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| Sunday, 31 July 2005 |
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Chitrasena as cultural bridge builder Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake Some loose ends were left behind in last week's tribute to Chitrasena which was written on the rebound following Chitra's death. The main strand relates to Chitrasena's involvement in the Lionel Wendt Theatre in the 1960-70 period which proved so fruitful both for his own work as well as the English language theatre of the time. Here again one has to set Chitrasena against the times and the cultural forces at work in society at the time. For Chitrasena in this intervention embodied the two major cultural strands which exerted a dominant influence on the day. Having come out of the womb of the classical Indian dance tradition he was yet resilient enough to absorb and adapt himself to the requirements of the modern Western theatre as well. As we observed last week Chitrasena returned to Sri Lanka from India as a product of the Indian masters and a child of Shantinikethan, the seat of the Indian cultural renaissance. Contemporary Sri Lankan artistes had looked to India not merely as the overarching mother culture but also as a culture which was evolving with the times synthesising both tradition and modernity. Thus the literature and poetry of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, the Rabindra Sangeeth and the paintings of Nandalal Bose exerted a powerful influence on the figures of the contemporaneous Sri Lankan cultural renaissance such as Ananda Samarakoon, Sunil Santha and Chitrasena with Amaradeva as a somewhat younger adherent. Both Samarakoon and Sunil Santha in their music and the former additionally in his lyrics had attempted a rudimentary fusion of the Indian Great Tradition and the Sri Lankan Little Tradition embodied by the poetry of the Sri Lankan folk. This has been considered the height of heresy by the conservative establishment for which the Indian Great Tradition was a relic casket to be reverently worshipped rather than a living and breathing creative body which could be adapted for the purposes of the time. This was at the heart of the controversy which led to Sunil Santha's exclusion from the then Radio Ceylon although the same Establishment was much more sympathetic to Amaradeva when he attempted a similar experiment a decade later with the support of Mahagama Sekera's lyrics. The same forces were also sympathetic to Chitrasena when he sought to fuse the Kandyan and Indian dances with the modern Western ballet in his trail-blazing theatrical creations. But this was the age of modernism where under the influence of Newman Jubal and Ediriweera Sarachchandra the Sinhala theatre had become accustomed to grapple with issues of tradition and modernity. Moreover a more progressive and bohemian set of dramatists personified by Sugathapala de Silva and Dhamma Jagoda had introduced contemporary European and American dramatists such as Ibsen, Pirandello and Tennessee Williams to the Sinhala stage while Henry Jayasena and Dayananda Gunawardena had sought to fuse the vitality of the folk theatre (as opposed to Sarachchandra's more stylised theatre) with modern dramatic forms in works such as Jayasena's 'Hunuwataye Kathawa', 'Janelaya' and 'Apata Puthe Magak Nethe' and Gunawardena's 'Nari Bena', 'Jasaya Saha Lenchina' and his more recent 'Madhura Javanika'. What was significant was that particularly Chitrasena and Jayasena played a pivotal vanguard role in the fusion of the Lumbini and the Lionel Wendt which took place at the time with Dhamma Jagoda playing a similar role at a later time. Both the Sinhala and English theatres collaborated in Jayasena's 'Hunuwataya' and Macintyre's 'Chalk Circle' while Chitrasena played Othello in Macintyre's production and Emperor Jones in Karan Breckenridge's production. Chitrasena and Jayasena were the two major figures of the Sinhala stage to appear on the English language stage and carried out their roles with aplomb. Those performances could only have come out of the 1960s which many consider the Golden Afternoon of the bi-lingual intelligentsia, the last gasp of an extinct artistic tribe. This was a generation which had been produced by bi-lingual education in the 1940s which had exposed them to the best of both cultures without making them lose their roots in their own native tradition. Obversely the English language artistes coming out of the Lionel Wendt at the time such as Macintyre, Breckenridge, Haig Karunaratne, Shelagh Goonewardene, Irangani and Winston Serasinghe and even in some measure the late Lucien de Zoysa were receptive and sympathetic to the experiments of the new wave of Sinhala dramatists. It was this peculiar cultural moment which gave its particular elan to that magic interlude and confluence between the two language theatres. There were also literary columnists and critics such as Regi Siriwardena, Mervyn de Silva, Philip Cooray, M. E. Sourjah, Nihal Ratnaike and Gamini Haththotuwegama who could intelligently interpret what was happening between the Two Cultures. Unhappily in the case of Chitrasena this association with the Lionel Wendt and the English theatre made it easy for his detractors to brand him as an elitist and the darling of the English-speaking urban classes. After all there had been other dancers and ballet-makers such as Vasantha Kumara, Premakumara Epitawela and Basil Mihiripenna but Sri Lankan ballet had never been a form hardy enough to thrive in unsympathetic conditions. In the absence of sponsorship and patronage, original thinking and innovation and a large corpus of artistes it was at best a spasmodic manifestation with Chitrasena alone possessing both the gifts and the luck of maintaining it over the years. Sheer economic necessity might at times have made it compulsory for him to run largely-attended dancing classes patronised by the urban well-to-do but the fact that his more enduring pupils have been the likes of Channa Wijewardene and Ravibandhu Vidyapathi demonstrate that the dance can thrive only in an environment conditioned by tradition. The torch then will pass to a new generation but what is tragic is that the bi-lingual intelligentsia which had nurtured so much of the best in Sinhala literature, drama, music, cinema and the fine arts such as painting and the dance should be almost extinct by the time of Chitrasena's death. A new generation reared on popular culture at one pole and half-baked radical politics at the other might see this as a historical necessity, the necessary passing of a narrow circle of elitist torch-bearers. But whatever rhetoric may be marshalled in favour of such arguments this
is one more reason which invests the death of Chitrasena with that enormous
sense of epochal less acknowledged by all his obituarists over the last
week. |
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