After 37 years of joyous mayhem, Welfare State International, the company I co-founded and of which I am artistic director, is creating its last gig….All our intentions of 1968 – access, disability awareness, multigenerational and multicultural participation – are established; now, though, they come before the art…. Overintensive risk management, child protection, alarm systems, licensing, family-friendly badges and employment laws invade with a suffocating culture of smug inertia.
Of course, he’s a theatre person so we shouldn’t expect too much self-awareness, but can he really not see the resemblance of the utopian world he worked toward, to the stifling world he inhabits now?
