Paradoxical legacies

Long-term exposure to the censuring biopower of both state and non-state groups constitutes a formative experience for both Sinhala and Tamil theatre in Sri Lanka.Footnote ⁴ Starting from the mid-1960s, Sinhala theatre was subjected to denunciation by trade unions, the early left-wing Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP or Peoples’ Liberation Front), government ministries, the Public Performance Board with power to censor and withhold licenses for performance and film screening, and right-wing vigilante groups aligned to the more ethno-nationalist JVP of the late 1980s.Footnote ⁵ Yet the 1960s to the 1980s was also a time of exuberance on the Sinhala stage, with several playwrights (who were mainly in government service) writing, directing and performing political theatre that satirized the state and its bureaucracy, conditions of labour, rapid urbanization and creeping neoliberalism.Footnote ⁶ Parakrama Niriella (who co-founded Janakaraliya in 2002 with H. A. Perera) acknowledged the influence of this cultural milieu when, in the 1970s, Sinhala theatre, European films screened by embassies in Colombo, and the street theatre of Gamini Haththotuwegama (which began in 1974) led to his own radicalization and nascent interest in theatre work.Footnote ⁷ International visits by artists to Sri Lanka and cultural exchanges also added to the artistic ferment of the time. Niriella acknowledges, for instance, a visit to Sri Lanka by renowned Indian playwright Habib Tanvir, and a 1978 workshop in Raipur, India (at which he met Tanvir again and saw performances of the latter's plays) as watersheds in the formation of his own aesthetic style that would later become a hallmark of JK's performances.Footnote ⁸

The theatre of the 1980s, in particular, inhabited two significant interrelated paradoxes. The first was of permission to perform at a time when there was severe government censorship of the media. No proscenium theatres were shut down, nor were stage plays banned, in contrast to the newspapers, radio and television channels that were heavily censored by the state. The second was of heighted theatre activity under general conditions of severe political repression.Footnote ⁹ What enabled these anomalies? A controlled outlet for dissent (‘letting off steam’) as a common tool of governmentality favoured the theatre, albeit the proscenium stage. As Ranjini Obeysekere notes, plays that stayed to script (assumed as such by the censor) and were confined by the architectural boundaries of an auditorium were considered less destabilizing than street theatre, for instance, which could occur suddenly in the full glare of the public, improvise and take the government by surprise. Street theatre therefore elicited greater surveillance and censorship during this time.Footnote ¹⁰

Adaptation also enabled the theatre's survival. The 1980s was a particularly virulent decade in which the war and the second JVP uprising overlapped.Footnote ¹¹ Its later years (1987–9) were known as ‘the reign of terror’ for the intensity of the violence it produced. Artists had to confront an increasingly authoritarian and militarized state. They also faced threats from an opaque array of non-state actors given that violence at times of political and armed conflict is polysemic and emerges from varied groups with different typologies of practice that draw on legal, para-legal and cultural repertoires of enforcement.Footnote ¹² The modes of censorship, moreover, became more dangerous. The abduction, torture and murder (upheld with complete impunity) of theatre actor–director and journalist Richard de Zoysa by state agents in February 1990 – for, amongst other alleged reasons, scripting a play entitled Who Is He? What Is He Doing? critical of President Ranasinghe Premadasa – sent a chilling message to all artists opposed to the political leadership.Footnote ¹³

