Meet Janya Govani | Actor, Writer, Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Janya Govani and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Janya, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
I don’t know. I never thought about it. I usually think about reasons to do something when something in me doesn’t wanna be bothered doing it.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I frequently experiment, with my writing and acting the idea of subverting language, and I frequently express my experience of the effects of going through everyday life whilst having the desire to subvert language.

I got to a place of abstraction and depth in theory because I did not have enough access or understanding of the real world. Now, as someone who wants to work on abstraction but also make space in the world, I am refraining the urge to try explain my art. I don’t always succeed.

But my first instinct is to ask you to just see anything I create. I started off in Rajkot, Gujarat, India being interested in anything and everything the world had to offer. Ended up trying to understand where I could offer the world something.

I studied genetics. I printed out a 1000 page textbook at home just to consummate my love for molecular biology. I went to learn dance. Managed to, just about. I was part of a theatre and dance group where we went to different places to show indian folk and contemporary dances, one play (I played a journalist who was raped and killed. I was 13. And I knew what was happening. I just didn’t know I was going to group up to want to do something where I would have to be in that environment). I read book series and if the last book hadn’t come out, I would try writing a fulfilling end.

Then, made a decision, a very specific decision (acting), but circumstances were not supportive, and my resolve was not fully developed. As a result, I remember getting into a lot many other mediums I can solitarily practice and forgetting I was part of anything involving the society I lived in.

And it led to stuff that was not good, was not bad. It was just what it was. understanding and questioning my identity in the world, understanding and questioning meaning in the world, trying to figure out what language means if it is only within myself. Painting. Trying to see how I could convince myself everything inside a canvas board was all I wanted to let someone know at once, and there were other sets of ideas that made better sense when grouped together in another canvas. I couldn’t get to a point where I felt satisfied.

And then covid hit. So it got deeper.

And then I ended up in Los Angeles. In acting school. No grasp of the purpose I had felt when I remember really wanting to do anything possible to become an actor in my early teenage. But I was in acting school. I had to act. And I had to cope with my love for poetic depth meeting the realism the profession of acting demands in the industry today.

I was trying. During my first year in the conservatory, I tried to bring some friends together to work on a script I had written a little while ago, exploring a reality where two people, however they come to be where they did, discussing meaning through opposition, not only of each other, but their own words. I think I was pushed to a space to use my imagination because it felt like an imaginative story, when all I wanted was to believe in its potential to actually take place in today’s world. It is called Rivem.

I am still trying.

Possibility is the beauty of fantasy. And I struggle with the possibility part, perhaps personally too. And I am now spending time grounding all of my desires I express in my work, to what I seem to feel is gonna convince the truth of the work to me. And maybe someone else. Hi.

That is how I wrote Subject and Convenience. Subject is a two Person two Act play dealing with a real time experience of a couple, Girl and Man, using a mechanism they use to understand each other: Girl owns an hour, Man owns the other. A transition in between. Them individuals, Girl is imaginative, man is a human being of the same girth but no words.

And Convenience is a one-woman show dealing with the real time experience of Girl with constant attempts to ignore symbolism and subvert identity with a set peppered with specific kinds of psychotic projections. I will be premiering Convenience at the Hollywood Fringe next month at the Henry Murray stage at the Matrix. Everyone who wants to see fantasy being the only real thing to a human, and reality being somewhat hard to understand, and their mixing impossible do all three and more, please be there. I would love to have you.

It was not easy. But I have revoked my rights to try to find out how I overcame anything. I need to just keep overcoming, don’t ever need to have the capacity to accurately word out the way the overcoming came about. If you know what I mean.

I want the world to know that it is complex, it is not complicated. and complexity demands to be understood to find a simpler solution. my art is just that pursuit of understanding. it leaves loose threads I hope to tie up with something I learn in the future. It is only the matter of tying another idea to an incomplete one. If you want to tie it up, come and help. I would love to have you.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Day 1: Sunday
I will take my friend to the holocaust museum. I will force them to be there for as long as I am. 4 hours at least. It is only one floor. But we have to read it all, and talk about it. We have to find more on the internet as we are exploring the artifacts. We have to find universality and see what completely in understood and unfamiliar ideas we have managed to familiarize ourselves with.

I would call her in time for a survivor talk. Tickets are free. People talk about life on their own volition and I sit down and listen.

I would sit at the Pan Pacific Park and watch dogs and their owners, or put my leather jacket on top of my face and head and just let my all black outfit soak in the sun. I won’t urge my friends to wear black on a scorching LA day but hey, if you want the whole experience….look like you are on a heist, and sunbathe. LA. Period.

I would then walk them to their hotel, making sure to go through Hollywood boulevard so that I can remind myself of what it feels like playing the villain. Screaming loudly if a stranger man finds reason to come up and make physical, or emotional contact. Practice screaming loudly, check.

And then sleep.

Day 2: Monday

Rent a theatre space in West Hollywood to click pictures of each other. That’s it. On film, and drop it off to the developer by the end of day so that photographs are ready before they have to leave.

Have food and drink oat milk. And sleep.

Day 3:

Find a cafe in Rodeo Drive and sit there. Just sit there until we find an opportunity to start an improvisation. Could be anything. I once was Kathy from the bikeridersn. I didn’t even know anything except ‘three weeks later, I married him.’ from the trailer. but it went on for an hour and my friend had lost trust in my ability to find the right partner for myself by the end of it.

And then do the same at the Chanel store.

And sleep. After drinking oat milk.

Day 4:

maybe we are tired of starvation? so we could cook at my place.

Eggplant curry, yogurt, onions, rice, fresh butter. Spicy.

And pack it up and go find a spot up Runyon canyon where we could eat in peace.

And do it all as slowly as we can. important.

Sleep.

Day 5:

Just. Take the bus to Joshua tree. Maybe risk it and buy maps and I happen to forget my phone and theirs happens to be stolen. There will be no signal anyway. No talking, watch the stars, oat milk, and then sleep.

Day 6:

After getting back, I will have them get some food and rest and then go to whiskey a go go, the viper room, find the concert of a completely unfamiliar musician and go. watch. them.

And eat and sleep.

Day 7:

They may have to pack their things. And they may want to leave earlier. Or stay forever.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Yes.

I will number it to make it easier.

1) Tractatus Logico Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstien. He really asked the same question I did. I felt so ordinary after I found out, and then the closest I have ever felt to someone by virtue of the potential to understand them, and he hope that similar understanding will be received with thanks.

2) The rocks on that beach scene in Wonder Woman (2017). I don’t know man. They were good.

3) Tom Cruise’s and everybody else’s performance in ‘The Last Samurai’. It is rare to live a story like that, so it is rare to believe one when you see it in a film. But I wholeheartedly lived that story as I saw the film.

4) The idea of going through consistent grief without facing judgement from anybody else. I read ‘The Great Fire’ by Shirley Hazzard, The English Patient, and watched 1917, and read the Entertainment section of the ‘America in between the Wars’ Cambridge textbook in Grade 9. And I felt no judgement for grief. And comfort was grabbed embraced by me.

5) My father

6) The film industry in America. I understood society through it. I understood jealousy, the slow pain of understanding what having an identity, so stringently, as a compulsion, could be like. And I also understood how overcoming the fear of a label and not letting it matter would feel like.

7) Jackie Coogan running

8) Rest.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/17_janya/

Other: Link to website for Convenience: https://janyagovani17.wixsite.com/website

Link to buy Tickets for Convenience: https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/10967?tab=tickets

Link to watch Rivem: https://cifra.com/project/5e8b7718-28a0-403d-9e9a-fbaa8a67ef67

Image Credits
Janya Govani