| Artful Evaluation for Creative Health and Wellbeing This open access book presents new methods for evaluating the contribution of participatory arts to health and wellbeing. Responding to shifts in arts and health discourse, it argues for challenging long-standing ideas about how value is theorised, measured, and communicated. This book critiques the dominance of social impact as the primary way of understanding change in arts, health, and wellbeing, proposing instead evaluation approaches grounded in contemporary Indigenous, post-humanist, and postcapitalist theories. Curated as a collaboration between academic scholars and arts practitioners, this book brings together theoretical research frameworks and practical expertise to consider the collective inequities that shape the delivery of community arts projects. 
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| Rethinking the relationship between applied theatre and policy. There has been a longstanding concern about the relationships between policy, funding and theatre practice in educational and community settings. Past scholarship has made evident the varied ways a relationship with policy can manifest and play out in the political, pedagogic, aesthetic and ethical values, approaches and outcomes of applied theatre practices. This includes the ways theatre can play a part in producing the problems it intends to address. This article argues for the use of critical theories to interrogate and rethink the policy-funding-practice relationship, to generate nuanced understandings and open up a space of possibility. |
| Re-sensing economies: Artistic and embodied knowing for more-than-capitalist futures The climate catastrophe and transgression of planetary boundaries, together with the erosion of democracy and rise of oligarchy, have intensified demands for critical reflection on capitalism. This edited collection responds to these demands, featuring contributions from scholars across the social sciences disciplines and geographical contexts. The book explores ways to rethink and retheorise capitalism through theoretical, conceptual, and empirical contributions. Some contributions propose ways to reform capitalism, some emphasise the need to examine it as part of diverse more-than-capitalist economic arrangements, while others invite us to reflect on what might come after capitalism. Embracing a pluralist approach, the book reflects the dynamism of capitalism and presents diverse theoretical approaches and methodologies. Retheorising, on the pages of this book, takes the form of reconceptualising, reimagining, representing, as well as repairing. From text-based analyses to visual collaging and pottery making, the chapters engage with capitalism in multifaceted ways and invite readers to also reflect on how we sense and experience socioeconomic formations through scholarly endeavours. Through its pluralist approach, the book urges readers to explore and trouble the multifaceted workings of capitalism and engage with the possibilities for its transformation or transgression. |
| Toi Taiao Whakatairanga: Shifting awareness of forest health through artistic research Toi Taiao Whakatairanga (TTW) is a three-year transdisciplinary artistic research project based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. TTW explores the ways arts practices can contribute to public awareness of two plant pathogens threatening native tree species – kauri dieback and myrtle rust. The project commissioned and curated Māori artists to create artworks through engaging with iwi (tribes), hapū (sub-tribes), communities, mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and Western science. In this chapter, we discuss two art projects from Te Tai Rāwhiti, on the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island. TTW is not explicitly a development project, but, we argue, both artworks reveal the ways colonial economic and environmental development initiatives have contributed to species extinction and ecosystem degradation, threatening the continuity of Māori socio-environmental knowledge, health and spiritual and economic well-being. Both works also raise questions about sovereignty and self-determination, and we draw on Māori scholarship to interrogate the extent to which, through the East Coast projects, TTW developed a methodology for curating and researching creative practice that supports the mana motuhake (self-determination and a sense of mana through authority) of Māori iwi and hapū. |
| Being trees: What can storytelling and drama offer to students’ ecological understanding and citizenship? This chapter explores the possibilities of interweaving drama and storytelling with mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and Western science to foster students’ ecological understanding and citizenship in relation to ngahere ora (forest health). Our examples of practice come from Toitū Te Ngahere, a participatory, arts-based research project focused on raising awareness of and engagement with two plant pathogens that are threatening native tree species in Aotearoa New Zealand, kauri dieback and myrtle rust. Over two years, the project has worked with five schools to develop, inform and carry out inquiry projects, which involved the children creating artworks to raise awareness of forest health in their communities. In this chapter, we focus on the ways teachers and students (aged 5–14 years) incorporated drama, storytelling and performance into their inquiry projects. We consider each example in relation to mātauranga Māori connected to storytelling and Western drama education scholarship, to explore the capacity of drama and storytelling to engender creativity and agency in relation to forest health issues, involving children in important forms of creative eco-citizenship. |
