruus on tyhjää ja merkityksetöntä.

»Verrattakoon tätä silmälläpitäen »Kamelianaisen» viidettä

näytöstä aikaisemmin puheenaolleeseen kuolinkohtaukseen
»Adrienne Lecouvreurissä». Harvoin olemme täällä nähneet
näyttämöluomaa, jota olisi niin jalosti sekä ajateltu että suoritettu
kuin tuo vaikuttava näytös, jossa taiteilija sai melodraamasta
syntymään draamallisen todellisuuden. Ilonpurkaus rakastettua
nähdessä vaikutti niin aito tunteelta juuri siksi, että silloin heti
ymmärsi, kuinka hauras tuo onni itse asiassa oli, ja hänen
kuolemallaan, joka lopuksi kävi niin hiljaiseksi, oli koko semmoisen
suuruuden ja rauhan leima, jonka hajoamisen, lopun
välttämättömyys tuo mukanaan.

Mutta mikään Ida Aalbergin luomista ei näyttänyt minusta niin

läpeensä mielenkiintoiselta ja täydelliseltä kuin se osa, jossa hän
saavutti vähimmän tunnustusta, nimittäin Thérèse Raquin.
Ensimmäisen näytöksen rakkauskohtauksessa oli teatterin
sivumakua. Mutta muuten tuo suoritus kuului semmoisiin
näyttämöesityksiin, joissa luulee tulleensa niiden rajojen
ulkopuolelle, jotka näyttämölavalla yleensä ehkäisevät
mahdollisuuksia.
 Zolan draama on, kuten tunnettua, psykologinen kauhudraama.
Se on kuvattu suurin piirtein, ja Thérèse Raquin on keskuksena
tuossa kotitragediassa, johon mahtuu niin ihmeellinen sekoitus
suuruutta ja jokapäiväisyyttä. Tuo draama on realistinen, jos haluaa
väittää, että realistinen ja hirvittävä ovat samaa. Mutta se voi tulla
aika lailla idealistiseksikin, jos ottaa huomioon, että murha tässä
esittää niin suunnattoman suurta osaa kuin tuskin koskaan
todellisessa elämässä.

Thérèse Raquin on tässä draamassa ainoa rikollinen luonne,

joskaan ei ainoa rikollinen. Tämä on Ida Aalbergin käsityksen
lähtökohta, ja siksi hän jo alusta alkaen alleviivaa hänen
erikoisasemaansa koko ympäristössä. Se on jokaiselle
näyttelijättärelle sanomattoman vaikea tehtävä. Kolmen näytöksen
aikana näet pitää esittää eri muodoissa yhtä ainoata aihetta:
omantunnon tuskaa. Ihailtavalla kyvyllään taiteilija tässä kokeessa
onnistui. Näytöksestä näytökseen hän saa kasvamaan kirjailijan
tarkoittaman sanomattoman kauhun rikosta kohtaan, ja neljännestä
näytöksestä tulee kamalan brutaliteettinsa vuoksi oikea triumfi. Siinä
tarvitaan hienoa taidetta, ennenkuin voi saavuttaa ymmärtämystä, ja
suurta taidetta, ennenkuin voi saavuttaa voiton. Ja että Ida Aalberg
onnistui siinä määrin kuin näimme hänen onnistuvan, osoittaa hänen
itsensähillitsemiskykyään. Tässä on mahdotonta muistella
yksityiskohtia, sillä jokainen yksityiskohta on muistamisen arvoinen.
Kokonaisuus vaikutti valtavasti. Ja verrattuna semmoiseen
tyyliteltyyn tehtävään kuin Kirsti Flemingin tämän osan suoritus
todistaa Ida Aalbergin taiteen laajaa alaa.

