Blind Magic
A TRIPTYCH BY JO BANNON
Introduction
Blind Magic is a triptych of works:
a live performance
a film
a tactile installation
Across these media, the project explores the friction and overlaps between three elements: ‘blind virtuosity’, sleight of hand magic, and audio description/deception.
The works celebrate the techniques employed by Blind and VI folk to navigate the world through senses other than sight. They explore the multifaceted labour required for VI folk to perform and ‘pass’ in a society organised around the primacy of sight.
Each work will explore the particular, complex choreography of both blind virtuosity and sleight of hand, and invite the audience to notice the kinship between the two. All aspects of Blind Magic are designed with integrated access, which borrows from the magician’s repertoire of deceiving in the most delightful way.
PERFORMANCE - ‘The Dirty Work’
Jo has always had a thing for white rabbits. As a child it was a picture book of a bunny that helped her understand about albinism, as a teenager it was one of the insults yelled at her in the street, and later in her twenties a woman in a pet shop thrust a live white rabbit into her arms and said with a wild grin ‘look, it’s just like you!’
‘The Dirty Work’ is a duet between Jo and a white rabbit.
It’s a live performance work that explores the showmanship, crip expertise and everyday performativity of living as a disabled person navigating the world with reduced sight.
Subverting the traditional form of the magician and assistant double act, the performance is structured around a series of duets, or double acts. With Jo performing alongside a disappearing box, a huge curtain, a stage hand, an audience volunteer and her favourite of all, a white rabbit.
Together they perform a number of virtuosic and mundane magic tricks, and we are asked to pay attention to the practices of labour and care which are present in being and assisting a VI performer, the crip expertise of navigating space and obstacles with ‘performed ease,’ and the mystery and magic of perceiving the world through a VI lens which is fluid, unstable, cripped, deceptive and always surprising!
This choreographic work explores the intersection between the embodiment practices present in dance training, the tactile sleight of hand techniques of magic and illusionist acts and the overt and covert strategies (or crip expertise) implemented by visually disabled people navigating the world through senses other than sight.
As a VI choreographer I’m interested in how to stage the almost invisible labour of very ordinary often overlooked magic acts that a VI performer undertakes in navigating with reduced sight and how to create the conditions for an audience to acclimatise their gaze to this subtle but virtuosic choreography. Much of my work is about questioning what art forms, bodies and identities we value, in this work I’m interested in how to make a VI centred choreography for both performer and audience.
The work will include integrated audio description performed as magicians ‘patter’ and explore the conceptual and practical minefields present in this access mode, probing ideas around interpretation, impartiality, and deception.
We are currently looking for commissioning partners for The Dirty Work. If you’d like to find out more, please contact Matthew matthew@mayk.org.uk
INSTALLATION - ‘Sleight of Hand’
Sleight of Hand is a tactile installation for curious fingers and unbelieving eyes. The work invites the audience to participate in choreographed handling scores with ordinary and uncanny objects. It will integrate audio description, tactile design, choreography and ASMR to elicit the mysterious potential in the simple acts of looking and touching.
Subverting the format of a touch tour, Sleight of Hand invites audiences to participate in a series of touch encounters with unknown objects, materials and matter. Seated in a row at a long table, flanked by up to 15 audience members, participants are invited to take a leap of faith and slip their hands under a large, plush curtain in front of them. A voice in your headphones guides your hands as you touch, caress and investigate objects through your tactile senses. A close mic’d ASMR sound set up relays your touch back to you in an atmospheric, sensory, somatic, surround sound. The work aims to elevate senses other than sight such as embodied sound and touch to disrupt the hierarchy of vision as the primary sense in which we understand and consume both art and the world.
Once this participatory part of the installation is complete, people are then invited to the other side of the curtain, a traverse staging. They are now in the role of audience, witnessing, listening, observing the next set of audience members' hands perform these scores, in a scenario reminiscent of a magical illusion act. The work is a live, timed event, somewhere between participatory performance and installation suitable for theatre, gallery or museum spaces.
FILM - ‘Passing’
‘Passing’ invites the audience to pay attention to the barely visible but highly choreographed passing performed by both sleight of hand magicians and blind and VI folk, navigating the world through senses other than sight. It pays close attention to the hands of a sleight of hand magician as they perform a series of magic tricks; it reveals the complexities of a blind performer’s tactile navigation of space and objects, and it invites the viewer to notice the kinship between the two.
It will employ an extended filmic vocabulary, to disrupt the primacy of vision and propose a more embodied mode of ‘seeing’. Objects, hands and bodies will fall in and out of focus in highly textured compositions, creating a haptic experience: a sense that the eyes can ‘touch’ the screen. ASMR sound design will immerse the audience in the minutiae of touch. Integrated Audio Description will go beyond physical description to a sensorial, corporeal account (and sometimes stray into deceptive territory).
The film is designed for sighted and non-sighted audience alike and can be shown in a wide range of digital contexts. It will incorporate multiple modes of sensory and somatic ‘seeing’ including (at times deceptive) audio description, ASMR sound, tactile cinematography and subtle choreographies. The work attempts to disrupt the primacy of vision in our society, by proposing a more embodied mode of ‘seeing’.
About Jo Bannon
Jo Bannon is a UK based artist working in performance, choreography and live art. Her work is concerned with identity, sensory perception, and human encounter and explores how our physical bodies experience the world around us and how this sensory experience can or cannot be conveyed. Her work is informed by her identity as a disabled woman with albinism and attempts to unpick the ways we look, hear and sense our immediate environment in order to rethink or make unfamiliar these intrinsic human behaviours. Bannons work is led by form and so manifests in various mediums including intimate encounters designed for single or small audiences, staged performance, dance, film and installation.
Jo has presented work in the UK, Europe, South America, USA, China, South Korea and Australia. Jo also works as a dramaturg, educator and writer and is a founder member of artist collective Residence. Recent work includes Feeling Thing (2021), Kitchen Alba (2021), Absent Tense (2020), We Are Fucked (2018), Alba (2015), Dead Line (2013) and Exposure (2011).
Project Timeline
2023
September - Creation of Passing Film
Ongoing - Creation of ‘Sleight of Hand’ Installation
2024
March - Premier of ‘Passing’ Film
May - Premiere of ‘Sleight of Hand’ Installation
Spring - Development of ‘The Dirty Work’ Performance begins
2025
Spring - Premiere of ‘The Dirty Work’ Performance
We are currently looking for commissioning partners for The Dirty Work. If you’d like to find out more, please contact Matthew matthew@mayk.org.uk
Partners
Co-Commissioner of ‘Sleight of Hand’
Co-Commissioner of ‘Sleight of Hand’
Co-Commissioner of ‘The Dirty Work’
R&D Partner
Commissioner of ‘Passing’