Similarly, in the northern city of Jaffna, three Tamil student theatre activists – Thiagarajah Selvanith, Manoharan and Thillainathan – were abducted by the LTTE and forcibly disappeared.Footnote ¹⁴ An Old Wives’ Tale, a play written by Sumathy Sivamohan in 1989 for performance by the Women's Study Circle, Jaffna, was withdrawn because the playwright preferred to withhold it rather than modify two scenes the actors themselves thought dangerous. These scenes were on marital abuse, and the ‘slight but sharp’ critique of the LTTE. The full play was later performed under the ‘sparse conditions of Jaffna university’ sponsored by the University Teachers for Human Rights Jaffna (UTHRJ). Sumathy writes of an ‘anxious productivity’ that hung over theatre activity at this time, prescient of why three women associated with the play (Rajini Thiranagama, Sivaramani and Selvy) were either killed shortly afterwards by the LTTE or committed suicide.Footnote ¹⁵ In this environment, Tamil theatre survived either because, as with K. Shanmugalingam's Man Sumantha Meniyar (Sons of the Soil) (1985), it endorsed Tamil self-determination, or enabled ambiguous interpretations, as did his Entayum Tayum (The Land of Our Parents) (1992). This play, about elderly parents abandoned by the youth who had fled the violence, clearly held a critique of war: but the reproach could have been against the state, the LTTE, or both.Footnote ¹⁶ Sinhala and Tamil theatre also strategized on scripts (with topical content but through plots set in distant foreign or mythic lands), used alternative performance venues (as when Entayum Tayum was staged in 1992 in the inner courtyard of a private residence in Nallur, Jaffna),Footnote ¹⁷ or translated/adapted renowned world drama but with costumes, props, embodiments and language that were loaded referents of the local and political. Theatre practitioners thereby sought to minimize the risks of assembly whether at rehearsals or performances in multiple ways. They also made do with minimum funding.Footnote ¹⁸

How did this exposure to state and non-state biopolitics shape post-war theatre practice? Parakrama Niriella, for instance, assiduously chooses traditional folk tales, adaptations of Indian theatre (Charandas, one of the most popular plays in JK's repertory is based on Habib Tanvir's Charandas Chor), Sanskrit drama (Meti Karaththaya – a translation of the 400 CE play by King Shudraka titled the Clay Cart), and Buddhist jathaka tales (e.g. Thaham) for his storylines. In doing so he follows the strategic adaptations of the 1980s stage. He also used translations/adaptations of plays that had already been performed and thereby passed the censor. Examples of these would be K. Shanmugalingam's Entayum Tayum (translated as Hiru Nagenathuru), Dharmasiri Pathiraja's Kora Saha Andaya (translated as Payanihal), and Russian plays by Chekhov and Evgeny Schwartz. This select list alone, which demonstrates JK's use of already sanctioned and circulating narratives, explains why Niriella has had only one brush with the censors to date,Footnote ¹⁹ and why JK was able to perform with the support of both the government military and the LTTE throughout the war.Footnote ²⁰ These were strategies with long-term dividends particularly in the context of continued state regulation of independent post-war art,Footnote ²¹ and religious policing using both the social media and the law to frame artists as anti-Buddhist and as sources of hate speech.Footnote ²²

Funding also required navigation. Market forces (especially in war economies) demand that expenditure on any cultural production has an economic argument. In Sri Lanka, the government and its allied sponsors supported arts projects only if they aided the war effort, or, in its aftermath, the government's vision of post-war development. Theatre practitioners who wished to lend support neither to militarism nor to the commodification of their art were forced to crowd-source or to rely on small sponsorships from the mercantile or non-governmental organization (NGO) sector for their work. The challenges faced by Parkrama Niriella and H. A. Perera regarding funding for JK is a case in point. From considering, but later rejecting, small-scale financial support by the Anglican Church because they wanted to be independent of religious affiliations,Footnote ²³ Niriella notes how he thereafter approached government institutions such as the Youth Council and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs only to experience bureaucratic whimsy.Footnote ²⁴ It was HIVOS, the Dutch development organization, which filled the breach by providing seed funding in 2003 for a core group of twenty-five actors with which Niriella was able to recruit and start JK in 2004, a year later. The tent used by the troupe for its outdoor performances, and sound and lighting equipment, were funded by USAID. Finally, it was with the German international development organization (GIZ) and its FLICT programme aimed at strengthening local capacities for conflict transformation (begun in 2003) that JK was able to launch and sustain itself over a long period of time.Footnote ²⁵ The takeaways from these experiences were that, in the context of government disinterest or hostility to independent theatre, it was the theatre practitioner's renown, vision and funding from foreign governments under bilateral agreements of cooperation that provided some long-term promise.

