रक़ीब; Raqeeb to me is a love story. It is the psychotropic anticipation that is there in romance. A romance between seemingly normal, underwhelming persons. It is a farcical tragedy, proof that there always is a fly in the ointment.
It is poignant,To say the least.I reckon watching it, is what it feels like to take a nap inside your brain while you’re awake; a lobotomy of love. 
Σ रक़ीब; Raqeeb; An Ontology
It is an attempt at situating a simulated Dadaist dinner party as an ontology for examining empathy and compassion, considering the two to be teleologically volatile, accepting them to be an ‘a posteriori’ matter of concern.
रक़ीब; Raqeeb as an act of world building, scenography and dramaturgy is a Dadaist Dinner Party.
It is social adults being social adults.A lot of innuendos.People conspiring with each other over trivialities.Existential Discourses.A touch of raunchiness.A black soup of Worldliness.My goal was to achieve a microcosm. This microcosm represents the domesticity and intimity of our privileged society that keeps circulating norms and novelties, familiarities and strangeness’s through an emotional and ideological economy.
I have grown to acknowledge that our Selves, or at least my Self is a conscious presence in my respective every-day. This every-day houses hence a network of particularities that make up my circumscribed existence. As an artist my Self is both a transgressive anchoring point and at the same time it is strangely irrelevant, if not completely expendable.
I hence research this simulated Dinner Party as a Deconstructivist Anthropology. The Film is primarily a montage of worldliness and its thresholds, along with the multifarious negotiations that occur within and at their liminal edges. It is an embrace of the greyness, where-in we are constantly manoeuvring the magnification, hierarchy and degree of all the gazes operating within the context of a Dinner Party.
Costume Art and Design: Beatriz Marco Sanchez-Peral (Bea), Violet Yue Cao (Violet), Qian Yang
Choreography, Devising and Performance: Anneli Tan, Carmen De Mattia, Emma Edwards, Faye Singleton, Isabella Gaynor, Leyan Xie, Julianna Schmaus, Shea Sullivan, Serra Kösebay, Tom Germain, Yuchen Yolanda Wu
Cinematography: Amalia Ekshenger
Dramaturgy and Script: Anureet Watta, Atimanyu Vashishth
Graphic Design: Eddie Farrell, Farah Aly
Lighting Design and Art Direction: Amalia Ekshenger, Charon Hu, Diganta Ghorai
Sound Design: Farah Aly
VFX: Diganta Ghoria
Voice Artists: Abhishek Wagle, Ana Reyes Cid, Beatriz Marco Sanchez-Peral (Bea), Charon Hu, Eddie Farrell, Farah Aly, Katie Dunlop, Onojie Idemudia
Special thanks to
Aditi Sharma, AA Audio Visual Team (Bert Walker, Dainius Kacinskas, Thomas Parkes), David McAlmont, Munish Sharma, Renaud Wiser, Richard Brousson, Theo Lorenz
Directed By Atimanyu Vashishth
There was a little room.
I sat here.
She sat there.
I sensed something in her.
Something; beyond the interesting.
…
Red cheeks are quite compatible
With the fantastical.
The redder they get
The less skeptical i be.
The naivety of it all
Is apparently rather serene
It has its own
Twisted,
Terrible little charm.
The Short-Film, catches the eye for its simplistic absurdity. The absurdity which is banal enough to seem rooted in a real every-day.
As a social construct, when two people try to individually court, appease, or guile the same individual, the two people are Raqeebs in relation to each other. I suggest that every individual has an identity and an aspirational identity. This aspirational identity holds a performative element within it. In a manner of saying, an individual is always tending towards this aspirational identity and is in a constant state of performance in line with it. It is therefore my belief that we are all operating as a network of Raqeebs in our every-day status quos.
It’s a strange world.
…
A candy-coloured cutthroat
She was.
I had dreams of her,
Like dreamers do.
My dreams of her
Were a silent prayer.
That I myself wrote.
No one suspected us.
No one thought
That two people
Like us,
Would be crazy enough
To do something like this.
God damn!
We were suave lovers.
She looked away though.
When I woke up,
As she saw
The whites
Of my umber eyes.
She looked away,
As she slit my throat.
…
It’s a strange world.
Isn’t it?
