Experiments in Listening is a critical, caring, poetic and generous gift to scholars invested in epistemic undoings of Euro-colonial conceptualisations of ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’. In this beautifully written book, Shah offers a philosophical recalibration of our fields by enabling readers to enter a mode of listening – an attentiveness to words, worlds and actions – through a ‘commitment to not-knowing’. By compellingly centring hitherto marginalised voices, perspectives and practices, the book demands a recognition of performance-making as a process through which iterative, non-linear and embodied knowledge-systems live and breathe.

Royona Mitra, reader in dance and performance cultures, Brunel University London

Rajni Shah invites as they unsettle. The generous, radical proposal of the book reaches beyond the ‘audience’ and ‘performers’ who feature in its pages. This starts with the act of invitation itself, as plural and complex: it determines which bodies are present, which are absent, how they relate to each other. The shared activity of not-doing in explicitly constructed acts of gathering is provocative, an explosion. In this listening to form a politics of compassion is catalysed, to see and hear ‘beside’ and not for the suffering of others while recognising oneself as implicated in systems that hold listenings in place. In the stillness, invitations are offered – to care, reciprocity, responsibility. To re-orient ourselves to a clamouring, hostile world and refuse to yield this practice and promise of listening to its tyrannies.

Leah Bassel, professor of sociology, University of Roehampton

Experiments in Listening gathers the concerns of a career in thoughtful practice that is acute to recent discussions taking place in theatre and also more widely, as for example, in philosophy and cultural theory. The prose is entirely appropriate to the ethos and purpose of the book, very clear without oversimplifying, very attentive to terminology, and supple with its slight shifts in register for dealing with different aspects, especially within the experiments. The stanzaic structure (organised like rooms; in other words, shaped the same but perhaps with different functions) helps Shah to avoid what, given the topic, would be a contradictory teleological movement towards a conclusion. At the heart of the methodology is a sustained attempt to think in, for and beyond practice within the generous sense that a specific arts practice is always a practice too of being in the world: the material, ecological world and the world constituted of social relations.

John Hall, professor emeritus, Falmouth University

Drawing on philosophy, feminist practice and queer theory, Rajni opens up fresh ways of thinking about the symbiotic relationship between performance and its audiences. The word 'audience' itself is gently unpicked, as Rajni explores the radical potential in gathering, giving attention and above all listening. As they shift their point of view between that of performer and that of audience, Rajni builds an argument for a kind of listening that is compassionate and responsible, not least in the face of difference. In doing so, they shape a refreshed and necessary language not only for audience relationships, but a society in which the hierarchies of speaking and listening - and so of action and seeming passivity - have irrevocably shifted.

Maddy Costa, writer, dramaturg, and freelance researcher