Giving service and provoking rupture : the post-Fordist performer at work

Matthews, AE

Abstract

In this article, I examine my practice-as-research pieces What The Money Meant and SERVUS! in terms of how their design and delivery make visible those labour and exchange relations characteristic of late capitalism. After a brief introduction, I take the reader through theoreti-cal debates around service work’s proliferation and existing arguments about its relationship to performance, as well as Chantal Mouffe’s (2013) argument for the ‘agonistic’ potential of aesthetic activity. I move on to argue that SERVUS! provides an example of how the one-to-one performance form can both reveal reification in action and rupture or speak back to its enactment, via techniques including explicit payment, over-enunciation or ‘flourish’ and what I term affective dissonance. I then demonstrate how What The Money Meant extends these techniques by applying them across a specific scenographic design and participatory structure. What The Money Meant invites audience members to communicate with the performer by tipping, which I argue might be seen as a dramaturgical tactic of audience participation. I conclude by arguing that the performance of service, especially that which plays upon the one-to-one structure, can work ‘agonistically’ by both revealing the precarity of late capitalist labour and subverting its delivery.

Citation

Matthews, A. (2017). Giving service and provoking rupture : the post-Fordist performer at work. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 37(1), 139-154. https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2016.1252076

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 20, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Nov 2, 2016
• Publication Date: Jun 13, 2017
• Deposit Date: Oct 20, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: May 2, 2018
• Journal: Studies in Theatre and Performance
• Print ISSN: 1468-2761
• Electronic ISSN: 2040-0616
• Publisher: Routledge
• Volume: 37
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 139-154
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2016.1252076
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2016.1252076
• Related Public URLs: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rstp20/current
• Additional Information: Projects : SERVUS: Serve/Us Economy