Feeling Thing Candoco Dance Company & Jo Bannon
No longer available on Digital Stage
Feeling Thing invites us to pay attention to the objects around us and experience them as the dancing, feeling things they are. This film by multi-disciplinary artist Jo Bannon features three intimate duets between object and performer, with ASMR sound inviting us into an uncanny space where all things are alive.
Play trailer
Play audio trailer
Matter is lively. If you play the right frequency to your kitchen table, it will explode. You may not have noticed, but your iron has a certain swagger as it glides over polyester. Those of us 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.
In Feeling Thing, the camera captures three intimate duets between object and performer. The ASMR sound encourages us to listen closely and sense the life in them, inviting us to lean into feeling as a sensory, illogical, uncanny space where all things are alive.
What is ASMR?
ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It’s the 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.
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 the conversation around dance and disability..
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.
More from Candoco
Face In (excerpt) – Candoco
Sadler’s Wells & BBC Arts present Dancing Nation
Image descriptions
Header image: A white woman lies on her side in a living room, embracing a dark blue upright vacuum cleaner, one leg wrapped around its wheeled base, her bare foot arching against a pale blue patterned carpet. She cradles her head against the handle of the cleaner, echoing the soft curve of a greyish blue sofa behind.
What is ASMR? image: A woman lies back on a bed, her face hidden by a large electric fan which she holds gently to her chest. The three silver blades are enclosed in a globe of chrome wire and her fingers seem to pluck the wires.