I have very little to say about Danceboy because, as far as I can tell, there isn’t much to it.
In Danceboy, writer and performer Munish Sharma tells us about his lifelong love of dancing, which started when he was a toddler and Bollywood movies taught him that “This is what happiness looks like.” It also engrained unrealistic romantic expectations. And that’s the basic tension in Danceboy: as an adult, Sharma still loves to dance — and go to the clubs — but he doesn’t know how to negotiate romantic relationships. Fair enough.
But Sharma doesn’t explore this tension with the narrative specificity or thematic accumulation that might have made it resonate. Instead, as a writer, he jumps back and forth in an erratic timeline repeating his basic ideas, but failing to give them theatrical or dramatic shape. Every now and then, he’ll offer an image — of himself as a kid dancing with his younger siblings, for instance — but these images never develop into scenes or stories. Sharma doesn’t bother to develop characters or relationships. Rather than tell us about a specific romance — failed or otherwise — he recites a series of romantic poems. This series might be meant to indicate a process of maturation, but, without narrative toeholds, such a process, if it’s there, is hard to grasp.
Sharma is a charming performer and it’s good to hear about a South Asian-Canadian kid finding community in the club scene. But I’d need to know more about both the exclusion and inclusion to be engaged by them.
In Danceboy, Sharma repeatedly wonders, “Am I dancing my life away?”, but the script doesn’t dig into the potential downsides of dancing — or clubbing — so the question feels hollow.
In the script as it stands, dancing doesn’t look like a problem. But nothing else does either. The central tension between dancing and romantic maturity, which looks promising in theory, turns into a blank space, and that’s why there’s no sense of accumulation — or a point.
DANCEBOY Written and performed by Munish Sharma. Directed by Gavan Cheema. A Theatre Conspiracy production presented by Pi Theatre and Touchstone Theatre. Running at the Vines Den (825 E. Hastings) until March 22. Tickets and information.
THERE’S MORE! You can get all my current reviews PLUS curated local, national, and international arts coverage in your inbox FREE every week if you subscribe to Fresh Sheet, the Newsletter. Just click that link. (Unsubscribe at any time. Super easy. No hard feelings.) Check it out.
0 Comments