The Platforming Artist podcast series is supported by Torch as part of humanity's cultural programme.
Hello and welcome to the third instalment of our Chameleon Artist podcast, and today we're so happy to have someone open with us similar.
It's one of the poets on our original production of Medea. Hello, how you doing?
And they're I'm doing really well. Thank you. How are you doing? I'm not so bad.
Really glad to have you on. Just to tell you us a bit about you.
You studied classics at Oxford. Obviously, that's where we met.
And whilst that not only did you work on the day with us, you were absolutely at this make up and you are now the founder of Coriander Theatre,
which is something I'm sure we're going to talk about later on. You're also a performance poet.
Obviously your commissioned for us right now,
but you have had other recent commissions from the English heritage, from Sony, from the Barbican galleries,
and alongside all of this, you're a political organiser and you currently work for local anti-poverty charity where you live in Hackney.
And my sort of favourite facts about you is you're also a yoga teacher. And yeah, that's a whole story that maybe we'll touch on later.
But yeah, so, so glad to have you on. So glad to be here.
So let's start, let's jump straight in, Corey out there to great name.
Great story. What made you found it? What's the story? What's your mission?
Obviously incredible group of people running it where people of colour.
Let's let's have a little chat about that. Talk to me about coriander. Yes, absolutely.
I would love to. So in many ways, the seed of coriander theatre was the very same production of Medea that we were lucky enough to work with you on.
But when we were studying together and I think it was seeing that production, that extraordinary,
truly extraordinary up in production was such an inspiration to me and certainly other people in that age making community of seed.
And so some of the theatre they've done before, all with my very dear friend that we went on with perhaps a more like community building approach
towards art making and theatre making because we're really seeing the power that could come from that.
When we graduated uni and moved to London,
we wanted to keep taking it further and we found that so many of the artists around us just to keep them alive,
really, who many of whom happened to be artists in different disciplines or producers them were also queer people of colour.
And we saw all their resources out there, the funding as hard as it is to access.
And we thought, well, we can do that. We can use the skills that we have to access that funding,
access those resources and then use those like very real material things to support queer artists of colour,
all kind of politically engaged artists and make some amazing art together.
It's an incredible mission,
and I'm so glad that you guys were inspired by the production and certainly do that and put on productions at Oxford and continue now.
But I've got to ask coriander, theatre, coriander, what's the what's the story there?
What's the name? Yes. I was such a fan of the name.
We went through many, many iterations of the name for a long period of time.
I was really deeply committed to something like yoghurt and rice collective or something until a dear friend who is out being like, Well, no,
when you're not really a collector, if you are a theatre company and submit to you,
this makes it sound like you manufacture those like Malaya, you'll get to put home.
So we we took the note and instead we reflect a little bit.
We loved the idea of staying connected to food similar to what it is that they make for some reason focuses on food or just guest.
We just like to eat. We like to make through this that connected to cultural heritage to be thinking about how
one shared element of North Indian food and Typekit Mediterranean Arab Lebanese food,
and of that heritage is fresh coriander that kind of threw it on top of it.
We also particularly like that detail that, you know, some people have that genetic predisposition.
That means they just can't enjoy coriander. We kind of like that because we were like, OK,
some people might not like as if this company of great people of colour and if they don't like us, then that's their problem.
I'm certainly a fan of that coriander beer to great people, but I am one of those people who is doesn't like coriander, genetically type smoke.
But I love with this company, and I think it's very interesting.
I mean, what is it like being in that in that space or what have you being queer people of colour?
I mean, it just took me about how it feels to create in that space and the experience you had.
I mean, you've done numerous things. You've gone to Berlin.
You've you've you've really had experience within with this theatre company and we'd love to hear just a bit about how that is and how that feels.
Yes, absolutely. And in many ways, it's been absolutely extraordinary.
Remember when we were in Berlin, it was part of this theatre festival festivals,
the kind of like oppressed and political theatre makers around the world with all these amazing people from all different backgrounds,
from really a fairly big geographical spread. And I remember at one point we were in just just our company.
In the kind of converted chapel of the site of this, it used to be a church.
Now it's a progressive theatre venue of some sort.
And I remember in this very like sacred feeling space, reciting this like fairly queer,
like really voicing like translation of a beautiful piece of North Indian devotional,
which can be ecstatic to have this wonderful friend of mine shiver with their dancing to this classically trained as well as a Bollywood dancer.
And she was there like dancing and dancing and dancing and entering this state of this kind of like state, almost like mystic love, right?
