The ‘pop-up’ recovery arts café: growing resilience through the staging of recovery community

Abstract

Reflecting on a prototype event, A Recovery Arts Café, this article examines how recovery communities can be staged through collaborative performance events that directly engage with what it means to be in recovery from addiction. I theorise recovery and performance practice as particular forms of affective ecology, or processes of relation between the human and nonhuman, and challenge neoliberal ideas of self-care and ‘good’ citizenship. Drawing on posthumanist concepts of ‘life-living’ (Manning 2016) and ‘making kin’ (Haraway 2016), I identify how recovery-engaged performance events can operate as dynamic modes of growing resilience amidst societal contexts that impede capacity for recovery.