PASSING: An Interview with Jo Bannon

Listen to the Audio Described trailer here.

PASSING is the upcoming short film from Jo Bannon which invites us to pay attention to the barely visible but highly choreographed ways in which we all perform, or pass, on stage and in everyday life. 

Working with Sindri, a visually impaired dancer, and Augusto, a sleight of hand magician, Jo draws parallels between the two, beckoning us to peek behind the pink velvet curtain and witness the magic of their hands, the virtuosity in their movements. 

As a visually impaired artist, she experiments with sensory modes of seeing, including audio description, tactile cinematography, ASMR sound design and close up choreographies to disrupt the primacy of vision in engaging with art. 

PASSING releases across MAYK’s platforms 27 March 2024. In the run up, we sat down with Jo to chat about the process of making her first film and the inspirations for the piece. 

When did you first begin conceptualising PASSING? 

It was maybe two, three years ago when I first met Sindri — one of the performers in the film. We were both invited to CRIP Lab, which was a residency for disabled artists in Dusseldorf. As soon as we met we became this troublesome twosome, partly because we were the only two people who were visually impaired on the residency, and so we often sat near the front watching films and learning about artists work, ad hoc audio describing stuff to each other. 

There was a moment when we were in a hotel bar having drinks and Sindri’s wine came in one of those perilously tall stemmed wine glasses. Sindri has very little central vision and uses peripheral vision. When the waiter put the wineglass down on the table, I watched Sindri reach for it and pick it up in this elegantly perfect movement, using senses other than sight. I thought of it as a magic act, this kind of beautiful illusion that they just performed for me. It made me begin to think about the performativity of living in a disabled body and the kind of virtuosity in the ways that you're working with your senses to perform the illusion of sightedness.

Then, I introduced Sindri to Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee – I think it switched a lot, who was Paul Daniels and who was Debbie McGee. Even though it started as a joke, something in my mind began whirring around assistance in relation to disability and how disabled people assist each other all the time, making adaptations or accommodations for each other in quite a playful, fun way. 

What in particular about the hands as sensing organs did you find most intriguing to dissect in PASSING? 

I think it’s about the reality of using touch as an aid to sight. There are loads of navigations that I use to move through space, but I do think of my hands as these kind of sensing organs. Sindri talks about his fingers as antennas, or tentacles that reach out into the world. Like at the top of an unfamiliar staircase in a retail shop for example, because the lighting is often quite bright or directional, I'll use my hand to find the top of the bannister. In my mind, I'm in some kind of Ginger Rogers movie where I am elegantly reaching for this staircase, but what's actually happening is quite a practical thing. Once I’m in touch-connection with something, the world becomes more stable and I can get a lot of information about the slope, or the height, or the material that I'm about to walk on. 

I also thought about the practice of magic, what you do with your body to learn a trick. That’s when I began working with Augusto, another performer in PASSING, who does sleight of hand magic, which is often located in the hands and with small objects like cards and coins. Even though they're relatively normal parts of the body, there is so much variation in the hands and how much we can train them. 

Were there any scenes you found particularly rewarding to shoot or perhaps challenging? 

So, I wanted the film to play with onstage and offstage. Some of the footage is showing a glimpse into the labour, technique and training that Augusto and Sindri are doing. But, a lot of the wide curtain shots are almost like ‘the show’, the performance, and I was really interested in having the curtain as a third performer, isolating parts of the body. You often only see the hands or the feet, or part of the body is concealed.

I was really inspired by that kind of clunky – I call it the bewitched edit – from the 1960s Bewitched TV series where something just appears. Working on the film and thinking about what magic film can offer, what it offers is editing. And so actually, some of those curtain shots are shot as you see them, but some of them are quite technical composite images. For example, hands that you see on one side of the curtain were filmed on a different take than the feet that you see underneath the curtain. 

How has your experience of creating live performance helped you make a film?

I think that my performance work has a kind of a scenographic sensibility which feels like it suits film. I'm really interested in objects and environments; how they perform, how the stage itself, or the curtain, or the table is a co-performer – I wonder if that is also to do with touch and how I often feel anchored when I'm in relation to furniture or materials. 

What film offers is the opportunity to get right up close. When I was thinking about the kind of tricks or the techniques that Sindri and Augusto do, you have to be almost within breathing distance of the hands to see what's happening and I think as a visually impaired person that's really exciting. We made a choice to film things almost too close; maybe from a technical point of view, you would never have a shot that was that close up on someone's face, but we went right in. Even though it's a visual medium, I find film to be quite accessible as a visually impaired person in that way. 

What was R&D like for PASSING and how did this influence your decisions making the film?

I did a week with Sindri and Augusto in 2021 and at that point I thought I was making a performance that they might both be in. But that's when I noticed things like the hands, and how do you see hands on stage? It's quite difficult to bring people's attention to. 

In the film, there's a way that they speak which is about demoing how to do something, or what they're doing, and I was really interested in that from an audio description perspective. Often, what an audio describer is doing is voicing what's happening, so I was often asking them to voice what they were doing as they were doing it, which kind of became like rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time. But actually, for them, I think they had a real expertise in that because as a magician you are often dislocating what you're doing with what you're saying and you have to create this kind of split in the body. 

That was something that came up, that ability that they both have to split what they're doing and what they're saying they're doing. I got interested in that as a form of instructional video or demonstration, thinking about how much content there is in the world of people instructing you.

How do you feel that PASSING, as the film element, completes the narrative world you've created in the BLIND MAGIC triptych? 

For me, the film is really specifically about Sindri and Augusto and this twinning of visually impaired virtuosity and magic as a kind of virtuosity. About them – in a kind of mockumentary style – taking down the mask or showing how they're passing, as either a normal person not doing anything suspicious or magical, and passing as someone who's more sighted than they are. 

The installation is much more about giving an audience the firsthand experience of touching, and that kind of ASMR, up close soundscape. Then the performance is a bit less know because it's the piece that’s is yet to be developed. It's more about that idea of the split, and how you might be doing one thing and saying another. I’ll also hopefully have a rabbit with me for that one.

What do you hope audiences will take away from PASSING?

There's a hope that the audience will relish or luxuriate in this textured, plush, pink, strange world. And that, through that kind of close attention, or close up looking and listening, there's an opportunity to slow down, pay attention to the kind of ordinary extraordinary-ness of ourselves and of what we can do, and of what we can train ourselves to do. 

On an emotional level, I find it really moving — this dedication that Augusto and Sindri have given to this performance of themselves. We all have ways that we perform and are often made to feel bad about that because we're not being ‘authentic’ or we're having to put too much work into being ourselves. I think it's really beautiful that they put so much attention, effort and skill into moving through the world the way they do.