Hänen vierailunäytäntönsä Tukholmassa ovat antaneet meille

kuvan omituisesta taiteilijaluonteesta, ja jo aikaisemmin on tullut
sanotuksi, että hän ei halveksi mitään taiteen keinoa, vaan voi
käyttää semmoistakin, mikä sinänsä on banaalia. Mutta hänen
persoonallisuutensa on yhtä täynnä temperamenttia, yhtä voimakas
ja yhtä mielenkiintoinen kuin hänen taiteensa on ihailtavaa. Hänen
suuruutensa on siinä tarmossa, jolla hän tulkitsee sitä, mitä
Shakespeare antaa Hamletin sanoa »intohimon pyörteeksi». Ja hän
on niitä harvoja meidän päiviemme pohjoismaisista näyttelijättäristä,
joilla on — turvautumatta musiikin kansainväliseen kieleen — ollut
tarpeeksi tarmoa ja kykyä tehdäkseen itsensä tehoisaksi myöskin
oman äidinkielensä rajojen ulkopuolella.»

Gustaf af Geijerstamin tapaisen realistin mieltymys »Thérèse

Raquinia» kohtaan on helposti käsitettävissä. Ruotsalaiselle
kirjailijalle on arvostelijana kunniaksi, että hän saartoi näin suurella
ymmärtämyksellä puhua näyttämötähdestä, vaikka hän
periaatteessa oli tähtitaidetta vastaan.

*****

Skandinaavian kiertueen aikana kierteli Suomen ja ulkomaiden

lehdissä tietoja, että Ida Aalberg lähtisi Englantiin ja Amerikkaan
tehdäkseen taiteensa tunnetuiksi siellä. Todellisuudessa hän —
lepäiltyään ylenmääräisistä matkarasituksista Kristianian lähistöllä
parisen viikkoa — saapui lokakuun loppupuolella kotimaahan, mistä
jatkoi matkaa Pietariin.

Vielä näytäntökautena 1894—1895 Ida Aalberg esiintyi useita

kertoja vierailijana Suomalaisessa teatterissa. Hän näytteli eräitä
vanhoista loisto-osistaan, Reginaa, Kirstiä, Maria Stuartia, ja esiintyi
lisäksi uudessakin osassa Ritana Ibsenin »Pikku Eyolfissa».
Sanomalehdistä päättäen helsinkiläisen yleisön suhtautuminen
häneen oli yhtä lämmin ja innostunut kuin aina ennenkin: katsomo
täynnä ja kukkuraista kiitosta arvostelijain puolelta. Tällä kertaa — ja
se onkin ehkä ainoa kerta — Kaarlo Bergbom kuitenkin vain empien
ja tinkien pyysi Ida Aalbergin avustusta, ja vaikka hän toukokuussa
1895 ilmoittaa sisarelleen Turusta, että Ida Aalberg on siellä
annetussa »Maria Stuart» näytännössä ollut tavattoman hyvissä
voimissa ja vaikuttanut muihin näyttelijöihin oikein säkenöivästi, hän
tuskin lienee ollut aivan tyytyväinen tämän näytäntökauden
vierailuihin. Bergbomien kirjeenvaihdosta vuodelta 1896 näkee, että
he tekivät suuren erotuksen tämän ja edellisen vuoden välillä. Ida
Aalbergin vierailuista 1896 Emilie Bergbom kirjoitti:

»Ida Aalbergin vierailu oli hyvin onnistunut, se oli aivan toista kuin
viime vuonna, jolloin yleisö kohteli häntä kylmästi. Kaikki hänen
monet tuhmuutensa olivat silloin liian tuoreessa muistissa, mutta nyt
ne oli kutakuinkin unohdettu.» —

Kevätkaudella 1896 Ida Aalberg esiintyi Suomalaisessa teatterissa

kolmessa uudessa osassa: Lady Macbethina Shakespearen
»Macbethissa», Kleopatrana saman kirjailijan »Antonius ja
Kleopatra» draamassa ja Elisabethina Hermann Sudermannin
»Onnen sopukassa». Helsingin sen ajan arvovaltaisimman kriitikon
»Hufvudstadsbladetin» avustajan Werner Söderhjelmin arvosteluista
ei täysin löydä syytä Bergbomien suureen tyytyväisyyteen.
Arvostelija tosin sanoo, että näyttelijättären taide on paikoitellen ollut
erinomaisen vaikuttavaa, mutta Shakespearen draamojen
tulkitsemista käsitellessään hän tekee yksityiskohtaisia
huomautuksia Ida Aalbergin käsitystä vastaan.

