Fish Eyes: SPARK Festival 2012 at the Belfry Theatre (Victoria, BC) – Guest review by @anabellebf
Once again, I am happy to be reviewing a play at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria for Hummingbir604. This time, I saw one of the four main plays at this year’s Spark festival: Fish Eyes.
It’s a shame that all tickets were gone for the first two days, but I do hope you’ll stop by your local theatre if Anita comes to present this play in your town.
Anita Majumdar here serves as both playwright and actress (it’s a solo play) and explores what it means to have a cultural heritage far away from home. Switching between a conflicted teenager, Mina, and her old dancing teacher, Anita touches themes of cultural appropriation, colonialism and assimilation in the Western world.
The story on its own is fairly simple and straightforward: Mina, the 17-year old Indian dancer, wants to date Buddy Kane during the summer when she is supposed to go compete in a dance competition in India. Mina is good at what she does, but she sees her Indian heritage as an obstacle to being “normal”. When a dance component in phys.ed. gives her a chance to shine, she realizes her talent but also sees how “white people” can viciously misappropriate her culture for their own benefit.
What makes this play shine is not so much the story as the way it is performed. The hand gestures of Indian dance are traditional storytelling gestures (something I learned during the play!), and she uses them liberally to tell this story. And she dances too. A lot. And well, I imagine… but I am no judge of good Indian dancing. In any case, Anita’s movements are as carefully choreographed as those of a dance and they enhance the story in really interesting ways. It’s hard to describe in words—you should just see it for yourself.
The set is simple and let Anita be the focus. There were some problems with the sound though—sometimes the music was too loud and we couldn’t hear Anita speak in the back. We missed a few lines because of this.
The play definitely made the audience laugh. There’s something so naïve about an otherwise talented teenager being in love with boys like Buddy. I wish there had been more emphasis on the cultural appropriation theme (why is there no more indignation about a white girl going to learn Indian dance at the “Coventry School of Bhangra” in England?). But overall, I left both entertained and educated about the vagaries of being of a certain cultural heritage far away from home. In certain ways, I could identify with Mina’s love/hate relationship with Indian culture.
This guest review was provided by Anabelle Bernard Fournier exclusively for Hummingbird604.com. You can follow her on Twitter (@AnabelleBF) and on her blog. Thanks so much for helping me provide coverage to the SPARK Festival 2012!