Donor rationalities and applied theatre

In Extreme Pursuits, an analysis of contemporary travel writing, Graham Huggan argues that much of it operates today under the sign of disaster, and that ‘this disaster writing is, in turn, the epiphenomenon of a world perceived to be in a state of emergency as a result of the seemingly irresolvable conflicts embedded within it (endemic civil wars, emerging environmental crisis, the global terrorist threat)’.Footnote ²⁶ Huggan's framing of contemporary travel/disaster writing applies equally to Sri Lankan applied theatre. As with travel/disaster writing, this theatre visits Sri Lanka's ‘trouble spots’, constituting them (former war zones, homogeneous ethno-nationalist communities) as sites of ‘intractable disorder’ from which the ‘work of remaking the world’ can begin.Footnote ²⁷ Such sites become, thereby, sources of sustenance and reproduction for theatre in peace building in the post-war context. The nexus of global capital, developmentalism, humanitarian aid and internationalization which theatre groups imbibe when receiving donor funding make them, as Huggan writes of environmental groups, ‘no less global than the multinational corporations whose human rights and ecological abuses they address.’Footnote ²⁸

The search, for instance, by the GIZ–FLICT project (which funded JK) for experts in the arts and ‘sustainable projects’ on conflict transformation it could fund reflects this purchase. Its need, according to its former technical adviser (arts and culture portfolio), to also stay ‘very low-profile‘ while supporting artists ‘who were courageous enough to ask controversial questions’ marked a strategy, moreover, whereby international donors did sensitive political work in Sri Lanka in ways that were less costly to themselves both financially and politically. The impetus from the donor's perspective was that funding arts initiatives for conflict transformation had more impact than ‘directly challenging the government or doing policy work’ because artists worked at the grass roots and made local communities think through political issues in indirect and non-threatening ways.Footnote ²⁹ Arts initiatives thereby served the interests of both state and donor; for art's artifice (including allegory), on the one hand, and its absence at policy-making tables, on the other, permitted the state to distance itself from such cultural work particularly when its own commitment to the peace and reconciliation agenda was half-hearted. It also shielded the donor from state hostility because the theatre arena itself, despite being under military surveillance at times, was geographically distant from the seat of government in the capital, Colombo.

Several questions emerge from this approach. Does it instrumentalize art for peace building by using it as a communicative tool above all else?Footnote ³⁰ If not, in what ways did FLICT go beyond such a methodology to allow for more cultural agency for both JK and its audiences? What measurements were deployed to assess impact, and in what ways have they influenced the JK archive? In other words, what do we learn from the JK–FLICT partnership of how a metanarrative on theatre and peace building becomes: gets constructed, circulated and reinforced as a dominant discourse which both empowers and closes off the theatre in question?

The JK–FLICT partnership (2005–17) remains unparalleled in the history of theatre funding in Sri Lanka, which usually takes the form of short-term sponsorship tied to a specific theatre production or applied-theatre project. While the idea of a mobile theatre had come to Niriella in 1978 (inspired by the Black Tent travelling Japanese drama group), the desire to form a multi-ethnic, Sinhala–Tamil bilingual theatre troupe had grown alongside his work for the Movement for Inter-racial Justice and Equality (MIRJE).Footnote ³¹ The groundwork for turning JK into an arts-based peace-building project was, therefore, already partially in place when FLICT funding was secured. As a result, JK did not have to totally shoehorn its artistic goals into project needs. But where it went far beyond commonplace models was, first, in taking nationally acclaimed theatre to rural and provincial areas (its own productions of Sekkuwa and Charandas had won several national drama awards), and, second, its habitus and praxis of living its message of coexistence.

Many applied-theatre projects use a facilitator or a small team, usually from outside, for community-based participatory theatre towards social and political change.Footnote ³² Applied-theatre troupes act thereby as external catalysts when they enter a target community. JK, on the other hand, worked at bringing the ‘outside’ within, by creating an environment in which Sinhala- and Tamil-language actors live communally, rehearse, learn each other's language, keep project records and work towards overcoming mistrust as part of JK's subject formation itself: their original locations in urban, rural and plantation contexts enabling a multi-experiential and therefore multi-perspectival dialogue within the troupe itself.Footnote ³³ This was understood as one of its core strengths. Arosha Tharangani, a JK actor–member, noted,

