With theatre slowly coming back and finding a place in the ‘new normal’, online performances are still a safe and comfortable way of “going” to see a show. This year the Adelaide Fringe has offered multiple shows with a ‘view from home’ option, and several venues (such as Black Box Theatres) have taken up this opportunity to live-stream their shows. Artists have also taken up this opportunity, such as Aarti Vincent, who is live-streaming her show, And No, I Didn’t Grow Up Doing Yoga, from her home in Melbourne.

The show was performed online via Zoom. The connection was great, audio was great and the lighting was great. However, I was not convinced with the professionalism of how the show opened. At the scheduled start time, Aarti came online and expressed surprise about the low attendance numbers, so we were put on hold while she called the Fringe artist contact line. It instantly put a rather unprofessional vibe across the rest of the evening.

Aarti is a great story teller, weaving life events and experiences from a cross-cultural marriage into her stand-up routines. Momentum was occasionally lost when she paused where laughter would be, but due to the show being online, it was mostly met by silence. Whilst the bulk of the show was original material, there were a few routines that I had sadly heard before from other comedians or as Facebook memes.

In this day and age, artists need to be exploring different performance avenues to reach audiences, and for this, I applaud Aarti Vincent for going out on a limb and presenting And No, I Did Not Grow Up Doing Yoga in this alternate performance environment. I do hope to see more from Aarti, especially if it can be in person, in the same room, as I feel her stand-up style really needs an audience to feed off of.