RAJ

crew

producer - Mohit Mathur & Ivantiy Novak

director - Ivantiy Novak & Mohit Mathur

writer - Ivantiy Novak

choreographer - Mohit Mathur

cast

Mohit Mathur

Ivantiy Novak

the project

An R&D piece about a young Indian man invited to the UK to sell himself. Together with Mohit Mathur we approached the work as an experimental movement piece that utilised beat poetry, iambic tetrameter and Berkoff’s free verse to explore identity and neocolonialism. The work was fundamentally absurdist in nature in order to engage the farcical elements of modern corporatism, bureaucracy and self-propagation. 

We formulated the satire of the piece, from Raj’s arrival to the UK to his deal with Mr Newman, by weaving surrealist movement into the language of the piece, taking inspiration from Stephen Berkoff’s Decadence and Actor, and Erast Garin in The Government Inspector. Mohit’s background in dance allowed us to utilise choreographed silent sequences to showcase the inner state of the character’s mind visually, while I made sure the textual parts of the work exposed the subtext of ‘the sale’ in rhyme.