Like such a rich part of our shared cultural heritage in that spiritual aspect that I'm interested in.
And then someone else, after a night was playing the drum and this this energy built and built and built, and we could access this.
Profoundly vulnerable part of ourselves that we wouldn't have been able to do in so many other places at the same time.
There are always difficulties queer people of colour are so often disproportionately affected by so
many of the worst forms of exploitation and violence in our society today and managing those things,
managing the potential of violence and trauma and insecure housing and lack of stable income.
Managing all these things as it accompanies a community as hard, always hard.
Sure. I think I mean, that all sounds amazing and I got I wish I was there in the bill judge.
But I think that's what you know to the end is also really important.
And I think that so often we we should be celebrating these spaces and I think people from the outside looking in things like,
Wow, they've created space. Wow. But I think that it's so often forgotten how difficult these spaces are to create.
It's not just a case of throwing a bunch of queer people or people of colour, queer people of colour in a room together.
It's got to be nurtured. You've got to put a lot of time and energy into it. It comes with a lot of difficulties and hiccups and hang ups and funding,
even things just like finding funding and finding people who can get behind the idea or a difficult enough.
And then when you're in that space and trying to create safety and a nurturing environment throughout these cases,
it's kind of I think that it sounds great from the outside. But believe me,
I appreciate and know the work that it takes to actually to successfully make that space and then use that space to create to create work,
to create art too. Even if even if it's just to create, you know, relationships, it's a really it sounds a lot easier than it is.
Issue, but to jump starting, I think I mean, we're both South Asian, we're both Indian, we're based North Indian, and my dad was born and raised.
I was born in south when my dad was was that emigrated south over the age of like seven from Kenya.
And there are a lot of Punjabis in South. But we we grew up with a bunch of jobs in our life and you could draw.
The Indian community has a real tight bond in this country. And I would love to hear sort of a bit more specifically about your your experience.
You know, I'm a I'm a North Indian gay man.
I would love to hear about your experience, particularly as a sort of Indian Indian queer person.
Mm-Hmm. Absolutely. And I had no idea that you were born in Seattle and your dad spent so much time in subtlety.
My own my grandparents worked in software. My parents worked in Seattle.
I worked in Philco. I grew up in Ealing. In fact, my my, my grandparents, my side were the first South Asian doctors in the UK.
Well, of course. Yeah, I was born in Ealing General Hospital.
Pretty, pretty typical folk. Pretty typical anyway. Love that.
Yeah, it's it's incredible. Thank God my connexion. That centralised like so much the heart of everything I love about London as well.
I especially like to bring it back to food.
My God, when this is all over, we should go south and just like we are way down our way through the ice, through the border.
Exactly. Yeah. If nothing else to do. Well, yes, particularly like as like a sundaes.
In comparison, if a person has an equivalent ethnic heritage, maybe like a cookie they see,
like what does that mean in the UK and especially is like a non-binary person or a queer personal, the person that they are?
Well, I suppose it's been like a real. Trajectory.
I think it's been a real journey in a lot of like real, very intense suffering and a lot of quite violent and traumatising experiences over the years.
And I think at the heart of it, a kind of if you're destabilising in the sense of self,
I think that's one of the things that runs through all of these experiences.
I feel very lucky to be where I am now, which is able to hold these things quite lightly.
Most of the time not to kind of deny any of that sadness or suffering,
but to recognise that there is like a lightness and a joy and an ability to move with it and through it and in celebration.
I think often what comes to mind for me is a slight sense of.
Freedom, perhaps maybe chaos is a better word. There's this sense of.
Like, not completely understanding what it means for me to be this person who I am in this society as it is.
I didn't really know. I have a kind of love that I'm happy to just kind of twiddle through my life.
Yes. Do I have I been working on a whole bunch of programmes which are like queer mystic poet from the subcontinent?
Like yes or mean, taking other prisoners to the subcontinent, just making them even more gay?
They already? Yes.
And these are things that are so important to me, like they're really not just my army can be a part of the fibre of my being like these.
I'm sensitive. It's like they're part of me. I'm.
But they know who I am, that they kind of fibres within this slightly confusing, loose edged, porous rebounded mess that I see myself as being.
So yeah, I don't know. I think that I mean, I think that's completely fair, and I certainly can said to that as a.
I think that what I've always. Said, we talk a lot about that chameleon is, you know, there is no role models.
Very few of, you know, India. Queer people, you have the guy from Queer Eye.
