Performance approaches to whole society resilience

In this article, we reflect on the ways in which arts practices can contribute productively to national resilience strategies. We focus particularly on the UK Government Resilience Framework (2023, UKGRF) which calls for a ‘whole of society’ approach to resilience, echoing established initiatives addressing ‘whole community’ (USA) and ‘total defence’ (Sweden, Switzerland). In this context, we ask what performance research methods offer to understandings of whole society resilience, and how existing artistic practices ‘perform’ resilience in ways that are currently not accounted for. The arts, we argue, are a nuanced means of attending to complex geo-political contexts that allow space for legacies of racism, sexism, poverty, colonialism, and terrorism to be revealed as having (had) important and differing influences in shaping the resilience of varied communities within society. The UKGRF offers a compelling opportunity to think about what whole of society resilience might involve, who might already be engaged in this work, and how we might develop and maintain a robust ‘whole of society’ approach to contemporary resilience challenges. We discuss Through my Window, a community outreach project run by the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow (UK), mural painting in New Orleans (USA) that offers positive, joyful images of individuals in a city that is too often read through narratives of tourism and crisis, and Remembering a Future (London (UK), 2018), a live performance in which Aman Mojadidi addressed issues of race, identity, home and terrorism. In so doing, we argue that artists, arts organisations and arts communities need to be considered vital, strategically important resilience practitioners, and that the arts should be being taken seriously as an engine of societal resilience more broadly.