Söderhjelmin näyttämökritiikki lähtee kirjalliselta pohjalta. Lady

Macbethin olisi Söderhjelmin mielestä pitänyt olla voimakkaampi,
vallanhimoisenpi ja julmempi kuin miksi Ida Aalberg hänet teki.
Varsinkin alkukohtauksissa näyttelijätär oli ollut liian lempeä ja liian
naisellinen. Kuningasmurha-kohtauksessa arvostelija myöntää Ida
Aalbergin loistavasti esittäneen pelon ja tyydytyksen välistä ristiriitaa
ja merkitsee, tosin silloinkin eräitä vastakkaisia huomautuksia
esittäen, että kappaleen loppupuolella näytteleminen kohosi
voimaltaan ja rohkeudeltaan näyttelijättären huippusaavutusten
veroiseksi.

Lady Macbeth on yhtä problemaattinen luonne kuin Shakespearen

muutkin suuret luomat, ja on mielenkiintoista havaita, että suuret
näyttelijättäret ovat hyvin erimielisiä osan tulkitsemisesta. Adelaide
Ristori on elämäkerrassaan kuvannut omaa luomaansa, ja hänen
kuvauksestaan näkee, että hän on käsittänyt tuon naisen
perusominaisuudeksi vallanahneuden ja kunnianhimon. Oman
käsityksensä tueksi Ristori vetoaa historiallisiin tietoihin siitä, miten
aikaisempi, englantilainen, näyttämösuuruus Mrs. Siddons oli
tulkinnut tuota luonnekuvaa. Ristorin luoma olisi, siltä tuntuu,
vastannut Söderhjelmin vaatimuksia. Mutta Ida Aalberg oli nähnyt
1880 Charlotte Wolterin aikoinaan niin suunnattoman suosion
saavuttaneen Lady Macbethin. Wolterin lähtökohtana oli rakastava
nainen, ylenmäärin miestään rakastava nainen, joka rakkautensa
luonnottoman intohimoisen hehkun vuoksi joutuu kauheiden
rikoksien tielle. Ida Aalberg on saattanut myöskin nähdä Ellen Terryn
Lady Macbethina — hänen häämatkansa aikoina Terry esitti tätä
osaa Lontoossa, ja Ida Aalbergin kirjeenvaihdosta selviää, että hän
näki Terryn ainakin jossain osassa — ja eräästä Terryn
muistelmakirjoituksesta näkyy, että hänen käsityksensä on ollut
lähellä Wolterin käsitystä tästä osasta. Terry kirjoittaa:

»Tässä lyhyessä osassa — lyhyessä sanainsa lukumäärään

nähden, mutta kuinka pitkiä näköaloja ja suuria mahdollisuuksia siitä
avautuukaan näyttelijättärelle! — ei ole yhtään riviä, joka ei osoittaisi,
että Macbethin kunnianhimon ja rikoksen »rakkahin osatoveri» on
nainen, nainen hermostuneessa voimassaan, nainen rakkaudessaan
ja, ennenkaikkea, nainen naisellisine ominetuntoineen.» —

Terry vetoaa hänkin Mrs. Siddonsiin. Hän kyllä tietää, että tämän
Lady Macbeth on ollut miehekäs ja lujatahtoinen ja
voimakasryhtinen, mutta nuo ominaisuudet johtuivat siitä, ettei
näyttelijätär, jolla oli kyömynenä, sysimusta tukka ja komentajan
käytös, voinut muuta olla. Terry vetoaa Siddonsin muistiinpanoihin,
joissa tuo näyttelijätär sanoo, että Lady Macbethin pitäisi olla
»kaunis, naisellinen, ehkäpä suorastaan hento ja hauras.» Tiedetään
myöskin, ettei Mrs. Siddons katsonut itseään oikein sopivaksi tuohen
osaan. —

