Kaveh Rahnama Lab:time - Move On
Kaveh Rahnama, the artistic director of Nearly There Yet, applied for Lab:time funding earlier this year to explore themes of displacement through the story of a skilled circus performer who is forced to leave his home country and clean dressing rooms in a theatre. The challenge of the project would be to perform acrobatics and juggling in such a confined space, and to use humour to keep the piece accessible and prevent it from being too politically overt.
Kaveh wrote in his
application for Lab:time: ‘I have been really interested in the way ideas can
be conveyed in one-on-one theatre experiences or pieces which can only be
performed for small audiences, as there is an element of extreme intimacy which
I am really drawn to.’
Along with Umar Ahmed, who directed the piece, Floria Da Silva and Kaveh devised and performed the piece in a dressing room of Stratford Circus. The piece ‘ended up taking a different direction’ from the one they were expecting. Kaveh said of his conversations with Umar: ‘it became clear to us that the choice of having the conceit of a performer pretending to be a cleaner to a small audience was perhaps not our most interesting avenue.’
Here Kaveh describes an (unusual) showing of the piece:
Day three was a huge turning point in the development of the project. We decided to show a structured improvisation of the piece to Ed Stephen, Floria, and a man we had met the day before on his way to the local Job Centre who said he didn’t go to the theatre because it was too expensive. His name was Malcolm.
Instead of ‘acting’, Umar got me to work on three snippets of interview he’d conducted with me the previous two days. He also got me to improvise a juggling section at the start of the showing. This piece was connected with the idea of memory and finding a sense of belonging in a physical action.
The response to this slightly scrappy, improvised piece was overwhelming. Clean and tidy it was not. But it had something. Malcolm was extremely moved. The references to race and class and misplacement seemed to resonate hugely with his own experiences. He also loved the juggling!
The eventual decision was for Kaveh and Umar to develop it into a one-man show which can be performed in any space, the aim being to engage people who wouldn’t normally come to theatres. Moving forward they will be working with Stratford Circus amongst other partners.
Kaveh signed off his evaluation of the project with this:
Thank you Lab:Time. Experiments in circus are very necessary.
