Archive for the ‘Arts and Theatre’

A review of (Un)making Time: ‘My Other History’ and ‘Rondo’

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Image from ‘Rondo’ Image from ‘My Other History’ “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue… And then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose In early 2011, Tracy Holsinger of Mind Adventures Theatre Company and Jake Oorloff of Floating Space Theatre Company were awarded a grant from the Sunethra Bandaranaike Trust to interrogate, through theatre, the idea and theme of reconciliation. The resulting plays were staged in April under the title (Un)making Time and featured two compelling productions – ‘Rondo’ directed by Tracy Holsinger and Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke and ‘My Other History’, written and directed by Jake Oorloff. Though bound by a…

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A Lost White Tribe: The Eurasians of Sri Lanka

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A Lost White Tribe: The Eurasians of Sri Lanka is a personal look at some of the last remaining ‘Eurasians’, and part of the Moving Images commissioned and supported by Groundviews. Produced by Menika van der Poorten these narrated photo essays document a community few Sri Lankans truly know about or remember today, or care to. Seven compelling and rare narrated photo essays of this community, shot in high-definition (HD), are now featured on Moving Images. Anne Williams Paul Samarasinghe Cynthia Emersley Cynthia Emersley meets the ‘Burghers’ P U Liyanage on local history Malcolm Grey on paddy cultivation Malcolm Grey on his grandmother

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A brief impression of ‘Rondo’

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Original photo courtesy Mind Adventures Rondo is a devised theatre play, based on the theme of reconciliation, says the programme note for the production of RONDO by Tracy Holsinger and the Mind Adventures Theatre Company. The structure of the play is episodic, with an unraveling of a series of seemingly unrelated incidents taking place between blackouts. A ‘Watcher’ watches over it all, standing on a small lighthouse like structure at the back of the stage, occasionally scanning the horizon with a spyglass and flashing a torch at the face on the ‘Visitor’, the only contemporary figure in the piece. As the Watcher rambles on in verse, at times comic and at other times obtusely philosophical, one hoped, the audience has a brief moment to ponder on what they have just seen and what it means in relation to the rest of what has been already performed. Rondo is a play that demands your complete attention. A brief moment to nod…

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A brief impression of ‘My Other History’

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Life span of one hour, four people performed excellently at a renovated warehouse down Park Street Mews. I was rooted to my seat and watched and listened in careful concentration to capture every syllable of the dialog. The play is low cost and high quality and gave a poignantly strange message of displaced people that we are gradually and conveniently beginning to forget. It is not only the man, woman and child who got corralled in Menik Camp that lost their ‘home.’ There is a whole lot more who are harnessed and weighed down and up rooted by the racial yoke. These then too are people of the soil, who are now geographically scattered and emotionally disorientated and carry totally or partially valid reasons to feel that they belong to an unequal second race.  The count among them is considerable, each looking in his or her moral compass to find a route that could guide him or her to a…

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  • 11 Feb, 2011
  • 1 Comment
  • Arts and Theatre,
    Colombo,
    Features

Interview with Mohamed Adamaly: A life in English theatre

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Mohamed Adamaly is one of Sri Lanka’s best known theatre personalities. As an actor, director and now increasingly a producer of films as well, Adam, as he is often referred to, always brings to English theatre memorable performances and drama. We began our conversation with how Adam started to act at Royal College, including in several directed by Shyam Selvadurai, the current curator of the Galle Literary Festival, who was his classmate. We talked about his grounding for theatre studying in the English medium, and how family bereavement completely changed his plans, taking him unexpectedly into the family business, law and more fully into professional theatre. We talk at length about English theatre, including the reception of Shakespearean productions and how elements of theatre changed since the time Adam first took to stage, especially during the long years of war. We also touched on the economics of theatre, on the paucity of sponsorship for serious productions dealing with contentious political…

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Imaging the aftermath

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“Absence of war does not mean peace. Meaningful peace can only be achieved by accepting separate identities and by trying to understand and accept the differences and uniqueness of cultural diversity. Peace cannot be achieved by blurring the uniqueness and denying separate identities. Peace cannot be achieved by suppression or by force; peace has to emerge from mutual understanding and respect” says Godwin Constantine. ### Godwin Constantine’s work takes us to a space engulfed with acute political and social implications that are connected with ethnic conflict and the resultant war that was fought for over 30 years in the land of his youth, Jaffna. Born to a middle class family in Kandy, doing his early schooling at St. Anthony’s College and Trinity College (Kandy) and now a leading cardiologist, one would wonder why Constantine’s work does not really sync with the usual art aspirations or aesthetics of the comfortable upwardly mobile middle class. In actuality, his work constitutes uncomfortable reminders…

