Monsoon fest represents underserved voices
Event’s co-creator manifests a formidable energy in promoting South Asian theatre
There is a perception that Rohit Chokhani doesn’t sleep.
The winner of the Vancouver Now representation and inclusion award at this year’s Jessie Awards is preparing — with co-producer and co-creator Gurpreet Sian — to launch the third Monsoon Festival of Performing Arts, but he also just announced the 2018 programming for Project SAT (South Asian Theatre). This initiative aimed at developing a deeper infrastructure for touring, producing, presenting and creating national and international South Asian theatre projects in Canada is just one more way this active creator is doing his part to “represent the unrepresented” voices in this country’s theatre scene.
Add in an artistic associate position at Bard on the Beach, helming Diwali in B.C. (Oct. 5 to Nov. 18, across the province), producing new plays and any number of other community outreach and creative pursuits and you can see why people question how Chokhani does it. He assures me that sleep plays a key role in keeping up the energy levels.
His master’s degree in computer programming provides some key organizing skills that make him the rarest of creative types: an efficient one.
Throughout his studies, he was always presenting events and pursuing arts on the side.
“I immigrated here eight years ago and spent two years trying to do my thing, settling on a collective play at the Fringe Festival called Siddhartha: A Journey Home at Dr. Sun Yat-sen Gardens,” he said. “It was my first thing artistically and then I got picked up as general manager at Urban Ink. From there, I went on to general manager at Touchstone Theatre and that was about the time that the discussions were ramping and amping up about inclusiveness in the local theatre.”
Seeing a chance to develop a South Asian presence in the scene, telling their stories and creating their own works, Chokhani delved into developing some vehicles. It took time.
“It’s still in pretty early stages, and I have a long-term vision looking ahead 10 years that is pretty wide-ranging,” he said. “I don’t feel that I really began to define myself as an artist until about five years ago when some of my curatorial vision began to take shape in events I was involved in.”
He met Gurpreet Sian and they agreed that the Monsoon Festival of the Arts should be a blanket event that can serve as both a training hub and a performance showcase. Over the 11 days of the festival there are workshops, an industry series with staged readings and two plays. Anita Majumdar’s acclaimed one-woman show, the Fish Eyes Trilogy (Aug. 18, Surrey Arts Centre Main Stage), has toured internationally and Paneet Singh’s site-specific The Undocumented Trial of William C. Hopkinson (Friday to Sunday, Vancouver Art Gallery) is about the 1914 Vancouver trial of Mewa Singh, who was accused of assassinating Canadian immigration inspector William Charles Hopkinson. Singh admitted to the act. To have the play staged in the very same building where the case was tried over 100 years ago is unique.
“There are already organizations doing great work with music and dance, and Gurpreet and I knew we wanted to do theatre,” he said.
“But also theatre that was encouraging to emerging artists and not just presenting established artists. So we both spend the year logging in what we see in our different networks that resonates and look for some kind of balance between local/not local, emerging/established, international/ nation and diversity, inclusivity and so forth in the South Asian community.”
It’s a big mandate for Monsoon Festival of Performing Arts and Sian and Chokhani have been careful to keep the scope of the event reasonable to get the best results. Since launching the event, they have met so many new names and they are aware that the gap they perceived is getting smaller.
“Project SAT is aiming to provide even more opportunity for the community to learn more in the workshops in a way that is more inclusive in terms of access
and interest,” said Chokhani. “If you are from a certain culture, you may not be as interested in Shakespeare or Chekhov — both things that I do and enjoy — which are a focus of theatre schools. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when I go to India, I see different ways of doing things and think we can bring them here using Project SAT as a platform.”
Incorporating training platforms that are not so well known in Canada, such as Natyashastra workshop in the fall — which is a comparative study of Eastern dramaturgy based on the Bharata Natyashastra (historic performing arts text) and Aristotelian poetics — may sound pretty specialized. But if it results in interesting stories well told in unique ways, we’re all the better for it. Having succeeded in finding funding through Canada Council and elsewhere, Monsoon, Project SAT and Diwali in B.C. have all been able to offer the training for free. This is key to Chokhani.
“It needs to be free, because marginalized artists can barely make enough money to survive and I’m not going to charge them,” he said. “I’m just so happy that we’ve been able to cater to this huge gap in the scene and not have to charge for it.”
With a long-term vision to bring diverse South Asian artists and stories from all over the world to the Lower Mainland, he hopes to see the local voices added to the global chorus. He’s excited about the pace of expansion in each of these initiatives he’s working with and hopes that it continues this way. Chokhani is not someone who favours the word no.
“If you want to step up, let’s do it,” he said. “We all live in a very interesting time with cultural differences and gender clashes, but we can’t forget that there is an underlying humanity that we all have and we can come at our differences in a caring and loving way. Having a good conversation helps to understand each other.”