Taking place in the Rosebery Room at Sadler’s Wells, choreographer Jo Bannon is in conversation with collaborator and Artistic Director of Candoco Dance Company, Charlotte Darbyshire. Together and with the audience they explore Jo’s research into how specific bodies, identities, and sensory perceptions impact how we experience the world around us, and how this sensory experience can or cannot be conveyed.
The conversation takes its inspiration from Jo’s current research ‘Blind Magic’ that explores the imaginative dance between the hidden choreographies that deception and dexterity present within sleight of hand magic shows, dance, and the lived experience of visual disability.
This work sits at the intersection between sensory awareness practices taught in dance training, the tactile sleight of hand techniques used within 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.
This talk is presented by Independent Dance in partnership with Sadler’s Wells and complements the Seeing, Saying, Sensing weekend lab led by Jo Bannon, Holly Thomas and Katherine Hall at Siobhan Davies Studios exploring how we see, say, and sense the world around us.
The talk will be recorded and available in Independent Dance’s Digital Library following the event.
Supported through public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Jo Bannon is an artist working in performance, choreography and film. Her practice is concerned with how our specific bodies, identities and sensory perceptions impact how we 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 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 is currently researching a body of work entitled ‘Blind Magic’, interested in the relationship between the moving and narrating body, inspired by magicians patter, dance instruction and audio description Jo is researching ways we say what we see and what happens when we unsee or unsay – when sight and language falter.
Charlotte Darbyshire is an independent artist with over 25 years’ experience of working in contemporary dance and specifically in somatic and inclusive practices as a performer, maker, teacher and director of two award-winning films. Charlotte was a founder member of Candoco Dance Company, performing and teaching internationally with the company for the first 10 years and helping to lay the foundations of what Candoco is today. She is now Artistic Director.
Charlotte went on to develop her independent practice and research into inclusive and creative approaches to dance practice for disabled and non-disabled people. She led integrated projects and later wrote and delivered multiple training programmes in the UK, Colombia, Croatia, Bangladesh and Sweden. She is passionate about education and for 10 years was also a Dance Lecturer on the BA Degree Programmes at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and London Contemporary Dance School (2000 – 2011). In the last decade she trained with Linda Hartley to become a certified Movement Therapist and Integrative Bodyworker. This has strengthened her international reputation as a movement educator and facilitator and grounds her practice as Candoco’s Artistic Director.
