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Deshamanya Chitrasena celebrated his 82nd birthday : A tribute to a Sri Lankan dance legend

by Jayanthi Liyanage

"When I sing to make you dance, I truly know why there is music in leaves and why waves send their chorus of voices to the heart of the listening earth."

- Rabindranath Tagore

Chitrasena - looks for another legend to keep dance alive.

Guru Rabindranath Tagore could have well composed these lines with his mind's eye peeping at his promising disciple, Chitrasena. For, this young protege's later foot prints matched in spirit, the open winds and the endless freedom of artistic expression at Tagore's Cultural Ashram, "Shanti Niketana", where the disciples were encouraged to free their mind from all bonds and release its spirit to nature's elements.

Wherever Sinhala ballet trod, Chitrasena's name has been evident. For achieving a splendidly balanced form of dance, which burst through the straightjacket of chauvinist nationalism and pirouetted beyond all human-drawn boundaries. But, which yet identified a "nationality" of Sinhala Ballet, sowing the rhythms of the traditional healing rituals of Kolam, Gam Maduwa, Sokari and Kohomba Kankariya in the vibrant pasture of theatre and reaping instead, a unique form of dance, vigorously freed from its roots.

Chitrasena's solemnising of his 82nd birthday at the National Art Gallery with the exhibition "Life and work of the legendary dancer", which one could also call an "Auto-biography of Sinhala Ballet", was also a candid flash of his multi-coloured lineage of dance.

The survey of the cameos of his 33 ballets within a 65-year span, studded with landmarks such as Nala Damayanthi, Kara Diya, Nirthanjali, Kinkini Kolama, Chandalika and Bera Handa, was also a glimpse of the infinity of Tagore's ethos, "In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play and here have I caught sight of him that is formless."

Deshamanya Chitrasena confirms this conjecture, saying, "The traditional dance lived because of the interest shown by the villager. As life changed in the village, it had no place for dance and I felt that dance would die. I thought the best place for it would be the theatre. Now it lives in the theatre when ancient traditional rituals are almost dead."

A fragment from an autobiography of Sinhala Ballet.

In shaping ballerinas from "devil dancers", he had to break away from traditions because "In our style of dance, unlike in India, we have only 'Shudda Mathra' (pure dance rhythms)," comments Chitrasena. "Like in Kathakali, we did not try to tell a story in dance. I gathered all I learnt in India and introduced story-telling into dance."

Tagore did not imprison a dancer in Kathakali or any other frame of dance, asserts Chitrasena. "A dancer could freely interpret a song. That was how I danced monk Ananda opposite Tagore's grand daughter, Nandita Kaplani, in Tagore's ballet, Chandalika". So, was born a form of ballet which travelled beyond the seas and earned high praise as "the brilliant ballet from Ceylon."

Tagore was not the only influence in creating the local dance legend. Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham and Mary Pickford equally shared his perspective of an unshackled dance". Isadora's book 'My life' inspired me," he remembers. "My body is a temple of my art," Duncan rationalises bare-bodied dance in her book, "I expose it as a shrine for the worship of beauty".

On the third day of the exhibition-(from the left) Dr. Sunil Kothari of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi; Sunethra Bandaranaike, Chief Guest; Chitrasena and Vajira.

But the decisive turn of his life was, when being born into an English-educated Govigama upper class family, Chitrasena chose dance as his vocation. "My mother was the first cousin of Sir D.B. Jayatilaka and she tried to stop me," he reminises. "But I was determined to dance."

He had muted but liberal help from his father, Seebert Dias, a passionate exponent of theatre who founded the "Colombo Dramatic Club" where thespians frequented and acted Shakespearian drama. "Those days, there was no place for artistes to meet. So our house became a Cultural Ashram where many artistes such as Sunil Shantha, Ananda Samarakoon and Amaradeva came and lived," says Chitrasena.

In an era when dance was labelled as belonging to the lower castes, his insight of seeing beyond traditions came from his parents who taught him not to subscribe to caste system. During that time, the lower castes could not enter a Govigama house. But my father gave them a seat, respect and honour."

Though encouraged by his wife Vajira, his pupil who also became his complementary dancing legend over the years, and gifted daughter Upeca and grand daughter, Heshma, Chitrasena is distressed by the gloom which shrouds the future of local dance.

A swing of legendary hands to spur the young feet forward. Daughter Upeca on his left.

Contemporary dance has become a mere commodity in the market of visual gratification, he laments, which Heshma endorses as "being at the lowest ebb. There is too much TV junk to which our children are exposed!"

Their new Kalayatanaya, which is yet to be built to assemble the now dispersed dance students in one ashram, nails all its hopes on Heshma, who, armed with a Degree of Dramatic Arts and Dance from the University of Berkeley and a minor in Business Management, is determined to promote her dance legacy.

As Chitrasena awaits the birth of his next ballet, "the birth of a nation," through the splendour of his past glory, he awaits the crowning of another legend who could keep the fire of local dance burning.

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