Fish Eyes Trilogy explores coming of age by way of dance
For Anita Majumdar, high school was a lot like life, with all the hormones turned up.
That discovery originally came to the Vancouver- based writer, dancer and actress ( Same Same But Different), when she was a student, 11 years ago, at the National Theatre School in Montreal.
There, she created Fish Eyes, the first of her unique brand of solo shows that combine dance with some funny, shrewd storytelling.
It was not only Majumdar’s calling card to becoming an in- demand solo performer and actress, but led to creating two other shows set around her high school, coming- ofage years, that comprise the Fish Eyes Trilogy.
For Majumdar fans who couldn’t get enough when she was here performing Same Same But Different at the 2014 play Rites Festival, she’s presenting the entire Fish Eyes Trilogy over two nights, Thursday and Friday, at the Banff Centre.
Not bad for something that originated as a student project.
“( It) was supposed to be just one night of a solo show for school,” says Majumdar, “and ( Crow’s Theatre artistic director) Chris Abraham happened to be in the audience that night.
“( He) told me, you’ve got to take this to Toronto, and after Toronto I never really looked back — the show just kept happening.”
Not only did it keep happening, but it grew, into three different segments, featuring nine different characters, all of whom Majumdar portrays in the three shows she performs over two nights at Banff Centre.
“I felt its popularity was a really good foundation,” she says, “for talking about the other things that irritated me while I was in high school.” Like what? “You leave high school,” she says, “and you realize, oh, those double standards I faced in high school, they’re just magnified in the world.
“The issues around differences between rules for genders and sex. Why are there different rules for girls and different rules for guys? Why do women get paid less than men?
“It just gets amped when you go out into the world,” she adds, “but you realize that the foundation for that, the introduction to that was in high school and these sort of small incidents, that seemed so small at the time — and even with perspective still seem small — were actually added to a larger life picture — and as soon as we become aware of those things, we become instruments of change.”
What makes Majumdar’s brand of storytelling even more impressive is that her shows tell almost as much of its story through dance as through words, giving a Majumdar performance a kind of kinetic dazzle.
“The dancing seems to be the thing people have always gravitated to,” she says.
While she performs The Fish Eyes Trilogy in a classical Indian dance costume, her shows are a mash- up of North American pop cultural references tossed in a choreography blender with classical Indian moves.
“It sort of juxtaposes what you think Indian dance is,” she says, “and it implements my Canadian identity most certainly.
“I’m wearing a classical Indian dance costume, but there’s these call- outs to Beyonce, call- outs to dance we recognize and understand — especially telling stories about high school. It’s almost impossible not to include hip hop and not to include more modern forms of dance that you wouldn’t see in India itself.”
For Majumder, it’s just her own unique brand of how she prefers to tell her stories.
“I enjoy telling stories through dance,” she says.
“I think they help demonstrate and illustrate things I’m unable to say without words.
“That’s my shortcoming as a playwright,” she adds, “but I’ve always contended that dance is a form of playwriting — at least in my world — and that when I choreograph something, I’m still speaking as the playwright.”