A Modern Day Lady of Shalott
For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died...
Tennyson has the Lady of Shalott pay the ultimate price for escaping her island existence of gazing in the looking glass in favour of the rush of the town. 'Revealing one-self' to the ‘city folk’, Tennyson implies, is not a pursuit for a lady. Rachel Weston would have something to say about that. Opera singer, cabaret performer, burlesque phenomenon and founder of Spoken Word night ‘Wordplay’, Rachel Weston is an addict to exposure. A fiery, curly-haired redhead, Rachel has taken her home town of Brighton by storm, throwing off barriers between artistic trends and genres to pay tribute to one diety, Performance.
Rachel doesn't see herself as a 'poet', 'singer' or 'burlesque performer'. Performance, for Rachel, should be fluid and improvisational - a two-way dialogue between audience and performer that is hampered by genre constraints. Rachel studied opera at Birkbeck College, 'I was drawn to the brazenness of opera and its total and unashamed ability to scream about emotion'. However, she soon moved away from the operatic institution, rejecting point blank the idea of her audience sitting in velvet seats at the ROH, ‘the opera house puts audiences on the passive end of the spectrum’. In Brighton, her current hometown, Rachel has plans to introduce opera singing into her burlesque shows, recreating the intimacy between audience and performer that she craves.
Rachel's belief in empowering the audience is key to the success of Wordplay, a Spoken Word night she founded in 2006. Brighton-based Wordplay creates and celebrates intimate performance, 'The venue is small and the night is different all the time, from chilled-out with ambient acoustic music and lyrical poetry to raucous slam rhymes and ska-funk.' Rachel created the night to bring musicians and writers together, allowing them to feel at ease and get lost in performance, of whatever kind and colour, 'Sometimes the whole room is silent, attentive and blissed out and sometimes everybody is stomping and sweating to a full-live band and the energy is palpable.' Crucial to Wordplay is its open invitation to new blood, staying true to Rachel’s idea of performance as free-spirited and exhilarating.
For the Lady of Shallot, performance comes with danger. Anyone who has stood with trembling hands in a spotlight knows the cold dread of exposing yourself to watchful, appraising eyes. Rachel Weston is an astounding performer because she strives to do away with this sense of danger. Whether giving voice to a liberetto in a shisha cafe or getting caught up in the moment at a burlesque evening there is a sense of unashamed passion to Rachel’s work, and this lack of reservation is infectious. It strikes me as fitting that the venue for Wordplay is named 'the sanctuary cafe'. Through her strongly personal vision of what performance can be, Rachel Weston is uniquely equipped to create the sort of safe-space in which daring artistic expression and interaction can thrive.
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