Shreya Parashar and Sachin Sharma in Colonial Circus: History, Clown-Style, Culture Opus Inc. at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied.
Colonial Circus: History, Clown-Style (Stage 27, Sugar Swing Upstairs)
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
The two bouffon clowns of this strange, fascinating, and unsettling (feel free to use the term “fringe-y”) show, “a brief history of colonialism,” sure know how to make an entrance.
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Two helmeted figures in white-face enter the stage, heads bobbing, bodies hidden behind a long swatch of red fabric. The sound: a deep, vibrating didgeridoo chant that seems like some sort of solemn ritual. And eventually, after a disconcerting length of time and some wordless prodding, we join in because that’s what we’re trained to do as theatre audiences. It’s a sort of call-and-response game, rewarded with a smile, or admonished with a grimace.
That’s the thing about this show, a deliberately unstable mixture of goofy and grave that never finds an equilibrium, or wants to. We’re never on terra firm as an audience; we’re always on the wrong foot. And what happens, for extended stretches, is on us. Which says something meaningful about colonialism, of course.
The audience, either singly or as a group, is involved all the way through Colonial Circus, the work of two genuine theatre experimenters, Sachin Sharma and Shreya Parashar. We’re asked to ask questions, and they’re all wrong. There’s a voyage to America that goes to India instead (“white boat people, what could go wrong?”). There’s very Brit tea-time, with participation from the sole member of the audience to reveal that he was born in India. Religion as a tool of colonialism gets a funny sequence. There’s even a monologue about war.
This is a show that always feels, again deliberately, like it’s coming apart at the seams, always awkward; the tone always unpredictable. At the end the artists explain that they’ve experimenting, in a cross-cultural way, with humour — what’s funny, what’s not funny. We’re a test case for comedy. And there’s a kind of brilliance in clowning tuned to that frequency.
Did I enjoy it? I don’t even know quite how to answer that question. But I’m glad I had the experience. How many times do you hear about risk-taking at the Fringe? How many times does it actually happen? Don’t miss your chance if you’re a Fringe experimenter too. There’s nothing like it on any other stage.