रक़ीब; Raqeeb negotiates and manoeuvres the Restless Operations of Identification presenting identity as a meta-culture. The Film as a discourse argues that how visibility is conceptualized and contextualised; matters. We need to acknowledge that the ‘Chain of Justification’ is never resolved satisfactorily. Any specific situation is made possible and affected by dimensions of social life that exceed it. As a matter of fact, what happens is that we step back to find that the whole system of justifications and criticism, which controls our choices and supports claims to rationality, rests on responses and habits that we should know how to defend without circularity. And yet, that is not the case.
The Film hence, rather than providing a blueprint for ideal polity, indulges in transgressive utopian thought engaging in a contemporaneous debate. It is an anamorphic model where a Dinner Party is understood as a political artifact to construct and produce a society rather than a mimetic system of representation.
f (The Ensemble) → रक़ीब; Raqeeb
As a director there is something incomparably intimate and productive in the work that my Ensemble and I put together. The troupe rewarded me with their trust, faith and time. They were indeed available, acute, confident, and free. Our labour together was to explore each of our facilities, and faculties to the utmost.
Their trajectory is attended by reflection, astonishment, and a desire. My growth is projected onto them, or, rather, is found in them - and our common growth becomes…
Revelation.
रक़ीब; Raqeeb A Character Sketch
Miss Tuttle – Star Costume (Host); is a bit of a freak. She is one of those individuals who was raised in an acutely impoverished household, and has now, in her late thirties suddenly fallen into vast amounts of wealth. She is pretentious, artificial, exceedingly wealthy and yet desperately stingy.
A – Red Dragon Costume; Territorial. Possessive. Curt.
B – Writer; Blue Helmet. A schmuck.
C – Voluptuous Tentacle Costume; loose. A free soul. A ‘living in the moment’ sort. With a certain flair. Soft yet a total badass. A perfect blend of quintessential feminine and masculine traits.
D – And? Big Head.
E – Waiter 1; Condoms Costume. Calm. Courteous, but abrupt due to their shy demeanour. A gorgeous vitality. A breath of fresh air. Playful.
F – Waiter 2; The Hairy One Costume, Gruff. Direct. Nonchalant. Kind.
Outsider – The Camera; a Filmmaker. Nihilist with a twist.
Miss Tutte is the host.
A and B are partners in a promiscuous marriage.
A and C are having an affair.
D is a question mark. Vague. Generic. A Chameleon.
E and F are extremely shy but desperately wanting to talk to each other. They see some latent potency there. A potential. It is an introverted and tense chemistry.
The Film रक़ीब; Raqeeb was achieved through a series of Open Rehearsals that were conducted during the month of February.
In many ways रक़ीब; Raqeeb as a project is a Pre-formance Lab before it was a Film.My intention was to invite audience members into a performative set-up which was not a performance, but rather a film set. The shooting sessions comprised of specific scenes that were performed/enacted out with dialogues being pre-recorded by voice actors.
I have been a part-of and executed numerous get ins, and Rehearsals as a Performance Maker, and I have loved every second of them.
The Violence.The Hysterics.The Adrenaline.The Sweat.The Collaboration.And I have always considered them to be Ad-Hoc performances in their own right. They have a sense of candidness to them. It is this candidness that I wished to share with an audience. I wanted them to enter a space free of formality.
Lewis Mumford had once said that all an act of Theatre needs for it to happen is two people having tea, and a third watching them have said tea. It is precisely this that I wanted to bring out for an audience. I wanted an audience to witness multiple takes, the discussions that occurred between these takes, the setting up of lights, the soundscape and dialogue.
The Sensation of Performance, The Noise. The Vibration. Rather than a Performance. 
रक़ीब; Raqeeb is in a way an innocent little letter to Ma.
During the course of a conversation that I had had with my Programme Director Theo Lorenz, I had asked him about his selection process for prospective students. He mentioned that he, first and foremost reads the Statement of Purpose, then reviews the References provided and finally goes ahead to assess the Portfolio.
It is funny that during that conversation, I did indeed remember what I had written in my own Statement of Purpose after all this time.
One of the lines from my own Statement of Purpose read…
Being my mother’s son, spending my childhood on the kitchen counter I learnt to acknowledge texture, flavour and the importance of achieving a serene balance through complexities and variety.In many ways I came to the AAIS to become a student as a result of my association to food. An association which was given to me by Ma.
It only makes sense, that the last thing I did at the AAIS as a student was to collaborate with Theo Lorenz and Tanja Siems over a Performative Dinner that was presented at Shoreditch Arts Club, where रक़ीब; Raqeeb came alive as a Film as well as a Dadaist Dinner in its own right.
