‘________ Happens’ - Glorious Making Week, September 2009

Over the last week of September 2009, Rajni Shah Theatre gathered together a group of artists, makers, technicians and producers in Lancaster, hosted by Alice Booth and the Nuffield Theatre, to _________  towards the new production, Glorious.  Glorious is the third part in a trio of productions that began with Mr Quiver (2005) and Dinner with America (2008), which share a common thread of identity, biography and body.  There is no simple route between the pieces – that thread is sometimes frayed, woven or multiple – and each production also stands alone.  

The act of _________ included a temporary tea shop in the city; a two day workshop; and a series of conversations about Glorious and its nascent ideas.  As well as a collaboration between the people gathered together by Rajni Shah Theatre, then, the week was also a collaboration with people in Nuffield.  It was time spent in-between the realms of audiences and individuals, public and private space.

I

The tea shop took place in a disused unit inside the Saint Nicholas Arcades shopping centre.  Rajni, Lucille, Sheila and Jen invited strangers inside to have a cup of tea and participate in an exchange of letters – visitors were asked to write a letter to someone they didn’t know, and receive one in return.  The simplicity of this setup, including the comforting familiarity of a cup of tea, lay the foundations for a partnership with the unknown. 

All communication starts with an act of trust.  When you speak to me, for example, you trust me to listen with care and respect.  If I do, then I’m extending myself to you in a reciprocal act of belief.  We are both exposing our feelings and our time, in order to absorb each other’s lives.  But it happens so fast and so often that you’d be forgiven for thinking there was no risk involved. 

Writing a letter to a stranger slows this process down and crystallises each element.  First, compose your thoughts.  What secrets will you reveal to someone you’ll never meet?  Next, read my words.  What responsibilities do you have towards someone you don’t know?  If communication starts with an act of trust, then it is also always a leap into something new. 

The success of the tea shop relied on its ability to make the unknown safe and also remarkable.  Letters were sealed by the writer and opened only by the reader – private messages written and received by private people.  But the process, and its situation in the centre of town, was a public intervention inside public space.  And while this publicness made the action physically and psychologically accessible to a wide range of people, it also meant the tea shop was competing directly with the consumer-relationships that mark a shopping centre, and mould the type of public that people can become.

By navigating this course between public and private, the tea shop engineered a kind of misuse of public space, in which a passive, consumer relationship was ruptured by the responsibilities of private individuals.  It was a request for people to stand alone (engage in private correspondence) and together (join in) at the same time.  But if so, this was a highly consensual form of misuse, dependent entirely on the choices  and ethics of each participant.  Another way to describe it, then, could be the creation of a collaborative community, in which individuals were transformed into a public without giving up their sense of self. 


II

The two day workshop also considered the individual within a public, or semi-public, space.  It began with another letter-writing exercise.  Each participant wrote a private letter to one other person in the group, describing what they hoped he or she would experience from the coming days.  It was only after this act of imagining another life – and of being imagined by a stranger – that the group introduced themselves, and began to explore their personal experience (the workshop focused on producing autobiographical work).

In other words, the group realised itself as a kind of public in order to recognise its members as individuals.  As in the tea shop, this oscillation between public and private space was consensual and also collaborative; which means that it was based on trust, and also that it effected a reciprocal transformation – moving between a collection of individuals and a self-defined community.  

Another kind of transformation took place in the second day of the workshop, when the participants showed their work to an invited audience.  This, the weekend’s most public moment, created a shift in perspective.  So far, the group had been defined by their personal relationships and experience.  Now, the community became defined by its artwork - a series of autobiographical statements that sought to mark their own place in the world as distinct (but not isolated) from the people who made them.  In this case, the presence of the audience did not  just create a viewing context for the artwork, but actually brought it into being.  

The pieces drew on a range of artforms, and one continued the letter writing theme. The artist wrote a letter to her father, which she sealed in gold envelopes and gave to the audience to read.  The act of reading turned us into a kind of choir: a collective body that inhabited her words and also made them our own.  Meanwhile, the artist watched us carefully from the centre of the crowd, and conducted us with her smiles.  The trust she placed in her audience, and our communal responsibility in return, was very clear. 

Each production of Glorious will begin with a week-long workshop with local artists and audiences, and each show will include elements from this process.  The fabric of the show will be woven from the kinds of activities and relationships begun at the tea shop and the workshop in Lancaster.  Which means that these not only constituted research into the making of Glorious, but also had implications for what the content of future productions could be.  Intertwining research and creativity within a methodology of collaboration, it’s easiest to describe this time in September 2009 as an approach to ___________ towards the show.


III

The act of __________ is not just difficult to define because it contains a wide range of elements, attitudes and people that contribute to Glorious, but also because of its deliberate inclusion of the unknown.  There are some structural elements of the production already in place, but inasmuch as they tie down the nature of the show, they also make room for difference and change.

Following a year of making and research in 2010, Glorious will tour to UK and international venues in 2011 and 2012, holding a week-long residency at each stop.  The piece itself will be a musical, with an overture and three acts, in which Rajni is the central figure.  It will explore differences and changes in scale – for example between a photograph and a projected film, a stretch of turf and a hill – which play with relationships of fantasy, magic and theatre.  And the audience will be encouraged to move onto the stage, thereby re-siting the work from the body of the artist-individual to the body of the public   This is an act of transformation that corresponds to that of the workshop participants in Lancaster, who moved between being private individuals to members of a group, to public participants in and creators of works of art. 

But these structural elements are not comprehensive at this stage.  More to the point, they are designed to leave space for the unknown, and to nurture its possibility.  The content of each residency-workshop will of course contribute differently to Glorious.  Moreover, changes in scale, form and materials will destabilise elements of the production, in order to generate the potential for something(s) unexpected to happen.    It is structure itself that makes difference all the more remarkable, just as it was the familiarity of the tea shop-setting that crystallised the trust at the centre of communication.  The overarching, traditional structure of Glorious as a musical will cultivate its ability to surprise. 

Even such an open invitation, however, leaves questions to be answered.  What exactly do you have to know for the unknown to take place?   When does feeling safe slip into being complacent, or the potential for difference start to feel unsafe?  How can you reconcile a desire to collaborate with a need for structure and leadership?  How does an artist like Rajni Shah take the lead without lionising her own role?  Who owns the process of looking, including the filmed documentation of the Lancaster workshop, and how does this change the responsibilities felt by individuals making the work?  How do you make room for difference – not just the kind of difference that you want to explore, but also difference in people’s reactions, including negativity, distance or provocation?

And alongside all this are my own questions as a writer.   Can Glorious be transformed into writing?  Or is reading a more appropriate act?  If so, how can audiences and readers contribute to the making of text that surrounds Glorious?  Can such a text be open to the unknown?  Should the process of __________ acquire a definition? 


Mary Paterson, June 2010