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Reflecting on a prototype event, "A Recovery Arts Café," this article examines how recovery communities can be staged through collaborative performance events that directly engage with what it means to be "in recovery" from addiction. I theorise recovery and performance practice as particular forms of affective ecology, or processes of relation between the human and nonhuman, and challenge neoliberal ideas of self-care and 'good' citizenship. Drawing on posthumanist concepts of 'life-living' (Manning 2016) and 'making kin' (Haraway 2016), I identify how recovery-engaged performance events can operate as dynamic modes of growing resilience amidst societal contexts that impede capacity for recovery.

Reflecting on "The Antidote," created with performers in recovery from addiction, this paper theorises theatre-making practice that attends to being as formed through affective and emotive relation with others, including the non-human. It suggests that theatrical activity generates spaces, or liminal milieus, that facilitate new patterns of connection with others and, therefore, supports growth in recovery identity. Adapting Manning's (Manning, Erin. 2013. "Always More than One: Individuation's Dance." Durham: Duke University Press) discussion of milieu, it examines how bodily attunement during theatre-making with people in recovery generated a recovery-engaged milieu. Acknowledging the antagonistic dimension of relation, it demonstrates how conflict and difference were embraced as a form of agonistic (Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. "Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically." London: Verso) activism.

This article moves on from the 'turn to affect' in applied theatre to explore further how concepts related to affect theory might offer ways in which practice might respond to the contemporary context of a 'post-normal' and 'post-truth' world. Acknowledging the influence of transdisciplinary discourses on gender, race, disability, space, place, performance philosophy and neuro-psycho-biology, it explores how applied theatre-making might be conceptualised as a 'space of potentiality'. The terms 'space' and 'potentiality' are surveyed as relational, contingent, and indeterminate, allowing for an understanding of practice that embraces fluidity, and difference, and resists pre-defined assumptions. Specifically, it draws on my practice of collaborative theatre-making with people in recovery from addiction to re-frame the issue of change within a more fluid appreciation of "affect" as a process of bodily inter-relation. It, therefore, discusses theatre-making as an affective ecology that generates an 'aliveness' that might support growth beyond the entropic life-cycle of addiction.