Alba Jo Bannon
CREATIVE Team Artistic creation
Jo Bannon
Dramaturgy
Nic Green
Production & lighting design
Jo Palmer
Sound design
Yas Clarke
Photography
Manuel Vason
Music
The Coventry Carol
sung by Saint Michaels Singers
recorded at Coventry Cathedral
Voice
Monica Bannon
Commissioned by
In Between Time with
Ovalhouse & Pink Fringe
Alba premiered on 13 February 2015 at IBT15 Bristol International Festival Supported by Residence, Make, Campo and Fuel’s Jerwood Residencies at Cove Park which are supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. Special thanks to Oliver Hunter, Sue Palmer, Jo Hellier, Joon Lynn Goh, Helen Cole and all at In Between Time, Rachel Briscoe, Rebecca Atkinson-Lord, David Sheppard, Abby Butcher, all the inspiring artists of Residence, Jane Klemen, Laura Dannequinn, Kate Yedigaroff, Selina Thompson, Misri Dey, Nadia Abdelaziz, Richard Gregory, Florian Malzacher, Annie Dorsen, Roise Goan, Cian O’Brien, Tom Creed and Joseph Bannon. And finally to Monica Bannon, the image maker, for all you’ve done and all you set out to do.
For Monica, through your faith you made us a miracle
Alba is a performance about paleness, blending in and standing out. Influenced by the artist’s experience as a person with albinism, the performance takes its title from the Italian word Alba: meaning sublime light. Creating a visual poem of imagery, story, light and sound Alba 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. Jo Bannon is a Bristol (UK) based artist making live art and performance. She has presented work in the UK and Europe and is an In Between Time associate artist and founder member of Residence. www.jobannon.co.uk
Notes on Alba: Alba, origin of the term albino from the Italian word Alba, meaning sublime light. Other translations include Alba, ( Provençal: ‘dawn’) French aube, or aubade, 1. A song or instrumental composition concerning, accompanying, or evoking daybreak. 2. A song of lament for lovers parting at dawn.
Notes on Catholic Mass: There’s a moment in a catholic mass, just before the communion, before those little tiny wafers are handed out, that a bell rings. Clear and sharp. This bell signifies to the congregation that God has arrived. Not metaphorically, not generally, but actually, here, in the house. It is the same with the wafers, not a symbol of the body of Christ, but the actual body. I don’t believe in God and even when I did I never believed he just turned up when that bell rang. And the thing is, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful for those who practice a faith, I don’t think anyone in the room buys it. And yet at the same time it is also irrefutably true. It is both the body and the wafer. The symbol and the thing. Yet this conflicting knowledge is held so lightly that both ideas are allowed to be true at the same time. This to me, a non-believer, is the definition of faith and I still cannot reconcile the beauty of it.
Notes on Albinism: Albinism is a genetic condition which affects the production of melanin, the pigment that colours skin, hair and eyes. Depending on the amount of melanin the person has, they may have very pale hair, skin and eyes. People with albinism also usually have a number of eye conditions, such as low vision, nystagmus and increased sensitivity to light. It is estimated that 1 in every 20,000 people in the UK have some form of albinism.
Notes on Vision and Visitations: In every human eye there is a blind spot. An area just outside the overlapping vision from each eye, a seam which doesn’t quite meet. To counteract this gap, this void, the human eye takes shortcuts. In any one moment it cannot assimilate all the visual information coming from any singular image, the depth, colours, shapes, it’s all too much, too fast. In these instances it refers to the past, scrolling through all the things you’ve already seen. It makes an assumption. A leap of faith. It tells you what you see. So to see is not about clarity but rather context. We are often led to think of vision as absolute, as truth. But what if it’s closer to a field of vision, a poetic and biological landscape consisting of imaginings, partial truths and visitations. Imprints from our past. We’ve all got blind spots, parts of our identity we can only guess at. An identity made up of vision and visions, imprints, and guesswork. The blind spots between the stories we tell of ourselves and the stories told about us.
Notes on Monica Bannon: My mum is not often described as a strong woman, she is not known for her strength of personality. Some would call her mild, meek or even timid. She is the kind of woman who gets bossed around by the doctors secretary and sits silently in pain for hours. Many would also call her funny and kind and playful and lots of other beautiful traits, but not brave. And yet she set about her task of raising me, this unexpected child, with such determination and bravery that it leaves me without words. I think of her fretful nature sending out her little white haired partially blind child into an at times hostile world and the strength that must have took. And the determination and will it must have took to turn that story into a miracle. To tell a story so often out of love that you will it into being. It is a quiet kind of strength which is often overlooked.
