We were lucky to catch up with Janya Govani recently and have shared our conversation below.

Janya, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

‘Convenience’ is the most meaningful project I have worked on. No. That is a lie. everything that led to ‘Convenience’ is the most meaningful ‘Project’ I have worked on.

Convenience is a one-woman show I have written and will be producing and acting in next month during the 2024 Hollywood Fringe Festival. That shows I have just about begun unapologetically working on solely the show, and control over all aspects of its writing and acting. It is meaningful to me because I have never once felt complete ownership over my creative process. In pieces yes, but complete ownership? No. and I have begun to tread a path wherein I finally can have a space where I can unapologetically own every aspect of my work in front of 30 people, strangers or not, at a time.

Working on this show since the beginning of this April has been a time where I mean every word I say, without ever trying to make sense of it for one second. Really knowing and getting used to the fact that all I think of, feel, live through as thoroughly or as lazily is going to be in the presence of someone else. Working on this show has also made me realize the reality of the current circumstances of my life as the 14-year old girl who dreamt too hard of the possibility. 21 years old. Working as an artist in New York City and based in Los Angeles. Writing, acting, showing. Faux bob and red lipstick. Yeah. I am free.

Convenience is about one way, one possibility of how a sequence of events can unfold inside and outside of my head for me to reach freedom from a complete and utter lack of it but accompanied by a complete and utter lack of ability and desire to explain this entrapment. From that. To freedom. What could make it happen, in under 55 minutes when all you have at your disposal is some random pair of broken headphones you used to numb yourself out, a script you wrote in which you are talking to this halo of a person you feel will heal you, and 30 people in the audience, one of whom will have anything that comes with being a reader of that script.

And I am being that, whilst finding so much freedom professionally as an entrepreneur. Securing funds for the play, doing press, releasing posters, ads, talking to people, getting better at explaining this personal thing that for so long was a good thing solely because it was unexplainable. Knowing I can, through way of the kind of work I have always wanted to do be able to be on a website article. Have my name out there and assume the implications of the synonymity that name will have with all your work. And embrace all the earnestness and decisiveness that comes into my work because of that.

Its meaningful…

Janya, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am Janya. You don’t know me, but I am finding it difficult to tell you about myself because I promise you, I don’t know me either. Anyway, I know perhaps a little more than you do, so here you are:

I am an artist who really wants to find a way to express it all, at once. In a split second. Somewhere, somehow.

I am 21 years old. I have never known who I was except for the 2 moments I felt I was an actor: one at 13, and one, exactly 3 weeks ago, on March 29th of 2024. So I am an actor. And whenever I cannot be one, I write.

the 13 year old realizing she wants to be one never felt good. It just had a surety to it I had never felt my whole life, and the surety didn’t feel euphoric or strong. It was one of those plain wins. And then I felt lost because I did not know if I could be anyone anyone wanted to see, on film, in Hollywood. I didn’t have a story to hold on to, or tell. And other’s stories, I believed in unapologetically in my mind, but I could never live in the real world. Because my ethic identity had to be compulsively strong. I had to continuously be Concious of the color of my skin so as to avoid hypocrisy. Because even if you have spent so much time identifying yourself with the stories you read, you cannot forget ‘who you are’, which is limited to the definition- less word called ‘indian’. I felt like I need to embrace emptiness. So I started seeing how I could write stories, the subject of which is ’embracing emptiness’.

And what came out was poetry, short stories, and questioning every linguistic tool I use to write. By using linguistics. Haha. I consider that to be my art too. Questioning questions, statements, analogies, metaphors. And I tried to do so in a short film I had written called ‘Rivem’. We shot in May of last year, edited till November, and made it. As much as we could convince ourselves That was my first community experience on the basis of an original work. And it went uphill from there.

I started writing Subject, a 3 Act 2 Person play I am now in the process of getting published and performed, in New York City.
Then I started writing ‘Convenience’, a one-woman play imagining 50 minutes I dream of living one day, the 50 minutes where ’embracing emptiness’ will somehow transition into becoming ‘attempting to embrace fullness.’ And now, this play is going up in the Hollywood Fringe Festival in Los Angeles, California from 9th-29th June.

