The Dirty Work

Jo Bannon has always had a weakness for white rabbits. In her new solo performance, The Dirty Work, Bannon literally conjures one up out of a hat and combines classic stage tricks – smoke, a magic wand and sorcerers’ spells – with her personal experience as a visually impaired artist. A look behind the velvet curtain blurs the lines between truth and illusion, performance and reality, and makes visible the usually invisible work it takes to move through the world. The Dirty Work is a magic show about visibility and disability. It explores the complex choreographies of blind virtuosity and sleight of hand, and invites the audience to recognise the surprising parallels between the two. Say “white rabbit” three times and watch the magic unfold before your very eyes!

Jo Bannon lives in Great Britain and works in performance, choreography and film. Her artistic practice deals with questions of identity, sensory perception and human interaction. The focus is on investigating how our physical bodies perceive the surrounding world. Taking her identity as a disabled woman with albinism as a starting point, Jo Bannon explores the complexity of sensory experience as well as the question of how this can be communicated, shifted or questioned. After presenting Magic of the Hands in Braunschweig at Theaterformen 2024, she returns with the premiere of the follow-up piece, The Dirty Work.