| Artistic practice, public awareness, and the ngahere: art–science–Indigenous Māori collaborations for raising awareness of threats to native forests We build a rationale for a nuanced approach to raising public awareness of ecological threats through interweaving art, science, and Mātauranga Māori (Indigenous Māori knowledge). The thinking we present emerges from the first phase of a transdisciplinary project, Toi Taiao Whakatairanga, which explores the ways the arts can raise public awareness of two pathogens that are ravaging native trees in Aotearoa New Zealand: Phytopthora agathidicida (kauri dieback) and Austropuccinia psidii (myrtle rust). One of our first steps in the project was to explore understandings of "public” and “awareness” and their relevance to Aotearoa’s ecological, cultural, and political context. This collective task was about developing theory to guide the second phase of the project, in which we would commission nine Māori artists to create new works about kauri dieback and/or myrtle rust. One of the key outcomes of our collective inquiry was a realization of the limits of certain conceptions of public awareness in the settler–colonial contexts. For example, conceptions based on an unproblematized definition of “public” fail to respond adequately to the rights of Indigenous Māori tribes and subtribes to sovereignty over their lands and taonga species. We identify the need for alternatives to transactional conception of public awareness-raising. This includes alternatives that align with te ao Māori (Māori worldviews) and allow for a lack of consensus about the nature of an ecological threat or the required response. We propose that mātauranga Māori and arts practices can be combined with colonial science knowledge to promote different awarenesses in ways that are responsive to difference audiences, acknowledge different knowledge systems, hold space for contested/provisional knowledge, and support the mana motuhake of iwi/hāpū and the ngahere. |
| Beyond fantasy: Postcapitalist possibilities for resourcing the arts in Aotearoa |
| Communities |
| A new direction? The arts and central government policy in Aotearoa, 2017–2020 Artistic work in Aotearoa has long been underpaid and undervalued. In this paper, we examine policy statements made by the New Zealand government from September 2017 until November 2020 about the nature and value of artistic work. Early statements appear to challenge the economization of the arts, and to suggest alternative ways the arts might be valued, including for their inherent connection to well-being and social justice. However, rather than moving the arts away from commercial imperatives, we argue that government initiatives have been implicitly equipping artists and arts organizations to deliver their own economization. |
Resourcing the arts for youth well-being: Challenges in Aotearoa New Zealand. BackgroundThis paper synthesises findings from two research projects with organisations involved in arts for youth well-being. Since 2017, Aotearoa New Zealand’s government has recognised the importance of the arts for well-being. However, the sector in Aotearoa has historically lacked recognition and support and this paper identifies a number of challenges that remain entrenched in the funding system. MethodsStudy One used an online survey to understand the approaches, aspirations and challenges of 19 organisations involved in youth arts for well-being. Study Two used ethnographic methods with three youth arts organisations to explore their experiences of the funding and policy context. ResultsSpecific aspects of the funding system in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, hinder the sustainable development of creatively rich, culturally responsive, inclusive and strengths-based practice that takes youth participation seriously. ConclusionsNew approaches to resourcing youth arts for well-being are needed to better support good practice and sector development. |
| Kindness in giving? Giving to and through the arts in the time of COVID-19. This article uses kindness as a lens through which to analyse examples of giving to and through the arts in Aotearoa during the first year of COVID-19. We consider whether the exceptional conditions created by COVID-19 caused reconsideration of the way the arts look after society and why and how societies need to look after the arts. We do so by critically examining state and private giving to the arts in Aotearoa New Zealand, from March 2020-March 2021, alongside large- and small-scale artistic gestures of giving. It appears that a ‘kinder’ economy for the arts emerged during this time. While this did not disrupt the established asymmetries in the arts or society, there was a glimpse of how the neoliberal ethos for giving to the arts might be decentred by an ethos of ‘social flesh’ (Beasley & Bacchi, 2012). |
