Sampling “South Asian” at Toronto Fringe Festival 2024
#SouthAsianAtFringe theatre reviewed
Colonial-Circus, Photo by Sachin Sharma featuring Sachin Sharma Shreya Parashar
Share Article
A thali, according to some sources, offers up a traditional South Asian meal that is considered balanced. There’s the combination of grains, lentils, vegetables, meats, broths, sweets and pickles. There’s also the rounding out of flavour profiles ranging from sweet and salty to pungent and astringent.
Like so many aspects of South Asian customs, however, a thali has also come to connote a way to sample a culture – this time through food – especially in the diaspora. Toronto’s Fringe Festival this year, which featured eight works that self-identified as South Asian during its run from July 3 to 14, reminded me of the thali concept.

bol, brown boy, bol Nawaaz Makhani. Image Credit Tiffany Wu
If you’re unfamiliar with the many options of South Asian cuisine, a thali is a great way to familiarize yourself with a restaurant's staple dishes. If you know your bhindi-do-pyaaza from your daal-tadka, it can be a cost-effective way to satisfy a variety of cravings.
That so many shows created by self-identified South Asian diaspora creatives got a chance to make it through Fringe Festival’s lottery system this year was a first, said Himanshu Sitlani, during an informal chat outside one of the Fringe venues. Sitlani is a co-founder of Nautanki Bazaar, which presented Aala Tamasha Aala: A Canadian Tale in India’s Tamasha Style at the festival. So, the eight shows decided to support each other, he added.

Koli Kari, Image Credit Barry McCluskey
There was, however, another show by Anand Rajaram called Crosstown at the festival this year. The one-man play, adapted by Rajaram from a novel by Richard Scrimger, featured a series of characters representing Toronto’s diverse residents. Now, a veteran of the Canadian theatre, film and TV scenes, Rajaram wasn’t included in the South Asian roundup – which throws up the question, what exactly did it mean to be #SouthAsianAtFringe. But more on that later.
The diasporic/immigrant experience was a central theme for a few shows that were part of #SouthAsiansAtFringe.
Written by Nautanki Bazaar’s other co-founder Neha Poduval, Aala Tamasha Aala told the story of Abhay, who dreamed of becoming a Lavni dancer before his move to Toronto. The show introduced audiences to tamasha, a folk theatre form popular in the Indian state of Maharashtra. In Toronto, Abhay works as a security guard, taking orders from a voice on the walkie-talkie. A lack of Canadian experience makes Abhay take on the mundane job with no respite. Frustrated and lonely, Abhay starts to remember his forgotten dream, and soon his imagination starts to intrude on his reality.