I don’t really have much more to say. I have done acting jobs. I photograph myself often. I like painting eyes. I was in acting school for 1.5 years. And I like talking about love. or talking about hate through love. I don’t know. Read my work and come to my show. I will be there for you.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Yes. I did not know it was driving me until a long time, or rather, did not let myself change my opinion on its negativity. So I did not know I had to let my passion for this mission flourish until 6 years into shutting it down in the multiple ways I could convince myself to use. So, take this with a grain of salt, because eI do not know it all.

When I was 14 years old I was immersed in reading a novel in which the character was not in any way like me, different family, language, way of using the language, experiences of self actualization (that I did not know the feeling, stakes etc of at the time). But she looked like me. Just a little bit at that too, knowing she had tan skin, And that was all, all I needed to give myself permission to revel in a life that I hadn’t lived. And I was able to do it because I could, easily find ways to feel ownership to another life. The permission, I needed. The permission I still need, and have tried finding in looks, parallels of life, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, all of the above. The permission has strings attached, and permission should not have strings attached, and it should be as effortlessly given as it is humanly possible.

And it is not. And the only thing driving my art is to find that permission, and help others do the same.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I am trying to convince myself that I need to unlearn the lessons I learnt. The solutions of the past are ingrained as far as I can tell. I can also tell that for the longest time I have mistook the extent of independence I really had in the world. After realizing that I let myself sink to the point of what was ‘allowed’ so as to never have to deal with the sensitive humiliation of fighting against it without knowing how to again. It’s obvious I have fully unlearned that. I am writing this because I have unlearned that. I have evidence I have unlearned that.

I am unlearning concreteness. Everyday, because I am shoved into a world where it exists more than a ‘realization’ of its invalidity can help sustain a rebellion against. I am so sure of the fact that language, as is used amongst people, for smalltalk or not, amongst artists, as a way to find agreement will not be the same language I use to find life. Because no current instrument of documentation, be it video, photo, sound or words will ever be able to remind me what I felt while
I was writing, or being recoded or filmed, and so I will never have time to fully understand what it takes to fully show everything , everything going on just through normal conversation. Even if I get better at it, I refuse to believe I will be able to pour everything I need and want to in the few words I write in a magazine, but that is all right. It will still help, just not in the way I think I want it to.

I am unlearning the idea that I cannot and should not see people. Unlearning, ‘I am not deserving of acclaim, even if it is the only way an artist is able to survive because of the ideals of good and bad being so deadly deep-set in the society I want to make it in. I am not deserving of acclaim because it is not fair to make it in service or in dependence of it.’ But I am a girl. I cannot go against the only values of society that seem like they have been created to be to serve me, and deal with the persistence it takes. I cannot deny the hypocrisy of my morality with the american way of seeing art but I, hypocritically so, let myself do it. for once. Because that is the only way I know I can be curious again, when I choose to love people, and hence am able to see them give me whatever they give me because I can only see someones real perception of me if I choose to see them.

I have had to unlearn the acceptance I had built when I did not see a way towards following my dreams. The reasons I built in my own head to sustain my emotional livelihood. The deeply ingrained lies that became somewhat synonymous with freedom because they were the only things bringing me peace from a deep sense of dissatisfaction. I have had to try breaking the habit, though I do not see success, even a little, because I was built to not want it, not like it, not be proud of it. The learned lessons clash as though they are paradoxes.

But a lesson that I will gladly learn because of that is that conflicts are not paradoxes. They are just the waiting period between the epiphany of coexistence.

I have also, finally, decided to move on from the belief that I ‘will’ be anything. I ‘will’ be an actor? no. I am an actor. Acknoledgment of the future in my sense of identity makes me believe I don’t already have one. I can choose one. I cannot afford that. The men in the club I dance in front of, or my parents, or my viewers or co-actors don’t wait for me to choose what I ‘want’ to be that day. So I cannot wait. I am something everyday. And I don’t need to know.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: 17_janya
• Other: email: [email protected]

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