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  • 26 Jan, 2011
  • 4 Comments
  • Arts and Theatre,
    Colombo

Heshma Wignaraja: Thoughts on dance and choreography

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Heshma Wignaraja is the Artistic Director of the Chitrasena Dance Company. Just recently, Groundviews featured an interview with her grand-mother Vajira, rightly often referred to as Sri Lanka’s Prima Ballerina. In the interview, Heshma addresses a question as to how difficult it is to carry on the rich dance traditions of her parents and grandparents in particular, and whether this tradition actually thwarts the evolution of dance. Heshma the choreographer is better known to contemporary audiences than Heshma the dancer, a point in fact I pose to her at the end of the interview. This interview goes into how Heshma began dance and how from years in the US, after the passing of Chitrasena her grandfather, she came back to Sri Lanka to immerse herself in the Chitrasena Dance Company’s productions. Heshma, in an interview done in 2006, was doubtful whether she and the dance productions did justice to Chitrasena legacy. In 2011, after several critically acclaimed productions to her…

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Shyam Selvadurai: Literature, identity, politics and the Galle Literary Festival

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Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965. His book Funny Boy introduced gay fiction to mainstream English literature in Sri Lanka, and indeed as Shyam notes, in South Asia. Born to a Sinhalese mother and Tamil father, Shyam was 19 when he left Sri Lanka in 1983 for Canada. Funny Boy was as much about class and ethnicity as sexual identities, and though Shyam has repeatedly noted that it was not autobiographical, the fiction is set against a violent Sri Lanka. Shyam is presently the curator of the Galle Literary Festival. In an essay (Coming Out) penned for Time in 2003, Shyam brought out the vexed relationship he has with Sri Lanka. On the one hand is the love for the country, “…live and let live generosity and good humour that I love most about Sri Lanka” and on the other, the unsettling nature of it “in this country that I still considered my home, I could never be at home.” Yet…

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Sethu Samudram: Bridging art, history and human relations

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“Sethu Samudram” is a three-year collaborative art project and a dialog-making platform between Theertha International Artists Collective, Colombo, Sri Lanka and 1Shanthi Road in Bangalore, India. “Sethu Samudram” is the name of the mythical bridge found in Ramayana, meaning the bridge across the ocean. This bridge connects Sri Lanka and India. There is substantial amount of good reasons to believe the existence of a real “Sethu Samudram”– a bridge across the ocean – between the two geographies in the ancient times, not only conceptually but also physically. This naturally-formed ancient bridge in the Palk Strait has acquired numerous mythical dimensions through millennia. South India is only 22 miles across the Palk Strait from North of Sri Lanka. Considering the proximity of South India to Sri Lanka, even without much hard arguments, the possibility of cultural exchanges and human migration between these two geographical zones for millennia can be an obvious presumption. Now a construction of a real human-made bridge is scheduled…

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Interview with Asoka Handagama

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Asoka Handagama is one of Sri Lanka’s best known and most controversial filmmakers. His films divide audiences and the critics – you either love them and celebrate his genius, or you hate them and decry his take on incendiary social and political issues. We began the interview with Asoka explaining how he approaches the creation of a film – what drives him to do what he does. He also speaks about the freedom filmmakers once had to express themselves in comparison to later years, when films were banned and Asoka himself was subject to a great degree of public vilification. I asked him whether after Aksharaya (Letter of Fire) and its violent reception, he thought of giving up filmmaking. Later on, I also point to what Asoka said about filmmaking going back by decades if Aksharaya was blocked, noting that despite its ban, Sri Lankan filmmaking both during the final years of war and after it, displayed no visible signs…

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  • 20 Nov, 2010
  • 1 Comment
  • Arts and Theatre,
    Colombo,
    Features,
    Vavuniya

The Gaza Monologues: An interview with Ruhanie Perera and Jake Oorloff

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[Editors note: Also see A review of the Gaza Monologues for video footage from and a review of the production.] Ruhanie Perera and Jake Oorloff co-created Floating Space in 2007. Gaza Monologues was their latest production, running to packed houses and good reviews recently in Colombo. As noted on the  group’s blog, Floating Space a theatre company that is committed to experimentation, Floating Space is inspired by the unconventional and shared experiences in performance. Its focus is to create and produce performance, with the objective of exploring the possibilities of theatre in terms of form, style, space, approach and purpose. Groundviews interviewed Ruhanie and Jake to find out more about the production, their future and theatre in Sri Lanka. A review of the production will be posted on Groundviews soon. Stills from a video recording of the performance.

