Bedroom Spectacles: New possibilities for collaboratively devised performance inside Zoom’s 'window of opportunity'

As performance makers whose training and testing ground was Southeast Queensland’s distinctively collaborative and embodied independent theatre scene of the early 2000s (Neideck & Kelly, 2021), Kat Cornwell and Morgan Rose have for the last decade enjoyed critical and popular success creating original, multi-disciplinary performances with teenagers for adult audiences in Melbourne, Victoria with their collective Riot Stage. Their most recent work for St Martin’s Youth Arts Centre is Us, a work that captures the micro-interactions between parents and their children, the beautiful, frustrating, messy, ridiculous, loving moments that usually go unseen, kept secret in the private realm and left out of grand narratives. This paper builds on an emerging framework of dramaturgy for performance in the ‘digital window’ (Neideck, Pike, Kelly, & Henry, 2021; Pike, Neideck, & Kelly, 2020) and descriptions of the nexus between digital and ecoscenography (Neideck, Rixon, Kelly, Pike, & Brumpton, in press) to provide an account of the possibilities for collaboratively devising performance within Zoom’s ‘window of opportunity’. Although this emergent form is indebted to early experiments in live-streamed performance, more recent advances in intermedial performance, and the grand spectacle of Katie Mitchell’s live cinema, it is utterly distinct from other modes of screen media. It affords nuanced investigations of intimacy and subverts expectations of professional practice, and must therefore be undertaken using the rhythms and timescales of human relationships (Tillmann- Healy, 2003). Most strikingly, performances on the scale of ‘bedroom spectacle’ reinvigorate the possibilities for the creation of theatrical heterotopias, ‘alternate spaces that are distinguished from the actual world but that resonate with it’ (Tompkins, 2014, p. 1), and reveal the fictional nature of the director’s insistence that the performer ‘leave their baggage at the door’.