Artist Hetain Patel on his new audio visual show and his early career spent in Notts

Tell us about your latest work Mathroo Basha (meaning ‘mother tongue’ in Gujarati)...
It's a live solo performance based on interviews with my family members. At the moment, it’s mainly women, like my mum and my auntie who are from the first immigrant generation of my family, moving through to my generation. In the interviews they’re talking about heritage, ancestry, language, food and more. It was inspired by knowing they won’t be around forever. You wonder when that generation's gone, what do we lose? There are lots of things that are spoken like language, food, recipes and rituals. The interviews make up a musical and rhythmic structure that I perform along to. Sometimes I perform physically and dance – sometimes I speak or sing the words along with them.

This isn’t the first time you’ve featured your family in your work. How do they react to seeing themselves in your shows?
They absolutely love it. They're big supporters and always come to my shows. When they see themselves in a gallery or theatre space it's a really powerful thing. When you grow up in a marginalised community, you’re told all these places are important spaces of culture, but the audiences are typically white and middle-class. So being witnessed and acknowledged in them is a powerful thing.

I loved your 2015 show The Jump, where you gathered your family together to film yourself jumping off the sofa, dressed as Spiderman…
Yes, that was shot in my grandmother's home, with them all wearing their own clothes and sitting upon the sofas we grew up on. I jumped down onto a carpet that’s been there for as long as I can remember, just like I did as a kid. The whole incident was about three and a half seconds, but because of the cameras we used we slowed it down to six minutes, so it became like a moving photo. Then we put an epic soundtrack on it. When I watched Spiderman films and jumped off that sofa as a kid, I genuinely thought I could be him. That’s part of the magic of childhood. I wanted to take the ordinariness of our lives and put an epic twist on it. 

Tell me about young Hetain from back then. What inspired you?
Well, I grew up in Bolton in the eighties and nineties and came through quite a traditional route. I loved drawing at school and did it all the time. Right up to the end of A-Levels it was all about drawing and painting for me. People told me I was good at it and it made me feel special. Then I came to Nottingham to do a degree in Fine Art. That expanded my horizons and art became a way to think about the world, my identity and how we all live.

Eventually, I started to expand into other disciplines like photography, film, performance, and sculpture. My moves into dance began in 2009 when I was creating a performance for the New Art Exchange, just after it first opened, called To Dance Like Your Dad. That ended up being supported by Dance4, now known as Fabric, and is where our relationship began.

You spent eleven years in Nottingham from 2000-2011. Where did you live? Where did you hang out?
In my first year, I was in the Maltings halls in Basford. Later on, I lived in different areas like Radford, Bulwell and Arnold. It was my first time living away from home and Nottingham was a city of discovery and helped shape me both as a person and as an artist. In terms of hang-outs, I used to go out regularly in Hockley and I'd love to go to the cinema or for a meal at Wagamama. However, I was always skint, either a student or an artist, so I probably didn’t take advantage of it as much as I could have.

I loved my time in Nottingham. I never really had a desire to leave, I found the art scene here so supportive and I was proud to consider myself as a Nottingham and East Midlands artist. Plus the transport links meant I could get anywhere easily. But I was freelance and my partner got a big job in London, so we moved. I still have lots of friends in Nottingham. There’s a woman called Vina Ladwa who runs a dance school called the Manushi Kathak Academy in Bramcote. That woman is like a second mother to me. She has an open door policy at her house and knows and feeds everyone.

This isn’t your first time at the nottdance festival is it?
No, I did a show called TEN at nottdance 2009, which was also at Lakeside Arts Centre. I took the Indian ten-beat rhythm cycle as a starting point and tried to find a meeting place between the red dot on the Hindu forehead and the red cross on the English flag. Then I did another show called American Boy for nottdance 2015 too. It’s a great festival and whenever I'm asked I'm happy to get involved.

You mentioned the English flag. How do you feel about the current rise of nationalism across the UK? This year we’ve seen a huge rise in Reform voters and we speak less than a week after a Tommy Robinson-led protest attracted over 100,000 people in central London…

When 2016 hit with both Brexit and the first wave of Donald Trump, you could see there were some major paradigm shifts happening. Those things both seemed ridiculous at the time, but the implications of them both were huge. It took a while to understand that it was all real and it’s almost like I can’t be surprised by anything since. I went to walk around the edges of some of those marches in London at the weekend, just to see who the people were on them. It made me realise that history is cyclical and it bought back the nerves I had as a brown kid growing up in Bolton.

It’s hard not to be overwhelmed. On one hand you feel guilty about not posting about Palestine and genocide every minute of the day on social media. Then, on the other hand, there’s a downtrodden pessimism where you feel we’re all in an echo chamber and the things you do can’t really make a difference. I can’t really describe the feeling; it’s not apathy because there’s a rage with it. But we have to keep existing, creating and connecting. We're not alone, we're all part of a movement. Even if we can all just do a little, it's a positive change and you’ve just got to hope it all adds up. 

Mathroo Basha by Hetain Patel is on at Lakeside Arts on Sat 1 November 2025, as part of nottdance 2025. A longer version of this interview is available to listen to here as part of LeftLion podcast series.

hetainpatel.com
nottdance.com