The Council Estate as Hood: Resisting the Crisis SPID Theatre Company and grass-roots discourse as cultural politics

The popular media discourse surrounding British social housing estates (or ‘council estates’ as they are known colloquially) depicts a state of crisis. This was highlighted during the UK riots in the summer of 2011, when the crisis of the council estate became a point of focus for those seeking to explain the motivations of the rioters. While MP Iain Duncan Smith proposed a causational link between the ‘dysfunction’ of the council estate and the riots (2011), both The Guardian (Curtis 2011) and the Financial Times (Gainsbury and Culzac 2011) concluded that the proximity of various council estates to the location of the riots suggested some correlation between estate spaces and the violent and criminal behaviour of the rioters. Many scholars (see for example: Reay and Lucey 2000, McKenzie 2009, Rogaly and Taylor 2011) have pointed to the damaging effect that such stigmatising representations have on Council Estate residents. McKenzie argues that negative representations work as part of a series of structures which reify the Council Estate as the space of the dangerous criminal ‘other’ (McKenzie 2009:23). As theorised by Bourdieu (1977, 2005) these structures also work as ‘structuring structures’ (Swartz 1997: 103) which contribute to individuals’ habitus (unacknowledged learned behaviour) in a way which works to limit the opportunities available to them. However, the contemporary representation surrounding the council estate and its inhabitants also resonates with the definition of the ‘hood’ offered by Richardson and Skott-Myhre. In their edited collection Habitus of the Hood (2012) they argue that the hood (an abbreviation of ‘neighbourhood’ often used in North American slang to refer to the urban inner city) is subject to damaging, negative narratives while it is paradoxically fetishised in spectacular and seductive narratives of ‘community’. Within this context, they propose that ‘creative works produced within the hood and outside of it (re)present a cultural politics’ (2012: 22). Like the ‘hood the council estate has come to embody: ...both the utopian and dystopian aspects of the low-income urban areas of large cities. It represents an awareness of community: an enclosed space in which residents are united in their daily struggles. It also signifies an isolated, marginalized, and often-criminalized space that appears frequently in popular media representations, legal discourses and public discussions. (Richardson and Skott-Myhre 2012: 18) This chapter will examine the way in which SPID theatre company, a collective of professional and community performers based on the Kensal House estate in West London, have responded to the discourse of ‘crisis’ and the correlating fetishisation of the Council Estate in popular representation. It will offer analyses of their live performances 23176 (2008/9), Sixteen (2009), and their film Affected (2011). Drawing on an understanding of Council Estate as hood, developed from Richardson and Skott-Myhre’s work, it will argue that SPID’s resident/performers are engaged in a grass-roots discourse which constitutes cultural politics. It will propose that their performance practice operates as a critical resistance against the dominant narratives of the Council Estate which threaten to disrupt and intervene in their identity-making.