Jo Bannon is a UK artist who makes live art and performance. She has presented work in the UK and Europe including The Barbican, In Between Time Festival, Arnolfini, Spill Festival of Performance, Battersea Arts Centre PAD Mainz and the National Theatre. She is an In Between Time Associate Artist and founder member of Residence.
Jo’s work is concerned with human exchange and encounter and explores how our physical bodies experience the world around us and how this sensory experience can or cannot be conveyed. Jo unpicks the ways in which we look, hear and sense our immediate environment in order to rethink or make unfamiliar these intrinsic human behaviours. Her performance work often manifests as intimate encounters designed for single or small audiences, alongside staged theatre work and installations.
Jo will use the week long residency at Cove Park to work on Alba, a new staged performance about paleness, blending in and standing out.
Influenced by the artists’s autobiography as a person with albinism, the title refers to the Italian translation of Alba, used as the source for the word albino, meaning sublime light. The performance will use blinding light, invisibility, movement and elements of contemporary opera to create a visual performance that explores the multiple narratives we inherit, construct and acquire in relation to our own identity. This performance explores the stories we tell of ourselves and the stories told about us. The myths we inherit and the ones we embody, the identities we cannot shake off and so instead perform.
image – Manuel Vason