Search

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.

As a director and Applied Theatre-maker who creates performances with, for and by people in recovery from addiction, I have staged scenes of intoxication, rituals of drug use and various representations of 'active addiction.' Such work involves aestheticizing stories of addiction, including the highs and the lows of the 'graft-score-use' cycle. The performances involve emotive affects such as shock and shame which, given the largely biographic content co-created with performance collaborators, raises sticky dilemmas about aesthetic strategies and ethics. Focusing on my staging of Too High Too Far Too Soon, a solo performance of Simon Mason's like-named biography, I reflect on the complexities of aestheticizing moments of drug use intended to have an impact upon the audience whilst also negotiating an ethical approach to authenticity. I argue, using aspects of affect theory as a theoretical framework, that aestheticizing moments of lived experience of drug addiction, whilst sometimes uncomfortable to watch, can be a generative experience for both the performer and audience. Through affective inter-relation in the making and performing of a theatrical performance, new potentialities may emerge, particularly for the performer, but also perhaps the audience, to reconsider their way-of-being in the world. I outline how such an aesthetic involves embracing chaos and indeterminancy and negotiating risk in both the devising and performance processes. It also entails a mutual reciprocity and reflexivity enhanced by a shared understanding of practices of recovery through which director and performer might be in affective attunement with each other. Ultimately, the affective experience of the performance generates sensations that could provoke new thought, action or interaction that in turn opens the potential for change, be that simply a moving forward in one's understanding of addiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]