Edinburgh Fringe 2025
The Anti “Yogi”
Fringe Management, LLC
Genre: Dance, Theatre, World Music
Venue: Greenside
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Mayuri Bhandari brings storytelling and joyous, mesmerising dance to her imaginative quest to take back yoga from the corporations that have subverted it. Funny, thought-provoking, and sincere, The Anti “Yogi” will keep you spellbound from start to finish.
Review
The start of The Anti “Yogi” finds writer/performer Mayuri Bhandari doing, well, yoga – the Los Angeles kind, perpetuated by what she calls wogis, or white yogis. As her expressive face winces with every mispronunciation and fatuous exhortation (“Inhale love! Exhale compassion!”), she gathers up the audience’s many laughs and segues into a tidy explanation of how yoga ought actually to work, with its focus on ethics and morals foremost, and, only then, the postures. “I’m not exotic,” she complains, “I’m exhausted.”
This is most certainly not true, as the hour that follows is an energetic one that interweaves storytelling with spellbinding dance. Bhandari employs impressions of Buddha, Krishna, Kali, and a very annoying wogi named Daniele, among others, to give glimpses into her Jain upbringing and her imagined struggle to help the goddess Kali bring real yoga to the West.
The show has as its subhead, “liberation, not Lululemon,” and Bhandari excoriates the Canadian multinational clothing company for promoting child labor, planet-destroying fast fashion, consumerist culture, toxic products, and values antithetical to the original concept of yoga. In a multimedia mock video conference, with recordings of Bhandari playing all roles, she blasts them for “wanting the benefits, but not the brownness,” of the discipline. I mean: fair enough.
There are a few questionable notes in the storyline, though. Daniele is a too-easy straw woman, and bookending the story with jokes about her parents’ fixation on arranged marriage is, likewise, a creaky trope that’s beneath her otherwise incisive critique. There’s also an abrupt turn, just before the end, to Bhandari’s experiences at the Standing Rock protests against the oil pipeline threatening Lakota territory in the US. It’s jarring, but it’s also to Bhandari’s credit that she doesn’t just rail against the cultural appropriation of yoga but tries to envision what a positive project might look like.
But, the main thing in all this is: the dance. “Water is life,” Bhandari intones at multiple points in the performance, and she moves like water given life. Not just the dance numbers, which are spectacular, but also in the smallest gestures she uses in presenting her imagined conversations. Her impressions of the enlightened beings she speaks with don’t succeed because of the voices she adopts, or the writing, but because her body describes how they occupy space. This is a person whose kinesthetic self-awareness and control are off the scale compared to us mortals, and it’s beyond astonishing.
Neel Agrawal accompanies the entire show on percussion, as an understated presence, and he adds depth and enjoyment to what is already a thought-provoking and entertaining hour. Their interplay, though limited, is delightfully sweet. In his quest for perfect timing — at which he thoroughly succeeds – he plays without ever taking his eyes off her. It’s entirely relatable, as neither can we.