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  • 19 Oct, 2010
  • 3 Comments
  • Arts and Theatre,
    Colombo

Interview with Vajira, Sri Lanka’s Prima Ballerina Assoluta

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Vajira is now 78. In just over half an hour and recorded at the Chitrasena and Vajira Dance School, Vajira looks back at her life and recalls how she began to dance, what dance means to her, what’s changed from when the time she was an active dancer, her legacy alongside that of Chitrasena’s, what and who inspired her, the changes she brought about to traditional Kandyan dancing and the future of the Dance School in the hands of her children and grand-children. Allowing Vajira to speak at length and interrupting as little as I could, for those who love dance (and love to dance), this is a record of a lifetime dedicated to its perfection.

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  • 20 Sep, 2010
  • 9 Comments
  • Arts and Theatre,
    Colombo

Thoughts on ‘Dancing for the Gods’ by the Chitrasena and Vajira Dance Foundation

“I strive to preserve the pure traditional styles, and to evolve new national dance forms based on the Kandyan technique, so that in the fullness of time a truly national ballet may emerge out of our humble efforts.” - Chitrasena I recently asked the illustrious Bijayini Satpathy, Director of the Odissi Gurukul at Nrityagram how she negotiated the contest between tradition and modernity in her interpretation of Odissi dance – the oldest surviving dance form of India, but only revived less than a century ago. It is in fact a broader question concerning the arts – the perennial contest, not always civil or progressive, between what is acceptable to the old guard and creative reinterpretation, between the fight to retain the ‘essential’ and countervailing tendencies of artistes to attempt answers to and be shaped by the zeitgeist. The best artistes reside – with varying degrees of success and comfort – on the knife-edge of this contest, courting controversy by redefining their…

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Black Paintings & Other Works: An exhibition by Chandraguptha Thenuwara

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Chandraguptha Thenuwara’s “Black Paintings & Other Works-an exhibition of paintings and installation” was inaugurated today (3 April 2010) at the Lionel Wendt Gallery, Colombo. The exhibition will continue till 5 April 2010. He has used perfect colours to depict the situation.  Many art lovers had a preview today. Chandraguptha Thenuwara says “The exhibition consists of two parts – one, the preface consists of three previously exhibited works and the other represents the current moment with nine new paintings and an installation. The preface was needed because the ideas expressed through the works are still valid. Among them is a triptych (2007) based on three selected Dammapada of the Lord Buddha that – ‘hatred never ceases by hatred’; ‘to all, life is dear and all fear death’; and ‘one should neither kill nor cause to kill’.  The other is the ‘Erasing Camouflage: Peace’ Triptych (2008); and the third is a painting which I exhibited last year in July, with the slogan…

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Interview with Ameena Hussein

Ameena Hussein is one of Sri Lanka’s best known English authors. She is also one half of the Perera Hussein Publishing House, that since 2003 has published some of the best new English writing in the country. The Moon in the Water, Ameena’s first novel, was long-listed for the first Man Asian Literary Award in 2009. Zillij, a collection of short stories I reviewed four years ago, won the State Literary Prize in 2003. Our discussion touched on Ameena’s tryst with cancer and how this influenced her writing and outlook on life. We also talked about English literature in general, and the quality of contemporary English fiction in Sri Lanka. Ameena also talked about identity, gender and violence – both in and through her fiction and their manifestations in the real world. We spoke at some length on the politics of representation and the contested space for women in Islam, harking back to two articles on Groundviews published last year in…

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About Groundviews

Located at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Groundviews is a citizen journalism website that uses a range of genres and media to highlight critical perspectives on governance, reconciliation, human rights, the arts and literature, democracy and other issues. The site has won two international awards, including the prestigious Manthan Award South Asia in 2009. The grand jury's evaluation of the site noted, "What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It's a new age media for a new Sri Lanka... Free media at it's very best!"

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