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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Founded by John Fox in Bradford in 1968, Welfare State International – WSI for short – is a consortium of freelance associates, many of whom have a fine art background. Funded by the Arts Council to research prototype forms of visual, celebratory theatre and ceremonial art, the company has achieved an international reputation for its original and pioneering work, having worked for and with communities throughout Britain and Europe, and as far afield as Japan, Australia, the USA, Canada, and Tanzania. Handcrafted celebratory events may variously incorporate specially made pyrotechnic animations, iceworks, architectural lanterns, carnival orchestras, oratorios of popular song, clay grottoes, mobile tableaux of performance art, theatrical transformations, surreal films, and infernal sculptural machines. WSI has consistently explored the territory between theatrical product and applied anthropology. In the original series of Theatre Quarterly, a feature in TQ8 (1972), compiled by John Fox, described and illustrated the company's early years, and in 1983 Tony Coult and Baz Kershaw edited a ‘Welfare State Handbook’ for Methuen, entitled Engineers of the Imagination. As the company celebrates its twentieth anniversary, its Development Director, Michael White, looks at some current directions and preoccupations in WSI's work and thinking.
1. The original script of King Real and the Hoodlums by Mitchell, Adrian is published in Peace Plays (Methuen, 1985)Google Scholar. The musical score was by Peter Moser, and the film, a co-production of WSI and Sheffield Polytechnic (directed by John Fox and Paul Haywood), is available for hire on 16 mm and VHS from the WSI office.
2. Thornber, Robin, ‘Cultural Desert Blooms’, The Guardian, 07 1987.Google Scholar
3. Hewison, Robert, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (Methuen, 1987).Google Scholar
4. Clarke, John and Critcher, Chas, The Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain (Macmillan, 1985), p. 195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5. Mitchell, Adrian, Uppendown Mooney (Privately printed, 1978: available from WSI office).Google Scholar
6. Hewison, RobertToo Much: Art and Society in the 1960s (Methuen, 1986), p. 182Google Scholar; Itzin, Catherine, Stages in the Revolution (Methuen, 1980), p. 70–1.Google Scholar
7. Williams, Raymond, Towards 2000 (Chatto and Windus, Hogarth Press, 1983; Pelican, 1985), p. 145.Google Scholar
8. Kiddle, Catherine, What Shall We Do with the Children? (Spindlewood Press, 1982)Google Scholar, a detailed study of the Welfare State mobile school, 1972–76, and the company's educational policy of that time. Much is still relevant.
9. For a fuller analysis of The Tempest, see Grimes, Ron L., Beginnings in Ritual Studies (University Press of America, 1981)Google Scholar, and Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (Methuen, 1983).
10. Pollution levels set out in European Commission survey of bathing beaches (1986), and Aquatic Findings, reports of Ministry of Agriculture. The Institute of Terrestrial Ecology at Grange over Sands, Cumbria, has independently and reliably monitored levels of radioactivity in South Cumbria.
11. Dubos, Rene, So Human an Animal (Hart-Davis, 1970), p. 108.Google Scholar