WSI essay GW.pdf (9.07 MB)
Welfare state international
chapter
posted on 2019-03-25, 11:06 authored by Gillian WhiteleyThis 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 1965-1979Pages
223 - 251Citation
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
BloomsburyVersion
- 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
2016Notes
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;9781408175446Book series
British Theatre Companies: From Fringe to Mainstream;Language
- en