Bold, delicate and collaborative: Rajni Shah on Glorious at Spill Festival

12 April, 2011
by: Spoonfed Theatre Team

Performance artist Rajni Shah talks about creating bold and delicate new work in response to the recession. Glorious is soon to feature at the Spill Festival of Performance.

Performance art is often interpretive solo weirdness that centres on the audience's relationship with someone on a totally different planet. It also explains everything you ever wondered about Charlie Sheen. For Rajni Shah though, performance art is something ever-changing and fundamentally inclusive. Her most collaborative piece to date, Glorious, is a touring musical theatre project that responds to the ideas of the community, local to each venue it's staged in. It's soon to be staged at The Barbican as part of SPILL Festival of Performance, and here she tells us about the utterly insane process that brought this warm and reflective musical together.

I think there’s a sense that we should be making smaller and smaller pieces of work in response to the recession, but we can still be bold and true. Let’s not give up. Let's make a musical – one of the most appropriate, exciting forms for this.

Working on Glorious is completely different to the way I've worked before – and I think it's fair to say that's true for everyone in the company. None of us have even worked on a musical before, let alone a musical that works with new local people each time and allows local musicians to reimagine its music. It means that the performance is about more than remembering lines or getting things right: when we're on stage, it really feels like a unique gathering of lives – and that includes the audience. There's something very celebratory about it, but also something incredibly poignant about recognising this shared moment as it passes and fades.

It seems I learn something new every day that I work on Glorious. When we were in Nottingham for the preview, we did our first letter-writing interventions in the Meadows Library, where our biggest fan turned out to be an eight-year old girl called Safeeya. We weren’t really expecting to work with anyone this young, but she was so enthusiastic and smart that we decided that she had to be in the show. And of course, she gave a beautiful performance.

Working in this way where each show is so different from the last, you can’t hold on to anything but the intentions of the piece. It means that we’re constantly changing the show and changing our ideas about the parameters around the show.

We spent a good year and a half exploring what the space of the show might look like. It's been a bit like archaeology – unearthing new territory every time we met: we talked a lot about ritual and presence, and about what it means to bring different audiences together. And we kept testing the work at every stage with different communities: we did a letter-writing intervention in an empty shop in Lancaster’s St Nicholas Arcades shopping centre, and then made a short performance with the people we had met. We led an open workshop in Newcastle leading to an informal event in cafe; we worked with six performers to test the material for Act One at Chisenhale Dance Space in London; and then we did the preview in Nottingham for the NottDance Festival earlier this year.

But still the show is changing – it has to change, as so much of it is a response to each place we tour. So we're still unearthing, and still discovering, and still collaborating with all the people we meet.