Jo Bannon

Residency: Blind Magic

Throughout 2023 to 2025, Jo is developing a triptych of works under the title Blind Magic: a live performance, a film and a tactile installation.

The film Passing and the tactile installation Sleight of Hand are already underway and have been commissioned by Wellcome Collection and Unlimited for premiere in May 2024. The final part of the triptych will be Blind Magic which will take the form of a live performance will be developed during Jo’s residency to premiere in 2025.

Blind Magic will explore the imaginative dance between sleight of hand, deception and dexterity present within magic shows, dance, and the lived experience of visual disability. Jo is interested in how to make visually impaired centred choreography for both performer and audience.

Built with access at it’s heart, the work will include integrated audio description and explore the conceptual and practical minefields present in this access mode, probing ideas around interpretation, impartiality, and deception. The multi sensory project de-centres the hierarchy of vision as the primary way in which we experience performance and recentres sound, touch, text and environment as central parts of the narrative and meaning in the work.

More About Jo Bannon

Jo is an artist working in performance, choreography and film. 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.

Jo has presented work both in the UK and internationally including Sadlers Wells, Tate Modern, Sydney Opera House, The Barbican, Wellcome Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Itau Cultural Sao Paulo, The Times Museum Guangzhou, HAU Berlin, and the National Theatre. She also works as a dramaturg, educator and writer and is a founder member of artist collective Residence.

Jo’s work is supported by a number of organisations including Arts Council England, British Council, Unlimited and MAYK. Recent work includes; Feeling Thing (2021) Absent Tense (2020) Kitchen Alba (2020, We Are Fucked (2018), Alba (2015), Dead Line (2013) and Exposure (2011).