Wellington multimedia artist Jo Randerson with the family dog, Panny, in their colourful home office. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The “neuro-spicy” performer gets personal in a new show on the exhilarating chaos of life with ADHD.
Sitting still is a kind of torture for someone like Jo Randerson, who powers through the world at light speed.
So when I talk to the Pōneke performer about their new show on the “exhilarating chaos” of life with ADHD, the first thing I do is apologise for subjecting them to the spatial confines of a Zoom call.
Randerson tilts the laptop camera so I can see the wobbleboard at their feet. “It’s great because I can stand still but be constantly balancing. So I’ll be on that if you wonder why I’m shimmering like a ghost.”
The founder and artistic director of Wellington’s Barbarian Productions has always viewed life from an off-kilter perspective.
One of their favourite places to work is lying on a bean bag on the floor, gazing up at the office ceiling where pieces of old wallpaper have been arranged around two downlights to create a pair of eyes.
The theatre-maker, writer and former stand-up comedian describes their brain as a super-charged pinball machine. Like Randerson’s new show, it fires in multiple directions simultaneously, and it’s not always easy for others to keep up.
“Often people tell me to slow down or to calm down, which can be quite irritating to hear sometimes. We can be so quick to judge, but I think there’s no one normal or right pace,” they say.
“I just really want to defend the rhythm that I’m at, while at the same time not heroising it, because it can get a bit speedy and out of balance. But some beautiful things can happen in there, too.”
Speed is Emotional, which opens Silo Theatre’s 2025 season in Auckland next month, is the multimedia performer’s most personally revealing show to date. A genre-blur of poetry, performance and comedy accompanied by musician Elliot Vaughan, it traverses everything from music and menopause to parenting and gender.
Randerson, who’s done some reading around the relationship between neurodivergence and being queer, says adopting they/them pronouns is something that’s slowly emerged over the past few years.
Husband and long-time collaborator Thomas Lahood and their two sons, Caspar and Geronimo, have taken it in their stride.
Reaching a place of self-acceptance has also come, in part, from being diagnosed with ADHD, after their younger son was assessed.
For Randerson, it’s helped make sense of the “neuro-spicy” qualities that have fed their creativity as an artist while also setting them apart.
“We have an ongoing conversation in our household about the usefulness of labels, but I think they can be a little rock in the sea you can land on,” they say.
“ADHD is not a mental illness, it’s a condition. But then I think depression and anxiety are pretty much part and parcel of it, too. There have been times when I’ve been embarrassed by the differences I have and wanted to be normal and blend in with the crowd.
“But I think the arts world welcomes people who are neuro-spicy, and I feel really at peace with it now. It doesn’t mean that my psyche is at peace – I still ride the waves of those feelings – but I’m like, ‘This is how it is. This is how I am’.”
Randerson, whose father is an Anglican priest, toyed with becoming a psychiatrist before doing an arts degree at Victoria University, ditching a Latin major for theatre along the way.
Operating out of the old Vogelmorn Bowling Club, Barbarian Productions has been touring award-winning shows internationally since 2001 and was the first performing arts company in New Zealand to pay the living wage.
The name references one of Randerson’s early stage personas as a volatile, anti-social viking in Banging Cymbal, Clanging Gong, which they first performed at the age of 22 and was partly inspired by their Scandinavian heritage.
The subversive politics of the punk movement have also been a key influence on their work.
In 2013, Randerson set up a bridal shop opposite Parliament in the lead-up to the Marriage Amendment Bill, which legalised same-sex marriage.
Their most recent collab with Silo Theatre was directing A Slow Burlesque, an exploration of queer culture that combined elements of absurd comedy and physical theatre.
The author of several short-story collections, they have a new non-fiction book coming out in July called Secret Art Powers, a concept that began life as a series of interactive illustrated talks.
Drawing from creative values that are central to the arts community, it outlines six “counter-cultural powers” Randerson believes can be transformative when applied more widely.
“Multiplicity is one of them, the idea that several things can be true at the same time. I talk about fluidity being a power and also the power of being wrong.
“Creatives aren’t afraid to step into that space and take risks, to say things that maybe would be unsaid otherwise, and sometimes get it wrong – but also to recover from that and keep moving.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.