Mean, it's a sin, which is an incredible series. I mean, one of the one of the main characters is India, and that was I remember when, when, when,
when, when watching the first episode, suddenly seeing some of that sort of I was completely shocked.
And Russell T Davies has done an incredible job with that series.
But on the whole, I mean, growing up, these examples career and it's a senator from the last three or four years,
like growing up that just I'd never seen myself on screen, on stage, on film.
And I think that that really has incredibly detrimental effects.
And I do think that absolutely through the work that we're doing,
comedians and we do encourage and I'm sure numerous numerous other activists are trying to get those stories out there.
And these are just I'm sure these two examples are just the beginning of numerous stories that will be that we'll be talking about that.
But on the flip side, to try and make it a positive and unlike I suppose, other people of colour who know other people of colour,
other queer people who maybe have had role models or have these like weird stereotypes and things.
And we just don't sort of exist in a way that we like now creating our own existence, our own story and motive,
and we get to be part of creating that space on stage, on film, on in our communities.
And I think that the positive from it is that like I do feel very free and very I don't I mean,
I don't have a role models for things, and I think it's really important that younger queer Indians do.
But at the same time that the blessing of where we're at now, if we can find one, is that we do just sort of have this liberty.
And I think that, you know, the great thing is we should try to create that liberty also by making it easier for the people that come after us,
that we can look at that as a positive and not be put into any box or stereotype or film character, whatever.
I mean, I'd be called the guy from Queer Eye. I don't know town or something numerous times.
But you know, other than that, I've been pretty free to just doing kind of whatever I'd like,
and I think that's it's a very interesting space to be in, I think as a as a queer Indian and.
Absolutely, I love how you say that about the like, the freedom that comes from not having a model like a role model,
I think that so beautifully done and the way that even celebrating that freedom,
we can still make it easier for those who come after us so beautifully.
It's absolutely part of our sensibility. But to think about it, we had an interesting conversation before the podcast started about visibility.
And this is why I think it's very interesting.
I mean, I'm very vocal about visibility and talk a lot about it, but you said something that that sort of stuck with me.
I think we should talk about, which is.
A different reaction to the idea of visibility and something that I think is really not spoken about and I would love to,
yeah, but see if you expand on any of the things you sort of talking about before we started recording.
Absolutely. I was really struck in that moment when you mentioned visibility, I was so surprised actually,
that this like I felt the real sense of discomfort arise inside me around word noise, as I say surprise because of course.
Visibility feels like such a wonderful thing. So often I've had beautiful experiences of people responding to my work young people,
young queer people of colour say after a gig they were like, Oh my gosh, that was amazing, like I didn't know about.
I have this one poem, which is about a girl not meeting this like gender nonconforming femme.
And it's drawn on like a sick manuscript that didn't actually happen.
The fact that the trans queer Sufi was actually lived a few hundred years before,
but by telling stories and going up on a stage with, you know, like, you know, with a full face on like so very like.
Let's just say with a lot of mess and at the least, like other Musk or cis or straight presenting kind of stage is poetic that I felt able to
embrace the sense of celebration that in telling a story about queerness in your life,
your ancestry and your heritage. So where do I have this discomfort?
I think it's to do with safety and lack of safety and vulnerability and danger.
And I like many, many queer people who come in and like many people,
have so many experiences they've experienced harassment youth and things like that.
I think there's a way in which, of course, like visibility it has.
These two sides, has celebration and community at the one site, and then it has harassment and abuse and trauma and the damage to one's sense of self,
the damage to one's ability to to be in the world and be well in the world.
And. Alongside each other. I think recently I've been trusting the robustness of myself,
and I think perhaps the more that I lean into that sense of robustness in myself, robustness in my community,
surrounded by all these people who I share strength with,
perhaps then visibility becomes much easier visibility as something collective rather than visibility or something individual.
I think that what you say is so important because.
I think it's very easy to get the effect of being the visible one of being the one that does the fight,
even in the last year where we've had these racial reckonings and things that started to come to the fore always and so often.
The majority looks the minority and goes. So what do we do?
So tell us, and even when it's well meaning, even when it's tell us what you need, tell us what you want.
So much of the onus falls on the person who's just experienced all the things that they recognised.
That is a really tough space, and I think that it's not this weird expectation for every gay man to fight
the gay fight and every brown and black and person collected to fight that.
I mean, we're also just people who want to do things and have experienced things and individually lives.
It's such an interesting.
Nuance that is that is even even when it's not forgotten is not I don't think it's really people say, Oh, of course, you know,
you have the incredible vignette about is that why Americans, white people about race, I mean, the conversations are had.
