Pieces of America 2 - by Rajni Shah and Mary Kate Connolly

Pieces of America 2

A very sideways look at the experience of performing and attending Rajni Shah’s Dinner with America in real and conceptual space…

co-authored by Rajni Shah and Mary Kate Connolly

The following is a template designed for the consumption and digestion of splinters of cultural reference…a lump in the throat, a twist in the gut, a warmth in the heart...

A cavernous dining hall envelopes you. Upon entering, you cast aside fear and difference, strike up friendship, and explore common ground. A vast Honduran mahogany dining table inhabits the centre in isolated splendour. The linen is embellished in sparse Lutheran hand with the words ‘Pride, Hope, Kinship, Drive’. You are here with others. No one feels left out or passed over.

I am waiting, sheathed in plastic. Blind. A sweat in the palm, a loss of balance, a careful slow movement of the lashes. How many of them are there? What do they look like? Are they smiling or frowning or talking? Do they think they are making eye contact with me? Have they sat down? Do they feel welcome?

Whilst milling around the vast table and reaching out to one another, you are presented with the starter of the evening: the Optimistic Amuse Bouche. This is designed to whet the palate, and purge the body of negative expectation and prejudice. It is light, fizzy with promise, and lasts only for a moment on the tongue before dissolving.

• 250 grams of the ice of the Delaware and the grit of the people crossing it
• 50 grams of the majesty of untouched landscapes
• 5 grams of the sheer size and volume of all things American
• Shake vigorously till all ice crushed and blended with other ingredients – serve in a shot glass…

The game is on. I am in the space with you. Solo voices of U.S. citizens punctuate this quiet part of the evening. I have met them all, can picture their faces and surroundings – each now reinhabits that place and time we shared two years ago. Most have moved on to new cities, lives, and some to a new realm of being. We are dining with the dead, the angry, the ungracious and the hopeful.

Guests are called to table, and invited to share in fellowship and the spoils of a beguiling landmass. Presently, a vast melting pot arrives.

You tentatively devour the space we share. It is most probably not what you expected. I try to alleviate our frustrations by seducing you. Waves of success and exhaustion wash over us. I am blonde and blue-eyed. You are staring at me. I look into your eyes but my sadness and anger and eagerness make you shy.

Main Course: Promising Stew

Base ingredient: The power of the American identity, and the endurance of the souls and hearts and bosoms of the American people.

• Place in a large pot with 250grams of Patriotism. Heat till scalding.
• Temper with the Songs of the South, the Validation of the Individual and the Fear of the Other.
• Leave to simmer, until a myriad of histories and distant cultures dragged to the shores in famine and slave ships, have all been absorbed into the mix, peppering it with the flavours of far off lands.
• Finish and mature the dish with healthy dollops of the captains of industry, the soaring bricks and mortar of shiny sky-scrapers, the chic New England style of Boston and Cape Cod, the airy art spaces of New York, the balm of Californian breezes.

I am trying to hold this space. Voices crowd in. I am singing. You have travelled into the cradles and fields of your minds. I am still trying to hold the space. Though of course, of course, this is an impossible task. You have left and some come back. This space is one of coming and going.

Side-dish 1:

Forebear’s Bread

A simple unleavened bread – coarse and sometimes hard to digest, it is formed from the sparse sensibilities of Lutheran and Calvinist settlers, cooked by the steam of growth, and transformed into a hard-working, conservative outlook, impeccably mannered, friendly, and a touch distant.

There is nothing other than being with you in the room. All our trajectories collapse into one pointed moment. You are with me now. One last song. We have come full circle.

Side-dish 2:

Moulded Faith Rice

A sticky sweet rice, made from varying individual grains, moulded together to form a wholesome, loving solid which places the family at the centre of life, which places immense faith in a benign god, which places trust in other people, and which places emphasis on striving ahead as one.

I have made an attempt, that is all. As I shed the layers of this shiny blonde outfit, you watch from the darkness. I have no idea who you are any more. I look at you and there is pity and engagement in the space between us, but I could not say exactly where it sits. I take a practical approach to undressing. Now your thoughts cram the darkness. It is comforting. You witness my body as a shared landmark. I make my escape.

Side-dish 3:

Fun and Frolics Fondue

A frothy, synthetically-chewy dip. This contains the lure of consumerism, the whiff of fast food, the playful yellow beacons of taxis on Broadway, the gushing emotion of sitcoms and movies, the stars in the eyes of waitresses working the graveyard shift in a Hollywood diner, the preacher touting for souls outside the Elvis chapel in Vegas, and the endearing twang of ‘American-English’.

My numb feet cross the space, blundering between you and the crumbs of mulch. We find ourselves in different locations. I have left it behind. The burial of something. Preparation for a harvest. Cleaning.

