sustained theatre

By Online Content Editor

Recent performances include Mr Quiver, Dinner with America, and the upcoming musical Glorious, a loose trilogy of performance installations addressing the complexities of cultural identity in the 21st century; and the series small gifts, a three-year enquiry into the relationship between gift and conversation in public space.

The following is a short interview with Rajni to introduce her work and thinking.

How did you start off as an artist?

I had a friend who was a budding actress. She was a little older than me, and I worshipped her. When I was eleven she came to visit me, and she asked me to help her rehearse some lines for a play she was preparing for. While we were doing this, she said, “You should be a director”. Since her opinion meant so much to me, I took this on as my ambition. It later turned out I was to be a performance artist rather than a straight director, but she wasn’t very far wrong.

What’s your earliest experience of visiting theatre/performance?

I’m not sure about earliest anything, but I did recently identify several experiences that shaped my aesthetic as a young person.

1. The Circus – When I was five or six, I somehow won tickets to the circus in Geneva – I think it was either Circus Knie or Circus Nock. The intensity of this experience got right inside me. My mum recalls me watching a contortionist with increasing fixation, and finally letting out such a loud scream that she had to take me outside.

2. Sylvie Gyllem’s beautiful Evidentia series when it was first shown on BBC2. This wasn’t super early in my life, but had a lasting impact. I’d never really seen much dance before this, and suddenly discovered that (at that time) BBC2 was showing some really interesting stuff so recorded this series onto a VHS tape. During the creation period for most of my early shows, I would watch this tape over and over to remind myself of the power of the visceral abstract – that there is a language deeper than the words and narrative we commonly use to make theatre.

3. My dad took the family to see one of the Shakespeare histories – I think it was at the Oxford Playhouse, and may have been Richard III. I don’t remember too much except that it was visually epic. The ambition of this production stuck with me – the way they were able to evoke the weight and intensity of monarchical unrest and disease through sound and set. The visuals spoke for themselves, and the powerful words were a bonus, another layer. Wish I could remember which company…

4. Twin Peaks. Again, this was on TV, but looking back I think that watching this series with its extravagantly rich visuals and fluid storylines really nourished me as a young teenager.

What experience do you bring to performance?

The most helpful experience I bring to performance is my growing experience as an audience member. This is the best and most honest form of training I could hope for. It allows me to always be making work that is focused on a dialogue with the audience, on taking my role as host seriously, and on respecting where each audience member might be coming from.

What's your current focus about as an artist and why?

Speaking with Strangers

I wanted to be able to speak to strangers, to get over the nonsensical veil of social shyness that disallows me from even offering help to someone I don’t know in a public space; I wanted to be able to talk to anyone as another human being and not get hung up on all the stereotypes and barriers.

I feel a huge amount of responsibility towards my audiences.Being an audience member can be life-changing. And it can also be humiliating, awkward, boring. I wanted to get to know different people, and to allow people who didn’t agree with me a way into dialogue through my work. So in 2005, when I was lucky enough to be awarded a Live Art Development Agency bursary, I decided to use it to take my work into public space.

Since then, I’ve created many public interventions where I use the idea of gift to open up dialogues with strangers. And now, I’m taking this notion a step further. In my new piece, Glorious, I will work with presenters over a year to build up a presence in public space, and this will lead to a whole range of non-artists performing with us on stage in a unique musical.

Many thanks to Rajni Shah for the article. Learn more about Rajni’s work at http://www.rajnishah.com where you can join her mailing list.

Film Credit: Uncertain Landmarks (2008) a remix of scenes from the making of Dinner with America by Lucy Cash. The film and still are both part of the book Dinner with America - Essays, Films, Images and Conversations which can be ordered from http://www.rajnishah.com website.