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Welfare state international

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posted on 2019-03-25, 11:06 authored by Gillian Whiteley
This peer-reviewed essay on the work of Welfare State International (WSI) was commissioned by Professor John Bull (University of Reading) to carry out new primary research for a case-study published as part of a three-volume re-evaluation of alternative/experimental theatre companies, British Theatre Companies: from Fringe to Mainstream. The three-volume study brings together new scholarly research on key influential British theatre companies (for many of which there are few published sources) and is expected to become the essential resource in this field for other scholars and researchers. My chapter, based on extensive archive research and interviews with former participants, situates the company’s forty years’ history within the context of recent communitarian, collaborative and participative discourses, which have emerged as key critical debates since the 1990s. I was approached as an expert in the field and commissioned due to my standing and previous work on the company which includes various conference papers and published essays. Utilising primary source, public and private archive/papers (eg extensive WSI papers and John Fox/Sue Gill archive at Theatre Collection, University of Bristol, Arts Council archive papers etc) interviews and communications with WSI founders, members and participants, it builds on previous extensive research and curatorial projects on WSI, eg I curated a research-based retrospective exhibition in 2007 at MidPennine Gallery Burnley (supported by Henry Moore Foundation funds) and have presented material related to WSI in papers at various conferences, eg Portsmouth Visual Culture conference 2009 and College Art Association, Chicago 2010 and have published a book chapter on WSI, radical politics and New Age culture in a book on 1970s culture.

History

School

  • The Arts, English and Drama

Department

  • Arts

Published in

British Theatre Companies: From Fringe to Mainstream 1965-1979

Pages

223 - 251

Citation

WHITELEY, G., 2016. Welfare state international. IN: Bull, J. (ed.) British Theatre Companies: From Fringe to Mainstream 1965-1979. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 223 - 251.

Publisher

Bloomsbury

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016

Notes

This is a book chapter published in Bull, J. (ed.) British Theatre Companies: From Fringe to Mainstream 1965-1979. The final version can be found here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/british-theatre-companies-1965-1979-9781408175439/

ISBN

1408175444;9781408175446

Book series

British Theatre Companies: From Fringe to Mainstream;

Language

  • en

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