KC Shornima: Detachment Style
Edinburgh Fringe Festival Review
Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker 1)
Detatchement Style is a one woman show at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival by New York based KC Shornima. The script is razor sharp; KC is indeed a writer for Saturday Night Live. Her words and ideas are precise and her life story is intriguing, making for both good drama and comedy. KC shares her story of living through a civil war in Nepal and of her experiences as a foreign woman living, and dating, in New York. The tales range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Her observations are sharp, funny and compelling.
The show is called Detached Style, referring to her being “emotionally unavailable, professionally successful, and ready to talk about it – just not too much”. Unfortunately though, her performance also feels detached. While she is right on the mark as a writer, as a performer she is fragile and seems to be desperately seeking for the audience to love her as she constantly asks for laughs. At one point she even sarcastically says ‘you guys are fun’. Apparently we didn’t laugh enough for her approval. At the end of her show, she dashed off stage straight to her phone, not leaving us time to actually appreciate her or engage with her post show.
Expecting a certain reaction from the audience instead of accepting the vibe of each performance (and realising that people can actually appreciate things differently, and it doesn’t mean they are having a bad time if they don’t hoot with laughter) to me feels like inexperience in the performer. However it could also be cultural. Some America based comics expect us to laugh aloud and if not, they’re fierce!
KC does manage to be touching, fragile and has the hall marks of her generation – consciously detached. She writes fantastically and has a great story to tell. I just hope that as she develops as a performer she learns to give us the the space to listen and react as we feel fit, without adding jarring commentary on our behaviour as an audience.
Pleasance Courtyard – Bunker One: 30th July – 24th August: 6:10pm
Website – https://www.kcshornima.com/
Instagram – Kcshornima
Facebook – Kcshornima
TikTok – Shornimakc