Home Fit for Heroes? Performing Carer Landscapes

Care Full and In-Kind were the public outcomes of a two year arts project by artist and academic Sarah Cole, working with ‘hidden carers’ in Islington, London. The first stage of the project (Care Full) used a range of arts practices within weekly workshops to develop ideas with the informal carers of partners, siblings, parents and children, finding ways of artistically framing responses to their bounded lives.

The culmination of the project was In-Kind, a one to one performance in a re-fitted military ambulance that toured the borough. This vehicle was selected for its metaphor of being on the ‘front line’, where carers express their feeling of being embattled by the repetitions, emergencies and circumspection of their everyday lives.

We ask what this arts project contributes to an understanding of performing ‘heroic’ home landscapes.

Our paper acknowledges the quiet representation of heroism in Care Full and In-Kind. It considers, also, the vacillation between hero and martyr that might emerge from an enquiry into heroism and ‘duties’ of care in applied and social theatre. Because these are family members, emotions and behaviours are manifest in complex ways as duty, love and care interweave: the traits of the heroic are uncertain. In addition to asking questions of the ‘heroic’, we will look at how unseen, ‘hoovered away’ (as one participant said), entrenched home- scapes move from the performative to performance, reinterpreted in a small military van. To what extent are such seemingly hermetic places reinforced or challenged by such performance?

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