VICTIM IMPACT

> BY JANET SMITH

Last week, in a news story buried under the latest follies of Donald Trump, the nationalization of the Trans Mountain pipeline, and the Ontario election circus, a former Vancouver notary who ran a staggering $110-million Ponzi scheme was ordered to surrender herself.

Canada’s highest court had just dismissed Rashida Samji’s last attempt at an appeal. She had been out on bail since being convicted of fraud charges for scamming almost 300 investors.

It was the final chapter in one of the most far-reaching white-collar crimes in the province’s history. But the vast majority of residents here know little beyond the headlines—if even that.

Now Theatre Conspiracy’s latest documentary-theatre project, Victim Impact, delves deep into the story, with playwright Tim Carlson digging into transcripts to expose the vast scale of the fraud, the absurd turns of its journey through the courts, and the mind-blowing amount of money Samji’s friends, family, and associates lost in the ordeal.

More than anything, director Jiv Parasram tells the Straight over the phone during a rehearsal break at the Progress Lab, his team wants to capture the scale of the human fallout—not something that usually gets tracked in tales of white-collar crime.

“With the victims’ stories we get emotional connections,” says Parasram, a multidisciplinary artist who just won the Toronto Arts Foundation’s emerging-artist award, and who is artistic producer at Hogtown’s politicized, buzz-creating Pandemic Theatre. “We’re trying to give a voice to the collective. It’s not just Samji, it’s an entire system. We want to look at the court systems, the justice systems, the economic systems that allowed this to happen.

“In white-collar crime, they’re often let off within a year or two, and the impact that has on a larger scale is huge,” Parasram continues. “So it’s not a petty crime; it’s treated almost with respect. The people [charged] have access to a lot of resources for lawyers, and then there’s the sheer bureaucracy of the court system.”

Based on Carlson’s research and interviews, Victim Impact mirrors the live-documentary feel of previous Theatre Conspiracy works like Foreign Radical and Extraction. Starring Nimet Kanji as Samji, joined by Jenn Griffin, Risha Nanda, Allan Morgan, and Munish Sharma in multiple roles, it’s brought to life with multimedia effects by visuals designer Milton Lim and sound designer David Mesiha. The show has murder-mystery elements and even film-noir touches, Parasram says. Film noir reflects the era depicted in Victim Impact, he points out: in its original form, the style grew out of the Depression, and often reflected people trying to pull themselves out of poverty. The Ponzi scheme came to light in 2012, and had been under way for about a decade; a lot of its action happened amid the aftermath of the great recession of 2007 to 2009. With Samji at the helm, investors were told they could receive returns as high as 35 percent as a winery group needed collateral to pay for its expansion into South Africa and South America. In the scheme, though, investors were actually just paying each other.

The show is complemented by a podcast series called Victim Impact: The Fraudcast at conspiracy.ca/ fraudcast, where Carlson dives even deeper into the case. “You can find out all the gritty details there that you can’t get to in the finite space of the theatre,” Parasram says.

The multifaceted approach has helped tackle the vast quantity of facts gathered over an intense threeyear period. “What I think audiences will get is the scope of how large it is,” Parasram says. “It’s so far above what anyone can fathom in terms of the amount of money that has been lost. To me, the idea of losing $20,000 is a lot. Here, it’s $110 million.”

Theatre Conspiracy presents Victim Impact at the Cultch’s Historic Theatre from Friday (June 8) to June 17.

Victim Impact

Dion Kaszas started getting tattoos at 17, as he puts it, “in the western tradition, just with the machine—pick something off the wall and go for it”.

Then, in 2006, while he sat in a shop waiting to get his latest ink, he spotted a pamphlet about the tattooing and body painting of the “Thompson River Indians”.

“My head almost popped off that we had this tattooing tradition,” says Kaszas, whose mixed heritage includes the Nlaka’pamux—an Interior B.C. Salish community in the Thompson River region. “I didn’t realize that my ancestors had a tattooing tradition. I knew the Maori had and the folks in Borneo and Tonga and Fiji did, but I didn’t know about it here.”

That moment would plant the seed, not only for Kaszas’s own reawakening to his culture, but for a revival of Indigenous tattooing here. Kaszas, who’s also a painter, went on to apprentice as a tattoo artist and eventually helped establish the Earthline Tattoo Collective, dedicated to promoting Indigenous tattoo practices in Canada.

Kaszas went on to get his master’s in Indigenous studies at UBC Okanagan, focusing his research on Indigenous tattooing. And now he’s come to Vancouver to guest-curate the new exhibit Body Language: Reawakening Cultural Tattooing of the Northwest. The show marks the reopening of the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art after a six-month renovation.

Body Language brings together the work of Kaszas with that of Nisga’a artist Nakkita Trimble, Tlingit artist Nahaan, Haida artist Corey Bulpitt, and Heiltsuk artist Dean Hunt. Each will display tattoo work alongside clothing, basketry, rock art, and other works that reflect similar motifs from their regions.

Tattooing and piercing were used