Feeling Thing is a new film by multi-disciplinary artist Jo Bannon and co-produced by Candoco Dance Company. The film invites us to pay attention to the objects around us and experience them as the dancing, feeling things they are.
Feeling Thing features three intimate duets between object and performer, with ASMR sound inviting us into an uncanny space where all things are alive. ASMR, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a name given to the pleasant tingling and often relaxing sensation that people can experience through the back of their head and spine when they hear or experience something that stimulates them to feel this way. What causes this response varies from person to person, but there are many popular ASMR triggers which include whispering, hair brushing, scratching and tapping.
In this context, the ASMR sound encourages the dancers and those watching the film to listen closely and sense the life in them, inviting us all to lean into feeling as a sensory, illogical, uncanny space where all things are alive.
Those of with the lived experience of disability may already know something of this potential intimacy, this strange kinship, as we dance the daily duet between our bodies and the people, objects and technologies that support us.
Feeling Thing is available to watch for free via Sadler’s Wells digital stage until 24 March 2022.
About Candoco
Candoco is a world-leading dance company interested in expanding perceptions of what dance can be. The company celebrates different ways of seeing, of being and of making art, putting them at the forefront of conversation around dance and disability.
About Jo Bannon
Feeling Thing is a co-production with Jo Bannon, a UK based artist working in performance, choreography and live art. Her work is concerned with identity, sensory perception, and human encounter and explores how our physical bodies 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 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.