Notes on Being Sent to Coventry: The common meaning of the phrase ‘Sent to Coventry’ is to be ignored or ostracised. This behaviour often takes the form of pretending that the shunned person, although conspicuously present, can’t be seen or heard. This phrase was common in industrial disputes in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Anyone who was considered to be unsupportive of the workforce was in danger of finding that his/her workmates refused to acknowledge their existence. Co-incidentally this was centred on the highly unionized car industry and especially British Leyland, which was largely based in Coventry. That gave rise to people who had in fact lived and worked in Coventry all their life being sent there figuratively by their workmates.
Notes on Superstition: A report was released on April 1, 2014 by the Canadian organization ‘Under the Same Sun’ based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Titled Reported Attacks of Persons with Albinism, the document reviews 180 countries and lists 129 recent killings and 181 other attacks, all within 23 African countries. These attacks include mutilation, violence and grave violations. Tanzania is thought to have the largest population of people with albinism (PWA) in Africa. PWA are especially persecuted in Shinyanga and Mwanza, where witch doctors have promoted a belief in the potential magical and superstitious properties of PWA’s body parts. There are further issues which arise from a lack of education around albinism, for instance fathers often suspect the mother of a child with albinism of infidelity with a white man or that the child is the ghost of a European colonist.
Notes on Ghosts: I am from a ghosted city. A city which was once there and is now a void. A bombed city. A blitzed city. An absent city. A city whose identity exists only in relation to what it once was. An echo. Of what it once represented. A city recreated from the rubble with no care. On a tight deadline. To build cars.
Notes on hair: Once my mum thought she had lost my hair. Once someone surreptitiously stole a few strands of my hair in the street. They were lose, already on my jacket but nonetheless they were still mine. Once a flatmate collected all my hair which had become embedded in the carpet, the curtains, the bed clothes and presented it to me in one big ball, at a house meeting. I know it wasn’t his intention but I couldn’t help but feel a little proud.
Notes on Lady Godiva: In Coventry town centre there is a clock high above the Peeping Tom Newsagents where on the hour every hour the clock strikes and a little door open and out comes Lady Godiva, a naked woman with long flowing white hair atop a white horse. Below her is Peeping Tom, a leering male caricature, a reviled figure, but without him, as the story goes, the legend of Lady Godiva would not have existed. Because this act of rebellion – to ride naked through the streets as a protest to the medieval tax regime – only exists because he peeped and saw her. To be seen is to exist it seems. And so every Saturday me and my mum would go into town to do the shopping and stop and wait for Lady Godiva to appear. I would strain my eyes to see her and as she would appear I’d say to my mum that one day I was going to get that job. I remember she would just look at me, nod and then we would go to the market.
Notes on fighting: I used to fight a lot. Proper fights with fists and nails and kicks and screaming. I used to fight so much that my sister named me the banshee; an Irish mythical figure who would fly through the night sky, hair ablaze whose screams caused immense pain to the listener. During the years 1994–1999 I remember physically fighting; Sean McKennery, David Beavens, Caroline Stacey, the boy outside McDonalds, Leon Casey, Marcus something or other, and a man in a pub old enough to know better. I don’t remember the names of all the other kinds of fights. I remember thinking I was going to get kicked out of school and then overhearing my mum telling my dad about being called in to see my head of year and how she expected I’d be expelled but instead the school told her that Sean McKennery had had it coming from me for a long time.
Notes on stories: ‘In the end, we all become stories.’ – Margaret Atwood ‘You construct your own identity. Part fact, part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story.’ – Jeanette Winterson
Notes on Eduardo Kac’s Rabbit: Alba was also the name of a genetically modified ‘glowing’ albino rabbit created as an artistic work by contemporary artist Eduardo Kac, produced in collaboration with French geneticist Louis-Marie Houdebine. Houdebine used the GFP gene found in the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, that fluoresces green when exposed to blue light. When Alba was exposed to such light, she would literally glow green. Eduardo Kac has described Alba as an animal that does not exist in nature. In an article published in The Boston Globe, Houdebine admitted creating Alba for Kac and stated that Alba has a ‘particularly mellow and sweet disposition.’
Notes on Endings: So we know how it begins, how it arrives, with 60,000 people camped out on the tarmac of an airport‌ but how does it end? Will it end? Can it end? Any kind of beginning only brings with it one assurance and with arrival comes the promise of a pause‌ because arrival is not a flurry of activity but instead a resting. A landing. How to land in your own body‌ even if only for a moment. Even if only for the time it takes to boil a kettle and watch the steam arrive, a mist slighter and more miraculous than the sum of its parts. Here and then gone, always worth watching, never long enough, and then back to water, back to promise, back to becoming.
Copyright Jo Bannon, 2015 Photography by Manuel Vason Designed by City Edition Studio