Projects
The Nerve of It
The Nerve of It
A performance for your nervous system designed for theatres.
Combining ASMR, Spatialised Audio Description, darkness, live performance and biofeedback from the audience, it will create an immersive space that responds to the communal neurobiology of the audience. It asks how we can utilise technology to communicate the specificity of our interior, non-verbal worlds.
The work stems from a familiar contemporary experiences of living in a world which is too demanding, which is all just a bit too much. It honours the nerve it takes to move through various states of precarity - be that our traumatised bodies, our capitalist workplaces or on our small planet as the temperature keeps rising.
The piece is an immersive performance in near-darkness. Its core medium is spatial sound - audio described scenes, whispered voices and ASMR textures - supported by subtle shifts of airflow, temperature and light.
Informed by crip politics, polyvagal theory, and a deep suspicion of wellness culture, it explores how the human nervous system itself can be a meeting place and a shared network of communication. An attempt to speak across sensory languages from my nervous system to yours.
Experiment
£20,000
Meet the artists
Jo Bannon
Lead Artist
she/her
Jo 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. Informed by crip politics and disability advocacy her work attempts to unpick the ways we look, hear and sense our immediate environment in order to rethink or make unfamiliar these intrinsic human behaviours. Bannon’s work is led by form and so manifests in various mediums including intimate encounters designed for single or small audiences, staged performance, dance, film and installation.
Jo has presented work in the UK, Europe, South America, USA, China, South Korea and Australia. Selected work includes Sleight of Hand (2024) Passing (2023) Feeling Thing (2021) We Are Fucked (2018), Alba (2015) and Exposure (2011).
Rhiannon Armstrong
Artist and Sound Designer
she/her
Rhiannon is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist making works with empathy, interaction, and dialogue at their core. Conversation and collaboration are central to her practice: between makers of different disciplines, public contributors, and audiences.
