OffScript podcast: Albion – Shobana Jeyasingh
What makes someone English – and who gets to decide?
Dash Arts’ production Our Public House is inspired by The Tempest. This led to Shobana Jeyasingh participating in their ‘Albion’ podcast series, which explores what it means to be English.
In this episode of Off Script, Dash Arts’ Artistic Director Josephine Burton is joined by choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, born in India, raised in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, and educated in the UK, whose internationalism has always been at the heart of her practice.
Shobana and Josephine explore what Englishness and Britishness actually mean, and why the tension between them matters. Shobana reflects on how English literature and a culture of open debate shaped her own values, even as she felt, in many ways, an outsider looking in.
At the centre of the conversation is Shobana’s production We Caliban, which draws on Shakespeare’s The Tempest to interrogate the encounter between non-European cultures and the colonising gaze of Prospero. It’s a work about empire, migration, and the questions that remain stubbornly unresolved. The Tempest is also the source material for Dash Arts’ forthcoming production, Our Public House.
Together, Josephine and Shobana make the case for why the arts, more than politics or policy, can hold the complexity that simple definitions of belonging refuse to.