Tomorrow night Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts presents Jo Bannon’s Alba. Ahead of the show, we spoke to the artist about the creative process leading to the creation of this visual poem. Using theatre as a medium, Alba demonstrates to be a performance that uses the experience of albinism as a starting point “to explore vision, seeing and being seen”.

 
What made it a deciding factor to translate your experience with albinism into a visual poem?
 
My experience of albinism centres a lot around vision, seeing and being seen. Being a person with albinism means there is an interesting paradox between having a limited way of seeing in the world (my eyes have low vision and high sensitivity to light) coupled with having an appearance in the world which is highly visible and distinct; pale skin, white hair, pale eyes. 

So I was interested in using some of the same aesthetics and symbols of albinism; white, pale, pure, angelic, as visual motifs in the work. One of the provocations I used when making the work was to create a stage space where I could blend in, an experience that I don’t often have, so the set transforms a black space into a white space. I’m interested in how visual material might be used as a vocabulary in the work, rather than text as a language, and what the emotional potential might be in images to make meaning and feeling for an audience. 

 
What main message do you want to tell your audiences with this autobiographical visual piece?
 
 
Well that would be telling…! By which I’m only half joking… Because if I could write or speak the ideas within the work I wouldn’t have to use the mechanics of theatre to conjure them. So whilst I am clear what the central ideas in the work are I really do invite the audience to experience the work live and to make meaning from the images, sound, action and to trust their own interpretation. For me it’s not about being deliberately evasive in any way, or making a riddle to be decoded, but about setting ideas in motion and allowing for the ambiguity and varied feelings and interpretations that can afford. I think that’s what theatre can really do best and when it works it’s miraculous!
 
Your performance is fulfilled with white props and lighting. For you, what does the colour white connote, mean or symbolise?
 
All sorts of interesting and conflicting things: albinism / privilege / purity / cheap white domestic goods / Catholicism / minimalism. I hope all these things are in orbit in the work.

A few tickets are still available, including Pay What You Decide.