Actor, dancer and playwright Anita Majumdar’s Fish Eyes Trilogy tackles modern issues in youth that need to be discussed more often.
By offering her art, humour and self-experience, Majumdar is able to captivate and engage with a youth audience toward issues they might face growing up as a visible minority in Canada.
A trio of dance-plays (Fish Eyes, Boys with Cars, Let Me Borrow That Top) tells the coming-of-age stories of three teenage girls in small town Canada. Inspired by so-called honour killings, hip-hop and teenage heartache, Majumdar’s performances “celebrate the joy and awkwardness of youth while slyly tackling issues of colonialism and cultural identity.”
Nightswimming Theatre and The Banff Centre present Fish Eyes Trilogy part one March 19, and parts two and three on March 20 at the Margaret Greenham Theatre.
“It’s really exciting to bring the show to Banff … for me, it’s a little bit full circle. My first work in Banff was a stage reading and now I’m coming back to perform an entire trilogy,” Majumdar said. “It was really just meant for a one night performance, and it was encouraging to go to Toronto with this show and I really haven’t looked back since. It’s been 11 years now of working on the show in some way.
“It’s a show about a teenager in a South Asian community who is classically trained in Indian dance and blames classical Indian dance for not being more popular in high school.”
When Majumdar first started the show, she was much closer to the age of the high school students that Fish Eyes resonates with, but her own growth and that of her performance over the last decade has shown Fish Eyes is a needed piece of art that reaches audiences more than ever.
“There was an aspect of my own high school experience that I’ve come to terms with, and it really formed a big part of what I’m writing and what I’m interested in writing,” Majumdar said.
“There’s something about the youth experience in high school that wasn’t being addressed that I thought needed to be in the public forum, so I wrote these shows to talk about them.”
The timeline shifts throughout the three parts, with Fish Eyes being the first and the earliest in the timeline, with the second play’s timeline moving into the future, a year after the point where Fish Eyes leaves off. The third part transitions back in the timeline by 10 months.
“There’s a lot of things in Fish Eyes that are mentioned that the other two shows revisit, and there’s one pivotal scene that gets revisited three times and we get to see it from three different perspectives,” Majumdar said.
Due to the content and issues Majumdar addresses in her performance she has become not only a voice for visible minority youth, but also a person to turn to.
“Youth really understand this work in a very different way than adult audiences do, but in a very important way, especially when you have young people who are of colour,” Majumdar said.
“Having them have a chance to not only engage with the content of the show, but also engage with the fact there is another young woman of colour onstage – it makes possibilities in their own minds possible.”
Adolescents are usually the first ones to come up to Majumdar and talk about what they just saw and ask how she became an actor, but in other cases they seek advice on personal problems they are facing.
“If it’s something like, ‘I just don’t fit in,’ we usually just talk about it, and people will get in touch with me on Facebook, that’s happened a number of times,” Majumdar said.
“I remember where a young woman saw Fish Eyes and came up to me and told me she was from a really abusive home situation, and that’s the point where I recognize that I’m not trained enough to advise someone in getting out of their abusive situation in their home. That’s why working with organizations like Kids Helpline for that particular school tour is really helpful; because you actually have trained professionals who do know how to advise.
“These kids have developed a level of trust with me from being onstage doing something they wish they could be doing. It’s easier to get them to move forward to organizations like Kids Helpline.”
