A TRIPTYCH BY JO BANNON
Blind Magic
Blind Magic is a triptych of works; a film, a tactile installation and a live performance.
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.
For more information on the project, email matthew@mayk.org.uk.
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. Find the Audio Described version here.
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. Integrating audio description, tactile design, choreography and ASMR, Sleight of Hand elicits the mysterious potential in the simple acts of looking and touching.
Subverting the format of a touch tour, this installation challenges how we understand and consume both art and the world.
Live 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. Its 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.
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).
Partners
Co-Commissioner of ‘Sleight of Hand’
Co-Commissioner of ‘Sleight of Hand’
Commissioner of ‘Passing’
R&D Partner