Photo by Isaac Meyer Feat. Shreya Parashar and Sachin Sharma, Colonial Circus Forest
Aala Tamasha Aala attempts to present a new spin on the classic immigrant story of a newcomer whose Canadian dreams are soon dashed by the need to survive. While the story may be familiar, it offered the chance for an audience in Toronto to get a glimpse of a tradition like Lavni, which was effectively used in the show as a way to escape a temporal space.
While Poduval couldn’t fully channel that coquettish energy of a seasoned Lavni dancer, who is supposed to captivate the hearts of her audiences, it was an admirable performance. And it was a joy to hear popular Marathi folk songs in a Toronto theater. Tushar Tukaram Dalvi and Amlan Das were similarly able to articulate the frustrations of an immigrant life in Toronto, in their respective roles – Dalvi as Abhay, and Das in his rotation of characters.
Nawaz Makhani’s bol, brown boy, bol (speak, brown boy, speak) meanwhile, took a solo approach in telling a personal story about a young South Asian man growing up in Toronto, deeply impacted by racism while negotiating his Canadian identity. Playing the tabla became a throughline in Makhani’s story, and clearly, he’s on a lifelong journey with the instrument. As he pointed out during the performance, it took him two years to figure out how to play the ‘tin’ bol on the drums. Makhani’s solo show could have used more fine-tuning. He covered a lot of ground in his desire to enact his personal journey, as well as demonstrate his ability to play some basic tabla pieces. As a result, the show simply scratched the surface in its anecdotal take on what could have been a deeply resonant story.
In Koli Kari, by focusing on a very specific idea of a chef using his mother’s secret chicken curry recipe to save his failing cooking show, Ganesh Thava was able to dig deeper and present an intriguing show. When Ravi decides to cook his mother’s mouth watering chicken curry, revealing the ingredients and tips and tricks that he learnt from his Amma, he’s suddenly confronted with a human-sized chicken apparition and flashbacks of past conversations with his mother and childhood friend. With minimal props and performances that rang true, the trio of actors Thava, Asha Ponnachan and Anne Saverimuthu were able to serve up a compelling story about a young man coming to terms with a different, long held secret. Ponnachan’s turn as the understanding and yet demanding mother was especially remarkable.
Moving beyond stories set in the diaspora, two shows presented works located in India. Dramatic Jukebox presented the Sadaat Hasan Manto classic Toba Tek Singh. Set in a mental asylum following the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, Manto’s play offered a satire on the tragedy of the divide. The story follows the inmates of the asylum, who are told that they must go to either of the two countries. But the question is who belongs where? An ensemble cast came together to present Manto’s searing indictment, enabled by an elaborate set. The only false note were the testimonials at the end, as each cast member came to the front of the stage to talk about the themes of refugees and homelands, and how Manto’s play resonated with them personally. It was the kind of context that’s better suited for a playbill.
Elephant Song, on the other hand, was an original play about a government clerk in Mumbai who starts questioning central belief systems in the face of a tragedy. The play aspired to use “influences from the minimalism of Grotovosky’s Poor Theatre to portray the maximalist megalopolis that is Mumbai,” relying heavily on sound. It was a riveting performance. Through strains of live sitar, Hindustani vocal music and Kabir’s poetry to the rumble of a Mumbai local train, actors brought Mumbai to Toronto, making efficient use of Theatre Passe Muraille’s intimate backspace stage. The trio of actors Arjun Kalra, Japneet Kaur and Chirag Motwani were convincing in their various roles. But Kalra was truly captivating, his lithe frame projecting the intensity of his character with a quiet ferocity.
When it comes to a standout show, the clear choice was Colonial Circus. It’s truly hard to describe what unfolded on the Theatre Passe Muraille mainstage on the evening that I caught it. Co-creators Sachin Sharma and Shreya Parasher describe Colonial Circus as an “immersive-absurdist-comedy show.” It was all of that and more. Consider their premise of presenting a “starter pack to the history of colonization through the art of Bouffon.” Dressed as a mix between a clown and mime, and using just a large red sheet of cloth, Sharma and Parasher had the theatre alternating between hysterical laughs and moments of shock and schadenfreude, while also considering our roles as settlers in this country. That the show was interactive and informed by their considerable chops in improv comedy just added to the shenanigans. I hope Parasher and Sharma are able to workshop the show even further with director Isaac Kessler, and present it beyond the festival.
I was unable to catch Rajaram’s performance of Crosstown. Other reviews suggest he was his charismatic self as an actor, with an uncanny ability to disappear into characters. Rajaram adapted the play from Scrimger’s debut novel published in 1996, which maps out the downward spiral of Mitch Mitchell, a former obstetrician and now unhoused man, who has to move crosstown when his shelter is relocated.
Thematically, then, perhaps Crosstown didn’t fit the rubric for being a part of #SouthAsiansAtFringe, since it’s not explicitly about the immigrant experience or a story that sets its origins elsewhere – although it may have involved some stories of immigrant people on the margins of Toronto society. Or it may just be that a new generation of self-identified South Asian Canadian artists didn’t know of a veteran like Rajaram. After all, not all artists’ paths intersect – especially when the diaspora sprawls generations and geolocations.
So, what does this mean for the evolution of South Asian Canadian storytelling on the Toronto stage? In a way, it represents the ebb and flow of migration to the city. The story of Abhay, a security guard in 2024, could have easily been the story of a Sikh farmer in the 1900s or a Pakistani cabbie in the 1990s. Ravi might not have had a cooking show in the 1980s; but he could have carried the spices with him to make that secret recipe in a bid to escape the ravages of Sri Lanka’s civil war. I remember watching Rajaram in a small theatrical adaptation of a Tagore play almost two decades ago.
The stories never get old. People who tell them might change, and find new meanings in them.