Under the Covers (Performance in Nottingham)

In an interactive media performance Zoo Indigo take their babies on tour so they can perform while you babysit. Combining autobiography and cutting edge technology, the performance duo attempt to re-enact the movie star roles they aspire to with help from two flat pack daddies, but the day-to-day-ness of their real lives keeps interrupting. Under the Covers is an intimate, tender and humorous meditation on the way in which artists juggle the work they make with the lives they choose to lead. In re-visiting real-life in the making of their latest work Zoo Indigo marks a return to performance after a pregnant pause.

“An unexpected show. A lot of laughs, ingenious involvement of the disarmed and willing audience, and some seriousness too. Great ending. I hope more people can see it.” Caryl Churchill

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.