Glorious
Of all the places to see a new
musical premiered, SPILL at the Barbican seems an unlikely setting. But artist Robert
Pacitti’s annual festival of performance is well known for offering the unexpected and
in Glorious, a new commission from
Rajni Shah Projects, it delivers once again. Glee this is not.
by a desire to engage with a wider public outside the live art bubble. Here, she
not only talks to them but puts them on stage to talk to us. Six born or
adoptive Londoners recruited on nearby Whitecross Street, their stories are accompanied
by a range of ethereal songs from Shah and a subtly shifting soundscape performed by students from
the Guildhall.
As the show tours to new
venues, it will be reworked in collaboration with those communities, too. The
only constant is Shah, standing centre stage for the duration of the performance in a remarkable ensemble by Lucille Acevedo-Jones that’s both set
and costume at the same time. Wise, still and beautiful as the oak tree she resembles, Shah is a performer of undeniable presence, projecting through quiet confidence and grace alone.
Her plea?
That we find a way of existing both inside and outside ourselves in order to appreciate
what really matters, the small notes of wonder amid life’s multiplicity. Insistent
repetition of words and imagery builds a cumulative effect – “from chaos into
light” as one song puts it. It’s a yogic experience, as removed from the West
End as you could get.
Yet, like other musicals
before it, Glorious leaves you
wanting more. Shah chose the genre,
she says, to test if something so accessible could “positively embrace the unknown and
the unknowable.” The results are certainly uplifting; we are sent off into the balmy Barbican night with daffodils pressed
into our hands and a sense of togetherness. But as for offering something we don’t know already? Shah simply reminds us that, as Louis MacNeice wrote in his incomparable Snow: “world is crazier and more of it than we think / Incorrigibly
plural.”