»Macbeth» ei muodostunut suuren yleisön kappaleeksi, se on liian

synkkä tehotakseen siihen. Mutta Ida Aalbergin esiintyminen
Kleopatrana muodostui näytäntökauden 1895—1896 suurimmaksi
menestykseksi. Söderhjelm säilytti kuitenkin siihenkin nähden hyvin
kriitillisen asenteen. Kleopatrassa on kaksi naista, hän väitti:
majesteetti, »maailman päivä», kuten Antonius häntä nimittää,
rikkaan kulttuurin loistava tuote — ja toiselta puolen taas nainen,
keikaileva ja rahvaanomainen nainen, jolla voisi sanoa olevan
mustalaisverta suonissa. Arvostelija väittää Ida Aalbergin pystyneen
esittämään vain jälkimmäistä puolta Kleopatrassa — sitä kuitenkin
verrattoman vivahdusrikkaasti ja voimakkaasti —, mutta
Shakespearen kuvaamaa majesteettia ja kuningatarta Ida Aalberg ei
ollut voinut kuvata, ja Shakespearen suuri tyyli oli puuttunut
esitykseltä. Ja arvostelija väittää aivan toisin kuin esim. paria kolmea
vuotta aikaisemmin Juhani Aho ja aivan toisin kuin mitä Ida
Aalbergin taiteilija-olemuksesta yleensä on väitetty, että
näyttelijättären taiteen suunta viittaa niin ehdottomasti nykyaikaiseen
ohjelmistoon, ettei Shakespeare sovi hänen esitettäväkseen: olisi
parempi, että Ida Aalberg näyttelisi Sardoun Kleopatraa eikä
Shakespearen.

Mahdollisesti Ida Aalberg keväällä 1891 Pietarissa näki Dusen

Kleopatran — sitä ei kyllä huomaa hänen kirjeistään, mutta se on
todennäköistä, koska Duse silloin esitti osaa, ja ainakin jokin
pietarilainen arvostelija piti sitä italialaisen näyttelijättären parhaana
luomana — ja varmaa on, että Eleonora Dusenkaan Kleopatrassa ei
ollut sitä »suurta tyyliä» ja majesteettisuutta, jota kirjallisuudentuntija
Söderhjelm suomalaisen näyttelijättären esityksestä kaipasi. Dusen
hermotaide ei voinut esittää majesteetteja »suureen tyyliin»! Mutta
Ida Aalberg oli todennäköisesti 1896 tavallaan paljon modernimpi
kuin hän oli ollut aikaisemmin, ei ainoastaan Duse-näytäntöjen
vaikutuksesta, vaan myöskin senvuoksi, että hän Bergbomista
luovuttuaan oli kiertueilla esittänyt toisen modernin osan toisensa
jälkeen. »Thérèse Raquin», »Sylvi», »Noora», »Kamelianainen»
olivat viime vuosina olleet tehtäviä, joissa hän useimmin oli
esiintynyt. Ne painoivat luonnollisesti määrätyn leiman hänen
taiteelliseen suoritustapaansa, sillä lienee varmaa, että suuret osat
muodostavat tavallaan maneeria ja vaikuttavat näyttelijän
myöhempään tuotantoon.

»Onnen sopukka» kuului moderniin ohjelmistoon, ja Ida

Aalbergista Elisabethina tuossa kappaleessa Söderhjelm on
julkaissut lämpimästi kiittävän arvostelun. Suomenkielisten lehtien
arvostelut olivat kaikista kolmesta osasta niin kiittäviä kuin suinkin
osattiin kirjoittaa.

Kevätkaudella 1897 Ida Aalberg taas vieraili Suomalaisessa

teatterissa. Bergbomit olivat ihastuksissaan ja väittivät häntä
suuremmaksi kuin koskaan ennen. Hänen uusi luomansa, Magda
Sudermannin »Kodissa», sai mitä parhaan vastaanoton. Näytteeksi
tästä ote »Uuden Suomettaren» kritiikistä:

