Sahabari Rao

“STILL STANDING”
Workshop

Participation: for free, with PRE-REGISTRATION at linda.sama@gmx.net / Subject: STILL STANDING

Credits:

Artistic Director – Shabari Rao

Assistant Director – Pia Bungalowala

Sound Designer – Rajesh Mehar

Hindustani Vocals – Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy

Introduction to the project
Still Standing 4 is part of a series of works that have been unfolding since 2018. The series explores the implications of stillness as an embodied experience. Each new work carries traces of the works that have been made before and engages with the ideas that: stillness is simple but not necessarily easy; stillness is disruption; stillness is an experience that is available and accessible to anyone.
Still Standing 4 is a 12 hour long performance experience that happens through the night. There is no separation between performers and audience. There is no director. It is a participatory performance where an audio score takes us through the duration of the event. The score includes verbal instructions/invitations, vocal singing and ambient night sounds. Each participant is invited to engage with and interpret the score in a way that makes sense to them. Every interpretation is valid and will shape the manifestation of that particular and singular experience of the performance. Therefore, viewed individually, Still Standing 4 is an experience; viewed collectively it is a performance.

STILLNESS MANIFESTO
by Shabari Rao

Stillness is disruption.
To be perfectly still is to cause disruption at a cosmic level.

Luckily, we can never be perfectly still. Even in death there is movement.
But we can be still enough and can cause disruption enough.

Stillness disrupts capitalism
The minute you are still, you stop being productive. When you stop moving, you no longer progress. And, in stillness, you disrupt what it means to perform. Progress, performance and productivity are the pillars on which capitalism is built. Sometimes even in stillness we become obsessed with these capitalist imperatives. Questions like – Is this stillness good enough? Am I getting better? When will I get to the real stillness? Is this all a waste of time? Or am I getting something out of this? – begin to plague us. But stillness has a way of rendering such questions insignificant. The only way to appreciate stillness is to free it from capitalist expectations.

Stillness disrupts our sense of self
Stillness is an unfamiliar state for the body. The body becomes a landscape that is unfamiliar. You have to relearn how to walk when it is done extremely slowly. Standing becomes a challenge. When something you have taken for granted, something so invisible, so simple, proves difficult to do, it is unsettling. It disrupts the familiar sense of body. Stillness also disrupts a sense of identity. Because we identify with what we do, what we make. We might be familiar with being still in a passive way while watching TV for example, or in an active way while waiting to get the perfect shot of a bird, maybe. But we are still doing something. So, who am I when I am not doing anything?

Stillness disrupts what it means to care
Stillness in times of crisis is not looking away, it is not turning a blind eye. It is not an act of passivity. It is looking directly at. Stillness forces us to confront where the care is really needed. To offer care in a state of agitation or anxiety is to act from a place of volatility. Because, in times of crisis it is easy to become anxious; when one is anxious it is easy to be manipulated. It is therefore crucial to find stillness in times of crisis. Stillness in fact, creates energy. And that energy can propel care work that is meaningful and sustainable. Care that responds to that which needs it the most.

Stillness disrupts relationships of power
A child on the supermarket floor. A man standing in Taksim Square. The youth of a country lying on their backs. Thousands of farmers refusing to go home. The simple act of refusing to budge: physically, ethically. Stillness is the genesis of non-violent resistance.

Stillness disrupts our sense of time
In stillness, time stretches, and folds, and thickens and ruptures. It is impossible to tell how much time has passed. Because does time even ‘pass’?

Stillness disrupts…
So, what does this imperfect stillness feel like?

It can be

a fidgety stillness
a tired stillness
a deep stillness
a wobbly stillness
a focused stillness
a stillness that is off balance
a deathlike stillness
an alert stillness
an energising stillness
a noisy stillness

If we know that we are not aiming for perfect stillness, then we can savour the many different flavours of imperfect stillness.

Movement:
We are moving all the time. We are used to being in a state of movement. We ascribe value to movement – it suggests progress, development, achievement. Movement is towards a goal. Even if that goal is to slow down! And the pace of that movement has got faster and faster as time goes by.

Slowing Down:
Stopping is tough. There is a momentum to our thoughts, our days, our bodily rhythm that makes it difficult to simply stop. So, we slow down a little bit. For just a breath. There is an infinite distance between moving and stillness and slowly we can explore that vastness.

Stillness:
We never arrive at a state of perfect stillness. But slowing down can become so deep that it feels like stillness. Now, stillness becomes a sort of magnifying glass. When the big rushing movements of thought, emotion and body slow down, the little, hidden, subtle things begin to show themselves. Like a shy creature of the night time, these things emerge when other things subside. And if you look too quickly, they might hide again, but if you sit awhile, they will come and sit next to you.

Moving again:
Now we have a scale between movement and stillness that we can explore in greater and greater detail, making it possible to come back to movement with a clear and tangible experience of what it means to be still.

“In order to understand the dance one must be still. And in order to truly understand stillness one must dance.” — Rumi.

BIO
Shabari Rao
is an artist and academic from Bangalore, India. Her work is rooted in practice-based research and engages with education, mental health, gender, and the environment. The body plays a central role in her process, which is collaborative and emergent in nature and takes the shape of performing, directing, curating, teaching, writing, and more recently, experimental film and audio work. Over the last 20 years her work has been presented through conferences, festivals, residencies, and publications, in cities across the world such as Sydney, Shanghai, Kathmandu, Singapore, London, New York and several cities in India. Her current projects include being the lead researcher for Open Invitation which is a multi-art, yearlong collaboration with Sonic Matter, Zurich; and Still Standing 4 which is a 12-hour immersive performance experience that builds on her previous work on stillness and has been commissioned by HelloEarth, Sweden.