Party atmosphere of Danceboy celebrates self-discovery and the joys of Bollywood
Multifaceted theatremakers Munish Sharma and Gavan Cheema bring an eight-year-long project to completion by working beyond stage conventions
Munish Sharma
Pi Theatre and Touchstone Theatre present the Theatre Conspiracy production Danceboy at the Vine’s Den from March 19 to 22
AS WITH ANY PROPER celebration, dancing shoes are strongly recommended for the upcoming world premiere of Danceboy, an immersive, dance-fuelled play copresented by Pi Theatre and Touchstone Theatre and anchored by actor, playwright, and producer Munish Sharma.
“Come ready for movement,” Sharma says. “If you are a fan of Bollywood [and] you grew up watching that in the South Asian diaspora, that frequency is there throughout the piece.”
Danceboy began as a collection of poems by Sharma. Given his experience working in cabaret shows and sketch comedy, sharing it as a spoken-word album would’ve been a natural fit. But he knew there was more to it. Fatefully, Sharma’s friend, director, and fellow theatremaker Gavan Cheema also saw the vision when Sharma shared the poems with her.
“Munish and I were on a walk and he said, ‘I have all these poems, and I think I want to make a show with them,” Cheema says, alongside Sharma in a Zoom call with Stir. “That would’ve probably been eight years ago. To see it become this whole world is so satisfying.”
Getting to this full-length Theatre Conspiracy production has been a journey of dedication and collaboration. A reading of Danceboy was presented at the 2018 Monsoon Festival, followed by excerpts at the 2019 Spring FUSE event at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2020, a 30-minute version of the show, titled Danceboy: First Dance, was presented online as part of Rumble Theatre’s Tremors Festival.
Now in its full form, the show unfolds in two parts: “the journey” and “the dance”. Alongside Sharma’s performance and Cheema’s direction, the show is bolstered by Ruby Singh’s Bollywood-infused sound design, and its party atmosphere amplified by featured artist DJ Zenia. Cheema—who serves as co–artistic director at Theatre Conspiracy, alongside David Mesiha—has found freedom in working beyond theatre conventions to find more immediate connections with the audience.
“We want to evoke a feeling of dance, and we want audiences to have this unbridled joy that is just so necessary right now,” she explains. “We love doing things that are immersive and site-specific, and we’re really excited by that.”
Munish Sharma
The show’s narrative follows a young South Asian man in his self-discovery through dance and movement. Sharma’s storytelling explores the tension between boyhood and masculinity, and cultural expectations set by Bollywood media that can overlook other experiences. Although he doesn’t identify as a professional dancer, Sharma draws on his lifelong passion for dance, and its influence in the South Asian community, to highlight the joyful and expressive power of this practice.
“Bollywood gets you at a very young age,” Sharma says. “It’s not like dance boy has it figured out. There’s a lot of failure, a lot of mistakes, but there’s growth in it. That’s also something that I wanted to say: that there’s no finite way of being who you are.”
Cheema also brings a nuanced relationship with dance to the project. She was a competitive dancer in high school and practiced bhangra, the traditional folk dance, for a big chunk of her life. In her words, this collaboration combines her love of dance, storytelling, and community, without avoiding “the good, bad, and the ugly of Bollywood”.
“Every person I know has had some breakup with Bollywood at some point,” says Cheema. “I think this show dances that line. It acknowledges these things can coexist. You can love something and be critical of something at the same time.”
Showcasing stories about the South Asian diaspora is nothing new for the artists. Sharma gained attention as a cocreator of the sketch comedy show I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Chicken. His play Mrs. Singh and Me won Pick of the Fringe at the 2015 Vancouver Fringe Festival. As a playwright, Cheema presented her bilingual play Himmat in 2022, featuring Sharma in one of the central roles. While representing a community’s struggles remains important, Danceboy is unapologetic in prioritizing shared joy, and building upon existing works by South Asian Canadian artists. As Sharma explains, “There is a level of, you’re always representing an entire community.”
“We are standing on the shoulders of giants,” Cheema adds. “We can only ask these questions and want these things because somebody else has already put in the work for our community to be where we are now.”
Fittingly, Danceboy joins this year’s Pi Provacateur Series, a program led by Pi Theatre that supports boundary-pushing independent theatre. The invitation is simple: come for the theatre, stay for the dance. 
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