Last Year for Rajni Shah's Songbox
3 June 13: Last month Rajni Shah, performance artist and friend, asked me to participate in an event called Songbox, a celebration of her latest work, Glorious, the beautiful multi-dimensional live art musical. Glorious involved volunteers on stage publicly reading excerpts from letters written during a workshop process, repeating the readings, and gradually paring them to their essence. In between readings, songs (composed by Ben & Max Ringham, with lyrics by Rajni Shah) were performed by Rajni and local musicians who arranged the music themselves in another set of preceding workshops. Each performance was different – different letters, different readers, different sounds – and each performance responded to the local community. It is a beautiful work, and one my favourite shows I’ve seen in the past few years.
For Songbox, Rajni asked seven musicians to create new songs in response to the show, with the following instructions:
Use any of the words (attached) to create a song that accompanies a one-minute film (by Lucy Cash):
Take the song you have written, repeat it three times without playing the film.
Use this repeated version of what you have written as raw material.
Using this material as your starting point, create a final piece that can be any length up to five minutes.
The enigmatic film shows trees in a wood, leaves moving in the wind, near the sea, with birds flying, and you can seeit here:
Songbox one minute Lucy Cash from Rajni Shah on Vimeo.
The letter we were tasked with setting to music was written by Trixi Hartmann and is as follows:
Last year I fell in love I moved to London I watched the world cup I fell out of love I got ill I had a surgery I sold sausages and olives I learned to make coffee I almost forgot being a photographer I made new friends I saved a cat I saved money I packed boxes I unpacked boxes I grew my hair I fell from a sledge I got a new job I was v happy to accept the challenge.
I had recently filmed Lisa May Thomas’ performance of Shipwrecked at Chisenhale Dance Space, which had a beautiful a cappella rendition of a slow sea shanty as part of its soundtrack. The feel of that song stayed with me, and the words in the letter gave me the idea of a person on the ocean, recalling his last year on land, the events that meant the most to him. I chose the lines that seemed to resonate for me – made me smile or feel – and the final form of the song is an original short sea shanty, boisterous at times, but where a sense longing, of reminiscence and loss, can break in unexpectedly…
You can see more about Rajni's work here: http://www.rajnishah.com