The countdown is on to Jo Randerson’s hotly anticipated, first-time-in-forever ‘solo’1 show, Speed is Emotional, coming to Te Waipounamu in March and April for festival shows in Wānaka and Ōtepoti Dunedin. “I’ve never done a piece like this,” says Jo. The last time Jo’s work was down this way? With Barbarian Productions, they brought Sing It to My Face, a multigenerational choral community confrontation, to Wānaka in 2016. Audiences in Ōtepoti might have seen their award-winning film, Hey, Brainy Man! at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2023. They just did a showing of Speed is Emotional up at Performing Arts Network New Zealand (PANNZ) in Tāmaki and they’re “really excited to come down to Wānaka and Ōtepoti and share the show with folk down there”.
FIVE minutes into the interview I’ve closed my notebook and thought of five thousand more questions and yesyesyeses about Jo’s show and their arts practice that weren’t anywhere near my page. We talk about community, about bastard clowns and their noses, about warm harbours and about the gutter of low art and when Jo says that they don’t experience time as linear I think yesyesyes and wonder how I can represent the extraordinariness of their conversation in the writeup of our conversation.
FOUR of the yesyesyesyes things that Jo says about the show and the arts are:
“They call clown noses the smallest mask. And a lot of clowns don’t really wear noses any more. A lot of them wear makeup. In the same way, I guess that you can make your face a mask. Some people do hold a mask of severity, you know, if you think of old skool CEOs or radiant joy for a lot of housewives from the fifties, you know, that mask? I think a mask doesn’t just have to be a tangible object.”“[In the show] we stomp our way through a few different forms, more like in a bastard way. I’ve never really studied pure clown, I think of myself as a bastard clown who’s done a couple of workshops with John Bolton and people have identified me in that form and I’m fascinated with that form. You know how in standup comedy you have to be funny but what if I want to plunge into despair and ride those waves? It just seems very normal to me that you can play comedy and tragedy in the same breath and I find it strange that the world separates them . . . sometimes people are like why do you have to make that a comedy? Well that’s just how I live and breathe and walk through my life and for me it’s more weird that it can’t be funny. Like does funny mean it’s not high art? It definitely does in some people’s opinions. But then I think that’s great because if you’re in the gutter of low art you know, no one’s even worrying about the rules or whatever. And I think we can bust through those silos, be in an amazing high art gallery, make an amazing community piece with ten people on their street. They’re all good places and the hard thing is sometimes you can make a virtue out of the gutter. Sometimes out of necessity. We need adequate resourcing for what we do and care and support. To do these things, but not necessarily in the way that elitist institutions do. That’s the hard thing.”
“You know that thing? About truth being like a diamond with many different faces on it and all you can do is represent your face but someone might have the opposite facet but you’re still a part of that shimmering elusive truth.2 I don’t want to give a definitive opinion of art cos there isn’t any, it’s all coming from where you’re coming from.”
“The arts can be a warm harbour for many neurodivergent people, as it can be for people who don’t fit the kind of mainstream in other ways, be it queerness or whatever, like it’s a place where maybe difference can be seen as an asset rather than a liability. It goes back to what Ken Robinson3 used to talk about, being like, that kid’s not dumb, they’re a dancer, they process things through their body. And I feel like that. Like, I did fine at school but I did really struggle to be seated, and the whole desk and chair thing, even now I like stretching on the floor all the time.”
THREE people that Jo mentions as being absolutely integral to their ‘solo’ show:
“Elliot Vaughan’s my musical director and he’s who I started working with first. Cos the show’s about tempo and rhythm and highs and lows, so he was kind of like a musical dramaturg with me, and he’s on stage visibly next to me. Someone said that ADHD people do really well with secretaries4 which, in the show I’m like, men in the seventies had a lot of those, and women didn’t have the opportunity and I don’t want to be some sort of gender essentialist but there are reasons why some people don’t feel as good at having people help them as other sorts of people. In some ways Elliot thinks of himself as a secretary, he’s like, ‘I’m here to support you’ and he’s such an incredibly skilled musician and composer in his own right so I feel very lucky to have him there.”
“Steven Junil Park from Ōtautahi who did the gorgeous costumes and that’s been a really important spiritual connection for me. The way that Stephen works with fabric and emotion and ritual and the natural elements, that’s a massive gift.”
“… and then we have our awesome director Isobel MacKinnon who has come back from Europe to do this show for us; we’re very lucky to have her. She’s a very political thinker, someone who understands strangeness. Issy’s really good with clowns, she trained with John Bolton. And Issy directed me and Thomas when we did our Soft’n’Hard show, going back to the start of your question. I feel like Soft’n’Hard was the last time I really went at it on stage, maybe ten years ago, and it feels really good to be back. (Though I don’t want to mess with the countdown, we also talk about TWO shows that Jo directed recently, by artists that they’re “akin to”, Dominic Hoey’s 45 Cents an Hour and Freya Finch’s A Slow Burlesque.5)
TWO of the two of us in the Zoom room6 were both diagnosed with ADHD in our 40s, alongside our children and Jo says that this show “has been a huge story for me, and one that I’ve felt erupting out of me like a volcano, going through this family time and being like I really need to get back on stage and I really need to talk about this”.
Yesyesyes. Jo says people talk to each other after the show about their own experiences, questions and stories. How often it’s the people with ADHD who are supporting the people with ADHD. We talk about masking some more and they say that, “it feels like a very common femme experience . . . I think ADHD presents differently in femmes than in mascs, and the same with autism, ASD, those diagnostic models were tailored towards our masculine friends, and then if you add that into a mix where women have been encouraged to traditionally stay quiet, and mask and look after other people…”
“Maybe in the past, I’ve thought I want to have compassion for those people who think differently and now I’m like, ‘Oh I’m also one of those people and I also need to have compassion for myself.’ I don’t experience time in a linear way and so that moment of recognition also almost backdates and updates all the previous information with another lens on it.”7
ONE other thing to say—which is that I love how Jo’s work, like their conversation for this interview, is full of ‘yes anding’. By which I mean, in case it is not wildly apparent from their quotes above, that they are a generous listener, a curious maker, shining multiple facets of the arts diamond. One example of that is that Speed is Emotional has a kind of companion book, Secret Art Powers, which comes out in July 2025. “Speed is Emotional is the more personal story and Secret Art Powers the more universalised version of it”, says Jo. Secret Art Powers is based on a series of illustrated talks that they did around six secret art powers: lies, multiplicity, fluidity, failure, live body and imagination. And ADHD? Is that a secret art power too? Jo certainly plays it that way and I can’t wait to read the book and watch the show. So
GO GO GO! Run don’t walk! Get tickets now! I’ll see you there!
Speed is Emotion will be showing in Wānaka, Ōtepoti Dunedin and Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in the coming months.
- Tickets for Wānaka, Monday 31 March, can be purchased from Wānaka Festival of Colour
- Tickets for Ōtepoti, Wednesday 2 April, can be purchased from Regent Theatre for the Dunedin Arts Festival
- Tickets for Tāmaki Makaurau, 16 April – 3 May, can be purchased from Q Theatre.
- because “it’s called solo but it never is a solo of course, this solo has so much amazing collaboration in it…” ↩︎
- Cue Rihanna. ↩︎
- Ken Robinson is apparently the most watched TED talker ever and his TED talk was called “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” ↩︎
- Yes please. ↩︎
- Who was interviewed on bad apple here: https://badapple.gay/2024/10/03/a-slow-burlesque/ ↩︎
- That’s Jo and me, to be clear. ↩︎
- This makes me cry. ↩︎
