As an introduction to Birmingham’s shout
festival, celebrating queer arts and culture within the city, Mawaan
Rizwan performs his one-man stand-up show, Juice. It presents the
Gay-Asian experience whilst talking about accidently making his family
famous.
Juice is an autobiographical piece, displaying
the genres of stand-up, physical performance and gender/queer theory
analysis, in a show of becoming selflessly confident and ultimately
comfortable within his own skin. Juice is Rizwan’s personal story,
cultivating the universal message of embracing yourself, with every
added flaw.
Rizwan is very much a comedy performer, and as a
result, we see a practice of great emotional timing. His physicality is
used to make us howl with laughter, and his conversational approach
tells us of everyday stories.
He creates a sense of trust to make a comfortable
environment. His light-hearted script is supplemented with larger than
life dance sequences with interludes of performance poetry and song.
Rizwan also creates an interesting emotional pendulum, swinging back to
raw and vulnerable accounts to reveal the parts of his personality which
are particularly hard to dwell upon, such as telling his parents about
his love for another person and therefore revealing his sexuality.
Through the journey of self-discovery and working
through hard emotional barriers, the result is that Rizwan is colourful,
funny and totally unapologetic. His confidence is infectious, and Juice
certainly has the power to make the audience feel good. As his mother
said, ‘when life gives you mangoes, make mango juice’. Rizwan makes it
clear that it has taken a lot of work to get there.
It is encouraging to see that within Rizwan’s
new-age style of comedy, he is inherently brave to tell us about his
personal process in order to present the show today. Rizwan is in fact a
YouTube sensation, and one video he had made about walking encouraged
thousands of hits. He also filmed family members, to the point where
producers from a famous Indian soap discovered his mother, and she is
now a famous Bollywood actor. Once more, his younger brother, who was
featured rapping with Rizwan in a comedic video is now cast in a
prime-time BBC drama.
As proud as Rizwanis, his emotional journey
means that he is not afraid to embrace, and own feelings of jealousy,
saying in his own words that his family ‘stole the thunder’. It is a
brave statement which allows the audience to see a work in progress.
Rizwan is a person reflected on stage who is actively coming to terms
with the highs and lows of personal growth and ambition.
The account of his now famous family makes way
for some deeply vulnerable moments within the journey of self-discovery
throughout his piece. But we must also remember that Rizwan is first and
foremost a comedian. He presents his journey against a backdrop of
colourful language and visual choreographed movements, alongside the
pumping tunes to Missy Elliott. In a spectacularly energetic dance
sequence, we see Rizwan strip from a sparkly green tracksuit to reveal a
skirt and bra made entirely of socks, aptly dancing along to ‘sock it to
me’.
As well as being the catalyst for the success of
his family, Rizwan also has an impressive history. Featured on BBC Radio
One’s Asian Network and being acclaimed in at Edinburgh Fringe, he is a
man of many talents. Juice questions the norms of society and analyses
gender and sexuality, questioning how much is influenced by the cultures
we come from. As the audience see Rizwan’s discovery, we also hear about
the past of his own family members, and that their experiences are not
too dissimilar to that of his own.
Rizwan’s bold characteristics and interesting
life story encourages the audience to accept their own quirks, and to
embrace the things that make themselves vulnerable too. Juice is a show
about stripping all emotional layers back, and Rizwan does it whilst
connecting positively with the audience. In a friendly manner and funny
visual concept, Rizwan gives people hope to embrace the elements of
their own personality which are sometimes hard to look at, in order to
be totally unashamed to be only you alone.