»Jännityksellä kai moni odotti eilistä iltaa. Rouva Ida Aalbergia ei

taas vähään aikaan oltu nähty ja viime aikoina on aina totuttu
jokaisena uutena kertana näkemään hänet hiukan toisen
luontoiseksi kehittyneenä aivan kuin vieläkin suurempaan
mestariuteen täysikelpoisena. Teatteriin meni sellaisella tunteella,
kuin jotain sellaista elettävää odottaissa, jota ei kovin monasti satu.
Eikä tämä jännitys ja odotus ollut aiheeton, vaan illan vaikutus sen
oikeutti. Näyttelijä sellainen kuin Ida Aalberg, hänestä voi sanoa, että
hän esittää tehtävänsä. Hän luo roolinsa uudestaan ja aivankuin elää
muutamassa tunnissa kokonaisen elämän iloineen ja suruineen. Niin
kävi eilenkin. Vaikkapa oli jo ennen nähnyt kappaleen tai sen
lukenut, niin entinen vaikutus oli kuin mitättömiin mennyt. Se Magda,
jonka Ida Aalbergissa näemme, oli kaiken aikaa pienimpiinkin
yksityiskohtiin saakka niin syvästi läpi-eletty, että se muodostui
entisestä riippumatta aivan itsenäiseksi taidehiomaksi, jonka
vaikutus oli vakaava ja vastustamaton. Ehdottomasti tulee tällaista
näyttelemistä seuratessaan ajatelleeksi, että tekijällä työssä on
pienempi osa kuin näyttelijällä.

Suureksi osaksi riippuu se myötätuntoisuus, mitä Magdan

edustamaa katsantokantaa kohtaan voi tuntea, siitä kuinka hän
tämän oikeutta puolustaa. Rouva Ida Aalberg tietysti jos kukaan on
omansa saamaan lausuttavaansa oikean painon, esiintymiseen
oikean värityksen. Kuin säkeninä singahtavat sanat hänen suustaan
ja terävästi iskeytyvät ne jokaiseen mieleen.
 Magda esiintyy »Kodissa» vasta toisessa näytöksessä. Mutta
kylläpä hän kuitenkin heti paikalla saa kuulijat valtaansa. Kun Magda
kolmannessa näytöksessä sitten kertoo kärsimyksistään,
taisteluistaan, joista kuitenkin vihdoin oli voittajana selviytynyt,
vaikkakin siveellisesti siipirikkona, — niin kostui salissa monen silmä.
Sydämen hehkuvinta tulta on Sudermann tässä saanut Magdan
sanat huokumaan. Mutta ainoastaan Magda sellainen kuin Ida
Aalberg, joka oman persoonansa parhaammuuden repliikkeihin
purkaa, saa sanoissaan kaiken sen esiin, mitä tämän
tuhlaajatyttären mielenpurkaukset eilen ilmaisivat.»

*****

1894 Ida Aalbergin taide oli valloittanut Tukholman. Jo seuraavana

vuonna häntä tahdottiin vierailemaan kuninkaalliseen Dramaattiseen
teatteriin, mutta sillä kertaa asia jäi sikseen. Vasta syksyllä 1896 hän
teki vierailumatkan Ruotsin pääkaupunkiin, mutta tällä kertaa hänellä
ei ollut erikoisempaa onnea. Hän esitti Elisabethia »Onnen
sopukassa», ja Tukholman lehdillä ei ollut mitään huomauttamista
itse näyttelemistä vastaan — ainoastaan murteellinen ruotsinkieli sai
lievän moitteen —, mutta Sudermannin kappale havaittiin
kiinnottomaksi ja vähäpätöiseksi. Gustaf Fredrikson, joka siihen
aikaan oli Dramaattisen teatterin johtajana, oli aikonut ottaa
ohjelmistoon Ida Aalbergin varalle joko Hedda Gablerin tai Nooran.
Ne tuumat kuitenkin raukesivat, ja Ida Aalbergin vierailu
Tukholmassa päättyi riitaan ja epäsopuun.

Tultuaan vapaaherratar Uexküll-Gyllenbandiksi Ida Aalberg oli

joutunut läheisiin tekemisiin muutamien pietarilaiseen aristokratiaan
kuuluvien henkilöiden kanssa. Kreivitär Prozor, joka kuului hänen
tuttavapiiriinsä, oli kirjoittanut »Vanda» nimisen draaman, ja Ida
Aalberg oli luvannut esittää sen Tukholmassa. Dramaattisen teatterin
johdolla ei aluksi tunnu olleen mitään sitä vastaan, että »Vanda»
otettaisiin ohjelmistoon. Myöhemmin kappale kuitenkin päätettiin
jättää esittämättä, ja Tukholmassa huhuiltiin, että niin tapahtui Ida
Aalbergin toivomuksesta, että hänen ja kreivitär Prozorin välit olivat
siitä syystä rikkoutuneet ja että hän oli muka menetellyt vilpillisesti
venäläistä kirjailijatarta kohtaan. Huhuissa ei tunnu olleen perää,
Gustaf Fredrikson ainakin nimenomaan torjuu ne kirjeessään Ida
Aalbergille ja toteaa, että »Vandan» jättäminen on johtunut
teatterinjohdon toimesta ja vierailun lyhyydestä.