And yet it doesn't really seem yet to sink in to people that it's not always easy.
It's not always what you want to do. And being the visible one is often as difficult as not having someone visible on a personal level.
I think it's it's a real nuance, and I appreciate you sort of being so honest and talking about that because it's a difficult thing that.
I find it hard often to say that myself, because I also don't want people to think that I'm not invested in those things,
I'm not interested, I do want to make a change. But some mornings everyone wakes up not wanting to be the one that's looked at, pointed out, you know.
And it's a really it's a really tough new ones. And I think even between us within our own communities,
I think I often tend to frown or someone else is working with me that we've got to
be pushing off some of that responsibility because you just don't feel that day.
And we all got to be sensitive to to the burden of of of trying to make this change.
As much as is an extremely positive change that obviously is to people who have created production companies.
All about it, all committed to changing doesn't necessarily make that something you want to do every day,
but I feel that it's easy to do every day of her life, even if you are doing it every day.
And I appreciate you being so honest about. This complex relationship with disability that I think so many of us have, but we don't speak about.
Absolutely. But I think there are two things that come to mind there for me.
And the first is really about making what I see are making in such a way that we can reclaim our humanity.
And when you say, like, I don't want every day to be an educator, I don't want every day to be in the fight.
I don't want every day to be organising. Some days I want to just watch Netflix and do nothing.
Some days I just want to make. I just want to, like, be a human like channel.
This like, we create a thing we have inside us. And I think that links to the ideas of community and solidarity.
Like, how can we stand very really in solidarity with each other?
You know, with people of colour in this country experiencing such different things as Indians in particular,
we have access to a lot more privilege than, say, Bengalis or Pakistanis,
let alone and all of the communities in terms of income and housing and
disproportionate state violence against black people here and across the world. And how can we deal with our exhaustion?
And also, like continue to fight for ourselves and all the people around us?
And I think it's exactly what you were saying about leaning on our friends and being like, Hey, I can't do this today.
Can you do this like today? I rest tomorrow. I'm really coming together in solidarity in that way.
Maybe, even perhaps through a community organisation, through a trade union or yoga teachers, or even with something a little relevant to my life.
Do you talk a little bit? But I think that's very interesting and we'd love to hear about what you're.
Yes. Very, very briefly. Even I've been really lucky to be involved with a brilliant group of yoga teachers over the last couple of months
forming and the UK's first trade union of the early teachers and part of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain,
who've done these amazing things on organising Uber drivers and delivery drivers and other precarious the gig economy workers really like.
Reclaiming those rights that some of the most exploited workers and gig economy workers,
precarious work in this country, in this country, and they're being deprived of yoga,
teachers actually have a pretty terrible time of it and coming together in
the framework of the union and really organising together like we're really,
really doing this in this light, so closely interwoven ways in such an amazing experience,
fighting for workers rights, for better material conditions and doing that as a collective.
That's actually I mean, I didn't I have to say that since, I mean,
I've thought about incredible and I will tell people that there is an article coming out.
Did you say The Telegraph tomorrow in India voices that the Independent's online independent online that is going to be coming out about that said,
do keep our eyes on that, but let's come back to let's come back to you.
I mean, let's come back to your work,
actually something I want to speak about here because just just thinking about what we've been talking about this, this this whole podcast.
All centres around, you said two very interesting things.
First of all, recognising our sort of limited visibility position as as is create Indians, but also recognising our very unique position within UK.
I mean, very few countries have a sort of being south south South Asian, being an Indian UK.
Such a weird position because obviously you that you're a minority, being the biggest minority and as you so,
so well said, I mean, we we experience privileges that so many of the other minorities.
I mean, you mentioned some names of people from Bangladesh are just our neighbours in India,
but nowhere near experience, the same type of privilege we do in this country.
I mean, it's so much nuance. But on the flip side, you know, we we don't appear in TV as much.
We don't appear in film as much. I mean, it's such a complicated conversation.
But another thing that you speak about in your work that I think is really refreshing and is is how we perhaps belong in another way.
And I'm just going to read a little little snippet of your poem and I'd love for you to talk.
It took a bit about that.
And if this is from your piece, from being mistreated, which is which is going to be published if we can't, we can't say a lot from it.
But I'll just I'll just read this little line, it says. Did my ancestors see their ancestor remembering Hitler's sitting far from the church by water?
I asked the rocks if they are my ancestors. They say yes, of course.
