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| Sunday, 3 July 2005 |
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Drama sans barriers by Nisansala R. Aryachandra "In 1991, a helicopter dropped a grenade and as a result I lost both my legs." This is what a Karmala, a war victim and she was also affected by the tsunami, had to say. She was participating at the UNHCR organised World Refugee Day Drama Festival held on June 20, at the Beira Lake Island. The newly constructed dome like structure accommodated the crowds. The cool winds wafting from the Beira Lake provided a natural cooling system. Despite her disability, she has risen and pikced up the pieces of her life and today, she has beaten an uncertain fate by a single desire to live - and go on. However, Karmala is still a refugee, displaced in her own motherland. On the theme of displacement, three groups of young people performed at this day. They were the Haritha Kulaka Madya from Matara, Active Theatre Movement, from Jaffna and the Musaeus College Drama Group in Colombo. The performances of all three dramas were brought out in a few words within a duration of about, ten minutes each. Even so, the life of the displaced, spoken in its true form has a definite effect and brought out the realities of the situations faced by the victims. The young actors conveyed this, in no small measure. In fact, each one of those actors who performed that night shed light to create vividly the life of a refugee, depicting almost parallel situations that helped everyone in the audience to see clearly the underlying theme, the idea, the reason and the point in the same light gathered from real life experiences of life in a refugee camp. The situation faced when displaced and forgetting one's own self to help another. When asked about his views and thoughts on the importance of this day and their involvement in carrying across a message that may still be vague and unaffected by many in Sri Lanka, Active Theatre Movement, Director, Dev Ananth commented: "This is not a day for celebration. It is a day to remember the suffering of the displaced by war and disaster. We are from Jaffna, and we know about displacement and we have suffered because of it to this day." He further emphasised, "we have done this before, mostly in Jaffna. The response is good. This is the first time we have been involved with the UNHCR, hopefully, the language barrier has not been a block in getting the message across." The drama performed, by the Jaffna group carried a deeply embedded sense of reality in the way the situations were woven together and touched almost all the angles in which nothing was left unsaid or left to be decided. It had a strong start and an equal forceful conclusion. It was simply a depiction of how it is. Above all, it seems as if the characters played by the actors are not just words or portrayals of scenes out of the imagination but of real experiences. Their faces itself spoke about the pain and endurance people have undergone. Its not just the contrasts and the tones of their voices in the various scenes that grabs your attention, but also the frequent lapses of silence that sets the scene at different levels of the play that speaks the very fact of the matter. The performance by the Haritha Kulaka Madya, from Matara in an equal remarkable portrayal and was an adaptation of the lighter side of the situation. Speaking, more from a humorous angle, its underlying theme was based on the subtle humour that springs from situations that even people who are faced with serious situations sometimes encounter. The surface story of the drama is helping one another in situations of disaster (special emphasis on the tsunami) and working as a team when in calamity. A notable and common feature in all the three plays was that all groups had chosen situations they were familiar with and situations that they can relate to and had derived the sequence of events in the drama accordingly. As a result, the performance out of the actors comes from within, emanating a sense of realness to the words, movements and the events. A performance on the theme in the English language was given by the Musaeus College Drama Group. Talking to one of the young actors, she explained, " we are portraying the life of the displaced in terms of war, poverty and disaster. It highlights what it is like to be poor and displaced at the same time. And eventually, overcoming the cruelties of life and giving something in return by helping people in similar situations." The other side of life as a refugee was clearly depicted by the drama performed by the Musaeus girls. Finding refuge in foreign lands and beating the odds set against you, and in achieving the goals, somehow with tenacity and courage and finding one's self by one's own commitment has a certain hidden message of hope amidst pain and suffering. It was indeed an appropriate conclusion. There was one unfailing presence throughout the evening, one could not
have ignored. It was a voice spoken in a common language which says, " it
takes courage to be a refugee. Think about it..." |
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