Millaisen lopun tämä Tukholman matka sai, voi aavistaa eräästä

lähdön hetkellä laaditusta kirjekonseptista, jossa sanat on aiottu
Gustaf Fredriksonille:

»Herra Johtaja!

Minä en voi hyväksyä sitä tapaa, millä Te Dramaattisen teatterin

johtajana olette kohdellut minua. Saan senvuoksi ilmoittaa Teille,
että minä, jos »Odetten» [»Odetten» vuoksi oli »Vanda» päätetty
jättää pois, sittemmin ei kummankaan esittämisestä tullut mitään.]
esitystä lykätään, heti matkustan. Minun täytyy silloin jättää asiani
Venäjän ministerin ja jonkun ruotsalaisen asianajajan haltuun.
Kuitenkin pyydän Teitä heti järjestämään taloudellisen puolen.
Paitsi laskua niistä palkkioista, jotka saan näytäntöilloista, joina
olen esiintynyt, minun, sen pahempi, pitää lähettää Teille laskuja
useammista puvuista niihin kahteen kappaleeseen, joissa minun
sopimuksemme mukaan olisi tullut esiintyä.»
XVI.

UUSI KOULU.

Molemmissa avioliitoissaan Ida Aalberg yhdisti elämänkohtalonsa

lakimieheen. Juridisesta kouluutuksestaan huolimatta hänen
molemmat elämänkumppaninsa olivat kumpainenkin suuria
idealisteja. Alexander Uexküll-Gyllenband oli kuitenkin verrattomasti
suurempi idealisti kuin Lauri Kivekäs.

Lauri Kivekäs oli tavallaan ollut eetillinen filosofi hänkin — hän oli
omaksunut maailmankatsomuksen, jonka tunnussana oli
kansallisuusaate. Hänen filosofiansa lähti elävästä elämästä
semmoisenaan, ja sillä oli selvät, joskin rohkeat ja hyvin
käytännölliset päämäärät. Lauri Kivekäs oli tyypillinen suomalaisen
luonteen edustaja, raju, häikäilemätön, rohkea, kiihkeä, jos oli
kysymys taistelusta, mutta pehmeä kuin vaha, helposti ohjattava,
empivä, jos hänelle haasteltiin lemmen kieltä. Tälle miehelleen Ida
Aalberg puhui melkein aina rakkauden sanoja, ja heidän
avioliitossaan ei ollut syviä, ainakaan maailmankatsomukseen ja
luonteitten erilaisuuteen perustuvia ristiriitoja. Heidän ristiriitansa
olivat tavallisen todellisuuselämän ristiriitoja, niistä puuttui
teoreettinen pohja.
 Alexander Uexküll-Gyllenband oli ikivanhan saksalaisen suvun
jäsen. Hän tunsi itsensä germaaniksi, mutta hänen esi-isänsä olivat
lähes parisataa vuotta toimineet slaavilaisuuden päämaassa,
Venäjällä. Kansallisuusaate ei hänelle muodostunut miksikään
kipeäksi persoonalliseksi kysymykseksi, siihen nähden olivat jo esi-
isät saaneet tehdä ne kompromissinsa, joita yksityisen ihmisen
elämänonni edellyttää. Ida Aalbergin toinen mies, vapaaherra
Alexander Uexküll-Gyllenband, oli kaikilta taipumuksiltaan
kosmopoliitti. Hän katsoi elämää ja sen ilmiöitä yleisinhimilliseltä
näkökulmalta.