I think it's a really interesting step,
and I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about what that means and your your unique perspective here, I think.
Yes, thank you so much for bringing that celebrity poetry into the space.
It's always so odd to hear someone on a radio programme so beautifully done to.
Yes, I was glad that this is the part of the programme that maybe spoke to you in any way that you wanted to draw it out.
I mean, this piece is in part of a wider project about exploring history in in writing and poetry.
And it was received by Maleka Book an incredible poet and somebody who is both incredible black British poet.
How do we, as people of colour, how did they, like British poets, relate to like the countryside in English heritage sites?
And there's been so much writing about the way in which people of colour are
reluctant to go in the countryside because of increased charges of racism.
You can experience that right and the way in which even in this heritage sites race,
the history of people of colour is weak working class histories, queer history.
And this project was of changing and run by English heritage.
And we were like. And this problem was so much about like.
Reclaiming the spirituality of the land like even if my blood ancestors on from this land, are you grown up on this land?
I moved every step of my life on this time. Even if I hadn't, this can still be the alarm that is.
It is part of my. That is more connected to in terms of.
And I think if these healers sitting from the church, I'm not that I have any opposition to to the Church of the Church.
I say that a weakened institution and by the water like in nature is somehow connected to some like.
Naturally, some naturally emerging spirituality,
this idea that the people sitting on this land for thousands of years celebrating the coming of spring and the turning of the
seasons for my is the sense that the line that fed my mother fed me right constitutes my booms is somehow my insisted too.
I ask the rocks if they are my ancestors. They say yes, of course.
I think that's so interesting, because the other thing that has been encouraging to hear people talk about and should talk about more is how,
you know, as much as people are really.
Understanding and relating to their own heritage, and I think a lot about how I am, but I always say I've said it on this podcast before my family,
having lived in India for 100 years, my mom was born in Malawi, my dad was born in Kenya, my grandmother was born in Madagascar.
They all came here at different times. My dad came in and had school here, my mom and you came here for education at university level.
This idea that there is any one place of belonging is so ridiculous, even for people who want people of colour.
People come from such a varied space, and I was born in London. I went to university 40 minutes away from London.
I'm there now like, there's there's nowhere is home to me other than London in any real way.
And I think it's so interesting and I really love the way that people in the ancestry in the area that I know in the area that we are,
you know, there's a sense of us also trying to even reclaim the space, but just be in the space that we have been in all our lives.
I think that's really interesting.
It really did speak to me that particular line, because it was refreshing to think about not only think about this weird immigrant connexion,
I have to go to a different country to many different countries, but to think about my great,
my real connexion to that, to the country that I was born in the country, that I've been educated in my first language,
the language I speak best and the thing I know most about, I mean, I certainly feel foreign.
I've been going to India in Malawi, the only place. I'm weirdly not a foreigner, though of course I am an immigrant is is London.
And I think it's a really interesting conversation.
I think there's a lot more nuance it ought to be made about that particular, that particular feeling as violent learning how we can combine both.
Our heritage as wherever we come from and a real sense of identity as being
part of the very fabric of the countries that we were also born and raised in.
If they weren't our own to begin with. So that's associated, put that sometimes for me, I have this thought that we have millions of ancestors,
we have infinite ancestors, and we I think if I wasn't queer, I wouldn't have taken such a like an explorer like.
My quit, I had quit, and in this country and around the world who have no bloodline connexion to me,
and it's somehow about the freedom of understanding with ancestors that I think opened up the
possibility for me that I can have access to Punjab ancestors in so I could have ancestors in Ireland.
I didn't know clouds of ancestors, and I think it's really refreshing, actually.
And I don't know, I sort of it's a sense of.
Sense of finding belonging in places where often I think it feels like you shouldn't or can't or couldn't, and it's great to find that now,
I mean that we've come to somehow we've come to half an hour and it's been so great speaking to you, I could continue speaking to you for forever.
And as I said, people watch out for the article tomorrow. I'm sure that carry on to fisheries is going to be making moves in the next.
I mean, whatever current advice lets us, of course, but soon they keep it all.
And obviously, you will be tied to us for the foreseeable future, obviously working on media, working in the spectrum.
Thank you so much for being a part of today and really being very honest and
open about about your experiences and how you're feeling fitting right now.
That is difficult to do. We haven't actually seen each other since this whole process started.
I mean, it's all been busy. So, yeah, thank you so much for contributing to this podcast today.
My absolute pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me and hopefully catch you and the rest of the media team down south or as soon as this is all they're going to.