my research

A newspaper article titled 'A play about the workers, for the lunchbreak' with a black-and-white photograph of actors on stage in front of a train, part of a Melbourne Workers Theatre production.

Melbourne Workers Theatre: An Art and Working Life company (1987-2012)

My work investigates the institutions, ideologies, and industrial conditions that underpin the Australian arts sector. Using interdisciplinary methods from history, sociology, political economy, and performance studies, I examine how funding systems, state policy, and industrial relations govern creative work — and how these forces are embodied in artistic practice. While I focus primarily on the performing arts sector, my research contributes to broader conversations about creative labour, state restructuring, and the cultural politics of neoliberalism.

My research looks back and forward. My current historical research examines the relationship between the arts sector and the labour movement through the Art and Working Life program, as well as the role of key institutions—right now, the former Australia Council and Actors’ Equity of Australia—in shaping the industrial relations of the arts sector.

By looking back, I seek both a thorough understanding of the current issues surrounding cultural policy, creative labour, and public support for the arts, as well as the good ideas and innovations that have been lost to time. Informed by this history, I examine the contemporary organisation of the arts sector, and seek to contribute to a reform of the structural, ideological, and social foundations of future Australian cultural policy.

My recently completed doctoral thesis, “The Subsidy Question: Community Theatre and the Integral State” (2025), examines the political and economic forces that have shaped Australian arts funding from the 1970s to the late 1990s. The project traces the evolution of cultural subsidy in Australia and its consequences for community theatre practice, situating the Art and Working Life program within two major shifts in the national landscape: the decline of trade unions and the rise of neoliberalism. In recognition of the significance of this work, I was awarded a University of Sydney Pro-Vice-Chancellor Paulette Isabel Jones Career Award in 2024.

SELECTED WORK

  • This thesis investigates how historic changes in capitalist strategies of accumulation have become manifest in Australia’s provisions for cultural subsidy. It investigates the historical conditions from which Australian neoliberalism emerged and aligns this with the history of federal arts subsidy, with a focus on the relationship between the state, community arts, and cultural policy in Australia during the period 1972 to 1997. The methodology is historical materialism, the analysis guided by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony which understands the state as “integral” to capitalism.

    The first half of this thesis is an historical analysis tracing the emergence of federal arts subsidy from its origins as a Keynesian-led postwar reconstruction policy; through its short-lived activation by the Whitlam government; to its significant destabilisation in the face of economic crisis; and investigates how these events manifest in Australia’s federal community arts program.

    The second half of the thesis examines how changing strategies of accumulation have been reflected in community arts funding, policies, and practice. This is explored through four case studies: Art and Working Life (1982-c1995), a joint funding program from the Australia Council and the Australian Council of Trade Unions targeting projects with a connection to labour culture; the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre (1987-2012), the only Australian theatre company founded with the mission to work exclusively with the labour movement; Creative Nation (1994), Australia's first federal cultural policy that entrenched an economic rationalist ‘creative industries’ paradigm into future policymaking; and The Essentials (1997), a community theatre production written with emergency services and domestic violence support workers about their lived experience of a statewide restructure under former Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett.

    This thesis finds that the Keynesian origins of arts subsidy maintain an irreconcilable tension with the “creative industries framework” now securely entrenched in Australian cultural policy, and that these cyclical problems are the result of a structural antagonism between a sector that relies on public funding and the imperatives of the neoliberal state.

  • 2025

    [forthcoming Dec 2025] Nantsou, I. (2025) Art and Working Life: The troubled legacy of theatre and the labour movement. Amfiteater.

    Nantsou, I. (2025) Disorganised Labour: The Melbourne Workers Theatre and the Cultural Impact of the ‘Prices and Incomes Accord’ (1983-1996). Australasian Drama Studies, 86, 264-292.

    Nantsou, I. (2024) Political Theatre in the ‘Climate of Fear’: Censorship, Dissent, and Kennett’s Victoria. Performance Paradigm, 20, 121-139.

    2023

    Nantsou, I. (2023) Cultural Policy and the Integral State: A Gramscian Analysis of Arts Funding. Performance Paradigm, 18, 41-59.

    Hay, C., Nantsou, I., Ashford, L. (2023) Editorial: The Art of Subsidy / The Subsidy of Art. Performance Paradigm, 18.

  • 2023

    Hay, C., Nantsou, I., Ashford, L. (2023). The Art of Subsidy / The Subsidy of Art. Performance Paradigm, 18.

  • 2024

    ‘Bringing ‘class’ into Performance Studies’
    “Doing and Undoing”, Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association interim conference, Griffith University Queensland (11-13 December)

    ‘Financial data for theatre history: insights from the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre archives’
    “Doing and Undoing”, Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association interim conference, Griffith University Queensland (11-13 December)

    2023

    ''It’s Time’ for a reappraisal: 50 years since Whitlam’s arts reforms.'
    “Archives, Artists, and Absences”, Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association Annual conference, Flinders University Adelaide (1-4 December).

    'Cultural Policy and the Integral State: A Gramscian Analysis of Arts Funding.'
    Theatre and Performance Studies Research Seminar, University of Sydney.

    2022

    'Myth-busting the Whitlam cultural revolution'.
    Theatre and Performance Studies Research Seminar, University of Sydney.

    2021

    'An introduction to Art and Working Life'.
    Theatre and Performance Studies Research Seminar, University of Sydney.

    2020

    'The Essentials—A Cautionary Tale'.
    Theatre and Performance Studies Research Seminar, University of Sydney.

    'Toward a new chapter of radical Australian theatre'.
    Theatre and Performance Studies Research Seminar, University of Sydney.

  • 2024

    Guest lecture, "Money", at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts on the history of Australian arts funding.

    2023

    “‘Hir’ and the field of Australian mainstage theatre”, for the
    Hunt-Simes Sexuality Studies Seminar (Gender Studies), University of Sydney. Invited by SSSHARC fellow Professor Shane Vogel (Yale) to present research from my Honours dissertation (University Medal, 2017).

    2022

    Respondent on panel for launch of “Arts, Culture, and Country” by Jo Caust, alongside panellists Dominic Mercer (Belvoir St Theatre), Liza-Mare Syron (UNSW, Moogahlin Performing Arts), and Augusta Supple (cultural leader).
    Currency House, New Platform Papers Launch, University of Sydney.

  • “A 1980s cost-of-living crisis gave Australia a thriving arts program – could we do it again?” The Conversation, May 27, 2025