Eräässä Ida Aalbergin kuoleman jälkeen lähettämässään

kirjeessä, joka silloin oli tarkoitettu salaiseksi, mutta josta hän
kuitenkin otti itseään ja jälkimaailmaa varten tarkan jäljennöksen,
vapaaherra Uexküll-Gyllenband on käsitellyt Ida Aalbergin suhdetta
kumpaankin aviomieheensä. Niin jäävi kuin hän olikin antamaan
lausuntoa tuossa asiassa, ei voi kieltää, että hän on koettanut katsoa
sitä objektiivisesti. Tärkein kohta tuosta kirjeestä kuuluu:

»En ole milloinkaan tuntenut Lauri Kivekäs-vainajata. Tunnen

häntä vain siitä, mitä olen kuullut toisilta ja mitä vaimoni itse on
hänestä minulle kertonut. Näin on muodostunut minulle kuva
voimakkaasta, mutta yksinomaan politiikkaan taipuvaisesta ja
suuntautuneesta luonteesta, niin, vieläpä poliittis-agitatoorisesta
luonteesta. Mutta vaimoni on kertonut myöskin monista jaloista
piirteistä hänessä ja monista ritarillisista teoista, joita hän
Kivekkään puolelta sai kokea — — —

Lopulliseksi ja määrääväksi tosiasiaksi tästä kaikesta kuitenkin

jää, että vaimoni ei ensimmäisessä avioliitossaan ollut onnellinen ja
että Lauri Kivekäs tässä viisi vuotta kestäneessä avioliitossa jäi
hänelle vieraaksi.

Lauri Kivekäshän ei ollutkaan mikään taiteilija. Hän kuului

kokonaan siihen Teidän kansallisen elämänne ensimmäiseen
kehityskauteen, jolloin poliittiskansallinen näkökanta oli kaiken
muun yläpuolella. Hänellä ei ollut mitään mahdollisuutta käsittää
Ida Aalbergin oikeata ja syvintä olemusta, joka oli kauttaaltaan
taiteilijan. Taikka: silloin oli vielä liian varhaista, jotta tämä olisi
käsitetty. Teidän kulttuurinne ei ollut vielä tarpeeksi kypsä siihen,
mikä kuitenkin jo eli Ida Aalbergissa.

Siksi Lauri Kivekäs ei milloinkaan tullut todella läheiseen

henkiseen suhteeseen Ida Aalbergin kanssa; ei milloinkaan
sellaiseen suhteeseen kuin esim. Perander ja Edelfelt —
puhuakseni vain kuolleista — olivat häneen.» —

Vapaaherra Uexküll-Gyllenband epäilemättä oli oikeassa siinä,

että Lauri Kivekkäällä ei ollut vaimonsa taiteeseen mitään läheistä
suhdetta. Ja jos onnellisen avioliiton perusedellytykseksi katsotaan
yhteistä henkistä työtä, voitaneen suuriakaan liioittelematta sanoa,
että hänen, Alexander Uexküll-Gyllenbandin avioliitto Ida Aalbergin
kanssa on onnellisimpia, mitä historia tuntee.

Vapaaherra Uexküll-Gyllenband oli hyvin kasvatettu ja ritarillinen

mies. Ulkonaisesti hän oli niin vaatimaton kuin tuskin kukaan muu.
Suomen seurusteluoloihin tottuneesta hänen rakastettava
kohteliaisuutensa ja sydämellinen palvelevaisuutensa tuntui melkein
ainoalaatuiselta. Ida Aalbergin eläessä hänen hieno
vaatimattomuutensa oli niin suuri, että vain harvat tiesivät hänen
jotakin merkitsevän vaimonsa taiteilija-kutsumukselle. Edempää
katsoen hän näytti vain Ida Aalbergin nöyrältä palvelijalta, joka totteli
herrattarensa pienintäkin viittausta.