Side dish 4:

Troubled Gravy

A bitter sauce which should neither be avoided, nor allowed to subsume the other flavours of the meal. Ingredients include the power and status accredited to violence, the despair of the sick unable to afford healthcare, the segregation and division of race, colour and creed, the elevation of image, and the furtherance of one nation above all others.

We watch a movie together. You pretend not to notice that I am by your side. I am afraid that at this point you are looking for the end. Some of you leave the space. I wish you would stay. But of course this is part of the deal between us. You come and go. We stay. It is almost time for the feast.

Dessert 1:

The first is Traditional Apple Pie with lashings of white peaks of cream. Warm and homely, it looks to a safe and prosperous past, a security and assurance that values were intact, that the future was golden and that America would prevail.

Oranges, Mandarins, Bananas, Apples, Dates, Pears, Plums, Dried Apricots, Chocolate, Chrysanthemums, Amaretti. How ridiculous. We consider making the world kinder.

Dessert 2:

The second is Mississippi Mud Pie. This dessert should be served cold. It is an intriguing, yet not overly sweet dish, formed by the power of hope, now muddied with change and the fear of disappointment. It looks unflinchingly forward to an uncertain future.

It is painfully awkward to find our way into this space of conversation. I come from a different trajectory into this feast. But having negotiated our differences, we sometimes fall into an entirely surprising conversation for a moment.

The lethargy of post-feasting cloaks you in warmth. Conversation wafts and thins with the rising steam of bitter black coffee…it is time to leave. Shyness tinges departures with awkwardness as new found fellowships forged amid the clamour, are met with chill night air. Smiles and connections linger, stored for a future time, a future feast…a lump in the throat, a twist in the gut, a warmth in the heart...

Rajni Shah is a performance maker, writer, producer and curator. www.rajnishah.com

Mary Kate Connolly is a freelance writer on performance and live art based in London

Pieces of America 1: A recipe for collaboration by Mary Kate Connolly

Pieces of America: A recipe for collaboration

“I’m fascinated by the notion that in this day and age everyone carries a small piece of ‘America’ inside them, a tiny concept or visual reference, often involuntary. And I’m at once repulsed and delighted at just how easily I feel connected with those ideas, which are often linked to capitalist ideals, of freedom, saturation, desire, individuality. So this is a piece about the ideas and images that we call ‘American’ and, for me, about a complicated personal attachment to both the land and ideas of the United States.”

– Rajni Shah-

Reading Rajni Shah’s words above, I found myself instantly drawn to the concepts at the heart of Dinner with America. I was curious about the ‘pieces’ that people might carry within. Are they a burden? Or an unconscious cache? Wedged in the cavities of consciousness, and creeping occasionally to the surface in response to a trigger: a sound, a scent, a vision. The sight of an iconic American face perhaps, captured on a silver screen, or a world stage. The bitter waft of black diner coffee left too long to percolate.

And what about me? Do I carry a piece of America within? Delving into the recesses of my sub-conscious I find not one piece, but numerous shards scattered in disarray. A jigsaw with pieces that will never join up; the image they convey will always be gappy, and tantalisingly incomplete. My childish glee at discovering ‘Swiss Miss’, a sickly hot chocolate complete with ‘just add water’ marshmallows, which would arrive every Christmas, dispatched by faraway American friends. In 1980’s Ireland...that was hot. The tales of starving wretches boarding famine ships bound for Ellis Island, taught at school…a promised land which would both sever them forever from kith and kin, and give them their one desperate chance at survival. Timing the lift to the top of the Twin Towers on a teenage trip to New York - it took almost two minutes, just as the cheery lift attendant had promised. My righteous, impotent fury at the war-mongering of recent times. My desire to travel to the Rocky Mountains with my father one day – a landscape which he has always marvelled at, but never touched.

Dinner with America is an ideological and literal feast. The audience is invited to dine out, not only on sumptuous dates and chocolate, but on the ideals, concepts and contradictions of a vast and complex landmass. This notion intrigued me and led me to wonder how one might go about conceptually ‘digesting’ a country in one sitting. The joke that begins ‘how do you eat an elephant?’ ends with the suggestion ‘in small bite-size chunks’. This would seem like a sensible attitude to employ when attempting to digest a continent. But what would those chunks be comprised of? Where would one harvest the ingredients?

As a writer with SPILL: Overspill I have been given an opportunity to collaborate with Rajni Shah – to engender a conversation and see where a meeting of minds might lead. Exploring how one might gather ingredients for a conceptual gorging on America, we decided that I should ask the audience members of Dinner with America for ideas. To enquire what fragments of America they might lug around inside….

On the first night of Shah’s performance, I set up a little ballot table outside the theatre space. People were generous with their contributions; casting their folded up votes, or humouring me gracefully as I canvassed for their thoughts whilst they queued before entering the venue. A few days later, Rajni Shah too gave me a long list of her ‘pieces’ to add to the pot. Armed with these fragments, I hope to devise a means of combining them; a recipe perhaps for feasting on America in a positive, receptive and palatable fashion. What ‘flavours’ might complement one another? How could they be combined? In what ratio? In what order should they be served?

