Under the Covers: an interactive audience (paper)

"We are really excited to perform for you tonight – we just had one little problem: we couldn’t find any babysitters. You see, we are both mothers. Young mothers. But don’t panic, we found a solution! Anybody ever heard of SKYPE? Great. So this is what we’ve done, the clever bit: we’ve attached infra-red cameras above our babies’ beds, and we are filming them, now, live, so you can babysit, while we perform". This paper examines the babysitting role of the audience in Zoo Indigo's performance of 'Under the Covers'. This collaborative (Garton and Rippel) performance as research project, engages with the staging of the maternal body, we are present as mothers, observing our real-life babies on screen. In placing/displacing our maternal body in performance, we attempt to stage the ‘inexpressible Real’. The performance deliberately establishes binaries, such as between autobiography and play-acting, real and fake, and through this a sense of the authentic is perceived in juxtaposition to the evidently staged. The audience are given responsibility for the care of the virtual infants