Varsin tuoreessa muistissa on, kuinka äärettömän hartaasti ja

innostuneesti vapaaherra Uexküll-Gyllenband Ida Aalbergin
kuoleman jälkeen palvoi vaimovainajansa muistoa. Hän perusti Ida
Aalberg-teatterin, johon yritykseen hän uhrasi varallisuutensa, hän
kirjoitti pitkiä, oudon dialektiseen tyyliin laadittuja
sanomalehtikirjoituksia, jossa koetti selittää Ida Aalbergin taidetta
kuvaillen sitä näyttämötaiteen ihanteeksi ja tulevaksi päämaaliksi, tai
saarnasi aikakauden taidekritiikin pintapuolisuutta ja
ymmärtämättömyyttä vastaan. Häntä ei ymmärretty, ja hänen
palvontansa muodostui taisteluksi ympäristöä ja oloja vastaan. Hän
sortui tuossa taistelussa. Jo ennen kuolemaansa hän vaikutti
murtuneelta mieheltä, mieheltä, joka oli saanut liian katkeria
kokemuksia ihmisten pienuudesta ja ihanteitten häviöstä. Eräs niistä,
jotka näkivät hänet hänen yksinäisillä vaelluksillaan Helsingin
kaduilla, sanoi hänen loppuaikoinaan tuoneen mieleen jonkun
Ibsenin synkistä ja katkerista henkilökuvista, mutta suurelle joukolle
hän pikemminkin olisi ollut Cervantesin »murheellisen muodon
ritari», joka oli noussut taisteluun tuulimyllyjä vastaan.

Vapaaherra Uexküll-Gyllenbandin vaatimattomuus esiintyy

suurena ja kauniina myöskin Ida Aalbergin kuoleman jälkeen. Hän ei
tuonut yleensä itseään ja omaa persoonaansa esille. Kaikki, mitä
hän teki ja toimitti, tapahtui ikäänkuin Ida Aalbergin nimen suojassa
tai Ida Aalbergin nimen ja muiston suojaamiseksi. Kun hän joutui
erimielisyyksiin jonkun kanssa — ja niin tapahtui lakkaamatta —, hän
mielellään tahtoi masentaa vastustuksen vetoamalla
auktoriteettiuskoon: Ida Aalberg ajatteli tästä asiasta toisin kuin Te,
siis Te olette väärässä.
 Vapaaherra Alexander Uexküll-Gyllenbandilla, niin itsensäkieltävä
ja vaatimaton kuin hän olikin, oli kuitenkin se ehdoton vakaumus,
että Ida Aalbergista tuli todellinen ja suuri taiteilija vasta sen jälkeen,
kun he olivat toisensa löytäneet. Hän sanoi joskus aivan suoraan:
»Minä olen Ida Aalbergin luonut.» Tuommoisia sanoja hän tosin
lausui asiaanperehtymättömille vain ikäänkuin vahingossa, hän käytti
niitä vieraan kanssa puhuessaan vain kiihkollaan jouduttuaan, mutta
lukemattomista seikoista selviää, että hän itse ajatteli niin ja että hän
itse vuorenvankasti uskoi tuohon käsitykseen.

Tosiasia onkin, että Ida Aalbergin avioliitto Alexander Uexküll-

Gyllenbandin kanssa oli kaksikymmentä vuotta kestävä koulu, jossa
edellinen oli oppilaana, jälkimmäinen opettajana.

*****

Seikkailevalla häämatkallaan vapaaherra Uexküll-Gyllenband, kun

avioliitto sittenkin oli solmittu, oli aikonut ruveta asianajajaksi
Riikaan. Tämä aie kuitenkin raukesi, ja nuori pari asettui Pietariin,
missä vapaaherra sittemmin ansaitsi toimeentulonsa
virastovirkamiehenä. Hänen tiedetään m.m. toimineen Suomen
ministerivaltiosihteerin virastossa. Joskus hänellä sanotaan olleen
parikin tointa yhtaikaa.

Vapaaherra Uexküll-Gyllenbandilla tuntuu olleen nuoruudestaan

asti tapana merkitä paperille melkein kaikki kokemuksensa ja
mietelmänsä. Avioliittonsa alkuaikoina hän yhä edelleenkin näyttää
suunnitelleen suuren, käänteentekevän filosofisen teoksen
kirjoittamista. Königsbergiläinen Immanuel Kant oli saavuttanut
maailmanmaineen kirjallaan, jonka nimi oli »Kritik der reinen
Vernunft». Samanlainen suurtyö lienee väikkynyt nuoren aatelisen
filosofian harrastajan mielessä, kun hän erään suuren vihon kanteen