Introduction

This Introduction outlines recovery from addiction as an ongoing process influenced by social environment as much as by personal affliction. Given how societal conditions impact negatively on recovery, it argues that systemic, communal and collective approaches to recovery are vital. Arts practices are, therefore, a vital mechanism for generating social activity, cultural events and atmospheres that support recovery. Duff’s concept of addiction as an ‘assemblage’ of bodies, spaces, affects and relations (2014) is applied to the context in which the recovery arts practices discussed in this book operate in order to theorise recovery-engaged performance practice as an assemblage that involves human and nonhuman elements. Interpretations of affect theory and new materialism in performance studies are extended to frame performance as an affective ecology; a dynamic system that is more-than-human. The term ‘messy connections’ is proposed as a framework to examine the systems of affective and sensorial interaction that occur in recovery-engaged performance activity, operating as an affective ecology with a recovery-orientated aesthetic and ethical-political ethos.