Patriotism

Yellow Taxis

Kinship

A crush on Obama

Hope

Fear…

Check back here this Sunday to read the recipe...

Mary Kate is a freelance writer on performance and live art, based in London

Summoned to Table: Rajni Shah’s Dinner with America by Mary Kate Connolly

Dinner with America

By Rajni Shah

Laban Theatre, April 6th and 7th

The hymn Amazing Grace, oft associated with the spiritual heart of America’s South, was in fact written by an Englishman, former atheist, and ex-slave trader, John Newton. The Native American Cherokee, during their forced exodus to the West of America known as the Trail of Tears, are thought to have sung it as a hastily performed funeral rite, when proper burials of the dead were not possible. Amazing Grace was popular with soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War. Versions have been recorded by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Joan Baez.

Thus when Rajni Shah began first to hum, and then sing the hymn during Dinner with America, the tune resonated not only with her immediate surroundings, but with a host of American presences and absences which the work sought to evoke. A sense of ritual, redolent of a religious rite, permeated Dinner with America. It seemed a meditation not merely on American people or culture, but on America itself as an animate being: vast, perplexing and potentially intangible. Entering the performance space I was struck by the hushed concentration of the onlookers who picked their way through channels of powdery soil which criss-crossed the floor, or crouched in darkened corners to survey the scene. It appeared we were all implicated in this rite – a calling up of stories, ideals and images that we each could muse upon as we wished.

From the four corners of the stage echoed recordings of American voices – young, old, American born, immigrant, affluent, homeless. Speaking with pride, shame, ardour, and disillusionment, they wove a varied and contradictory patchwork of what America meant to them as individuals. And in the centre of this stood the figure of Shah, swathed in a white veil and bathed in light; an icon around which we had gathered to venerate.

After a time Shah emerged to reveal long white gloves, a voluptuous blonde wig, floor length white gown, and a fixed, inanimate white face. The image was beguiling; ‘beautiful’ in a stereotypical sense, yet utterly grotesque and filled with artifice. Ensnared by the spotlights, she stood erect and unmoving, with the static posture of a shop-window mannequin. From time to time she would alter her stance ever so slightly, to disrupt the tableau and set a new one in motion. Hands on waist in a bored gesture of defiance would evolve into a heroic stance with one arm stretched aloft, and back again. And all the while Shah sang that iconic tune, in a catalogue of styles ranging from husky sexiness, to patriotic defiance. The Statue of Liberty, Marilyn Monroe, cosmetically altered features, blonde ambition, beauty, strength, power. All these notions swirled above this perplexing apparition - a provocative embodiment of a geographical and cultural landscape.

In many ways, Dinner with America was a methodical peeling back of the layers of a country. Not in an effort to reach its core necessarily, but more to enjoy and explore the artefacts unearthed, fully in the knowledge that a myriad more always lie beneath. Being aware of Shah’s physicality underneath her white mask enlarged the words of a Mexican man who said he had never known racism until he crossed the border. The desire to peer beneath the glittering exterior of the performed image was equalled by the need to hear his and other stories; realities utterly at odds with the glossy white shell of the USA. This was furthered when Shah seductively slipped off her white gloves and gown to reveal not white, but brown skin, clad in a sequined short dress and gaudy platform boots of red white and blue. The shimmering white layer of strength had been sloughed off to reveal a body that was complex, othered, exoticised, negated and unmissable, all at once.

By this point in the work, the burden of continual singing was beginning to show in Shah’s strained voice, cracking and gasping for breath as she intoned the hymn repeatedly. Her posturing became aggressively sexual, pleading for attention, trying to assert a power and allure, fast slipping away. It felt almost that a scab had been picked off, revealing an ooze and decay often obscured – histories erased, forgotten, erupting now to the surface…

The ultimate and last transformation was performed in silence. Voices had faded away, flashing gaudy lights were now steady and fixed. Slowly Shah removed dress, boots, false eyelashes, and finally, peeled off the latex mask to reveal her own face. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this intimate public act seemed on the one hand humbling and raw, but on another, filled with strength and poise. The final layer: unadorned and vulnerable, but freed from the burden of artifice and expectation.

Completing the sense of ritual in the work, a feast then began, in which everybody was invited to share. Silver platters spilling over with chocolate, fruit and nuts were carried onstage and the previous hush of the audience was broken as people came together to eat, and to chat. A literal ‘Dinner with America’. In this simple action, a final facet of that vast landscape was conjured. One which resonates with the positive sentiments of Amazing Grace. One which whilst occasionally lost amid a quagmire of division and hatred, nonetheless courses defiantly through the conflicted, loving heart of America.

Mary Kate is a freelance writer on performance and live art, based in London.