| Holding it together: Resilience and solidarity in the economies of youth performance companies When financial resources are scarce and uncertain, youth performance organisations find ways to ‘hold it together’: to carry on no matter what. Engaging critically with theories of organisational resilience, this article examines how two youth performance companies in Auckland experience and respond to a precarious funding environment. The local policy and funding context compels organisations to ‘shape up’; to become more effective in the competitive system. Within this environment, however, the promise of sustainability remains ever-elusive. An alternative response, then, is found in the different ways organisations experiment with localised, culturally responsive community and solidarity economies. |
| Taurima Vibes: Economies of manaakitanga and care in Aotearoa. |
| Who is Responsible? Neoliberal Discourses of Well-Being in Australia and New Zealand Policy proposals about social change and well-being shape the implementation of applied theatre projects through technologies such as evaluation practices and funding applications. Representations of projects can, in turn, effect public discourse about who participants are and why they are or are not ‘being well’. Like public policy, applied theatre for social change has to establish a problem that needs to be solved. Drawing on debates about change in applied theatre literature, we consider how funders, governments, and communities call on applied theatre practitioners to frame particular issues and/or people as problematic. We then examine discourses of well-being in Australia and New Zealand, drawing on policy documents and funding schemes to discuss the politics of change in applied theatre in each country. We consider how the field might navigate policies, technologies and public understandings of well-being, change and social good to produce work with and for participants in neoliberalised contexts. |
| Applied Theatre: Economies Applied Theatre: Economies addresses a notoriously problematic area: applied theatre's relationship to the economy and the ways in which socially committed theatre makers fund, finance or otherwise resource their work.
Part One addresses longstanding concerns in the field about the effects of economic conditions and funding relationships on applied theatre practice. It considers how applied theatre's relationship with local and global economies can be understood from different theoretical and philosophical perspectives. It also examines a range of ways in which applied theatre can be resourced, identifying key issues and seeking possibilities for theatre makers to sustain their work without undermining their social and artistic values.
The international case studies in Part Two give vivid insights into the day-to-day challenges of resourcing applied theatre work in Chile, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the US. The authors examine critical issues or points of tension that have arisen in a particular funding relationship or from specific economic activities. Each study also illuminates ways in which applied theatre makers can bring artistic and social justice principles to bear on financial and organizational processes. 
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| The 'diverse economies' of applied theatre Some of the perennial tensions in applied theatre arise from the ways in which practice is funded or financed. They include the immediate material pressures and pragmatic dilemmas faced by theatre makers on the ground and the struggle to secure the resources needed to produce and sustain work or to negotiate the dynamics and demands of particular funding relationships. In the applied theatre literature, there are many examples of groups and organizations that have compromised their political, pedagogic, artistic or ethical principles to make their work economically viable. There are also ongoing debates about the nature of the relationship between applied theatre and the local, national and global economic conditions in which it is produced. These debates examine the extent to which economic conditions shape the forms and intentions of socially committed theatre movements over time. This article takes a practice-based approach, drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2012 with three applied theatre companies: Applied Theatre Consultants Ltd in New Zealand; C&T in the UK; and FM Theatre Power in Hong Kong. This multi-sited organizational ethnography generates critical insights into the ways in which these companies bring social and artistic values to bear on business models and financial relationships. Analysis of the companies’ practice takes seriously the aim of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s (2006) diverse economies project: to imagine and create spaces of economic possibility. Organizational, management and economic processes can be insidious technologies by which capitalist/neo-liberal ideologies infiltrate socially committed theatre and performance. But they can also be critically informed practices, involving considerable ethical consideration, creativity and care. |
