“Fish Eyes!” has been yelled at Anita Majumdar from cars for years.
It’s the name of her first play in a trilogy that will be performed at the Cultch as part of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Jan. 27 to 31.
“When those people would yell Fish Eyes at me, it’s because they thought, oh remember, we saw that show together,” Majumdar said. “They have a very personal and intimate relationship with the show and me, because I’m the only person on stage and I’m the writer.”
Fish Eyes focuses on teenaged Meena, who’s considering dumping dance for her crush on the school’s most popular boy.
“Her dance life is so consuming that she doesn’t actually have time on the weekends to go to school parties or dances or hang out with actual people from her school because she’s always in either dance rehearsal or dance performance,” Majumdar said. “She’s always the outsider, and while a lot of these women feel like they’re the outsider, Meena really is.”
Majumdar wrote Fish Eyes after she moved across the country from her hometown of Port Moody to attend the National Theatre School of Canada.
“There’s something about that [high school] experience that I hadn’t reconciled with,” Majumdar said. “There was a frustration with the inequality that I found, at least, in Port Moody high school. It took me three plays to articulate partly my own experience, but more to the point and more majorly, the experience of young women I saw around me.”
Fish Eyes premiered in Toronto in 2005; at the Cultch in 2006.
But Majumdar wasn’t satisfied.
“I was interested in looking at a new young woman who sort of picks up from where the last character we met left off,” she said.
Majumdar wrote Boys with Cars, about Naz, who’s living the life Meena aspires to, in 2012.
“That life isn’t the bed of roses that Meena thinks it is,” Majumdar said. “We actually see a young woman abandon that talent for having a boyfriend, for conceding to his life, and that it also comes with consequences.”
Majumdar wrote Let Me Borrow that Top, about Candice, a popular girl who secretly aspires to be a Bollywood dancer, in 2013.
“The expectations of being someone who’s popular and retaining that crown of popularity asks her to continue to be the same person,” Majumdar said. “She’s not allowed to evolve into this person who actually now aspires to be a Bollywood dancer because it’s an experience that allowed her to step outside of her realm of popularity where everything’s uncool, and you hang out in a parking lot and do nothing after school, and because God forbid you actually care about something.”
Like her trilogy, Majumdar is a dancing, acting and playwriting triple threat. She’s a Dora Mavor Moore Award-nominated choreographer who trained in classical Indian, and other forms of dance for more than 15 years. She was awarded best actress at the Asian Festival of First Films in Singapore for her film debut in Murder Unveiled, has worked with acclaimed director Deepa Mehta and has appeared on TV in CBC’s Diverted, Republic of Doyle and Gavin Crawford’s Wild Wild West. Majumdar was awarded the 2013 Governor General’s Protégé Prize in playwriting under the mentorship of John Murrell, recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. She’s the playwright-in-residence at Nightswimming Theatre in Toronto.
In the trilogy, Majumdar portrays teenage girls’ travails with dance, music and dramedy, exploring topics that range from teenage heartache to cultural politics and colonialism.
She dons South Asian dance costumes and references Indian pop culture, but the coming-of-age stories each protagonist tells reflect what Majumdar and her peers struggled with in Port Moody.
“These plays feel like a microcosm of what you end up actually encountering when you go into the world,” she said. “So high school society feels very much like a smaller community of the same kind of double standards, the same kind of issues of fighting for feminism that you will encounter when you grow up. It’s the testing ground for relationships between men and women.”
The trilogy will be performed as Part 1, Fish Eyes, and Part 2 and 3, Boys with Cars and Let Me Borrow That Top, on alternating nights. Theatregoers can see both shows, Jan. 31, and add on dinner for $20. For more information, see pushfestival.ca.