Arosha Tharangani's framing of Sri Lanka's pluralities as encapsulated by/through Sinhala–Tamil collaboration is a common discourse on JK. It draws on an archive that makes this cooperation speak in the name of a host of other pluralities. What is the cost of this articulation? When we met JK actors in February 2019, the lack of Muslims, Burghers, Tamil actors from the North and East, or those identifying with non-binary gender identities as core members of the troupe, remained unmarked. The ‘multi-ethnic and ‘multivocal’ was reduced to the Sinhala and Tamil: a slippage that performatively recurs in JK's supplementary archive as well, comprising journalism, project evaluations, theatre and peace-building scholarship.Footnote ³⁵ Scripting narratives and knowledge on the troupe, this auxiliary archive becomes an important actant for the truth-effect it imparts. The conditions that govern its arrangement of knowledge are, therefore, important to mark.

Writing on live performance, Diana Taylor notes that ‘its efficacy, whether as art, or as politics, stems from the way performances tap into public fantasies and leave a trace, reproducing and at times altering cultural repertoires’.Footnote ³⁶ The ability of performance to both reproduce and modify derive, according to Taylor, from its capacity to make us recognize the already familiar, including ‘the fantasies that shape our sense of self, of community, that organize our scenarios of interaction, conflict and resolution.’Footnote ³⁷ Taylor's assessment of performance here is in relation to how the spectral operates in popular culture and keeps it alive in ways that alter culture itself. While a distinction is necessary between performance in popular culture which circulates reiteratively and widely, and the arts such as theatre, visual art or literature that have smaller audiences, the potentialities Taylor marks resonate with a commonplace belief in the arts as change agents. Within the discourse of ‘arts for peace building’, its potential to re-vision and foreground diverse perspectives which open up community to itself, enabling a renegotiating of its premises, is emphasized.Footnote ³⁸ Creating spaces for the communication of ideas and dialogue which may not be otherwise possible in contexts of mistrust and polarization, culture (and therefore the arts) is seen, moreover, as a crucial battleground for coexistence and peace, where earlier war had ‘spread from within … [similarly] making its own cultural sense’.Footnote ³⁹

Taylor's formulation of live performance offers a nuanced understanding of these dualities within culture. For Taylor, performance makes visible and thereby enables recognition of prior repertoires that shape our sense of self and our communities. The traces, tropes and injunctions these repertoires carry support both conflict and its resolution. For instance, even partial references in performance to myths, historical legends, religious symbols, traditional crafts and so on work to revitalize an imagined community because they tap into collective fantasies and memories. In the extreme, where there is a perceived loss of this heritage, such citations validate conflicts. As an ‘invocational practice’, however, performance also has the ability to reposition collectivities in ways that can change social relations. For these reasons, performance is never merely an ‘accomplishment’ or a ‘carrying through’. It has the potential to alter cultural (and political) repertoires themselves.

What would this mean in relation to JK's performances and their impact on audiences? The diverse and rich performance traditions that JK deploys incorporate a fusion of proscenium aesthetics (inherited from Western theatre), kuttu and nadagam (providing recognizable characters, song, dance, movement and styles from local Tamil and Sinhala folk-theatre traditions), Sanskrit drama, Buddhist Jathaka tales, the circus, pageant and the digital (through video screen projections). They constitute an assemblage of an array of theatre traditions, archetypal characters, stage conventions and temporalities that conjure up the spectral, the already known, and are, therefore, relevant to local audiences. This is an important act of recognition by JK of the collective memories, cultural agency and situatedness of its audiences.

Such a juxtaposition of multiple theatre forms is, as Taylor writes in the context of the Peruvian theatre troupe Yuyachkani, also an invitation to audiences who witness and participate in the performances to attest to their rich performance traditions.Footnote ⁴⁰ JK's multilayered and plurivocal performance aesthetic presents, therefore, a far more robust signifier of intertextuality and diversity than its Sinhala–Tamil bilingualism. As Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson note, theatre is inherently multidisciplinary in terms of its skills set, and interdisciplinary in its capacity to engage with other disciplines, whether this be history, politics, economy or the environment.Footnote ⁴¹ Why is it the case, then, that the multi-traditional, multimodal, intergenerational and interdisciplinary in JK's performances are often reduced in the archive to a metanarrative on Sinhala–Tamil ethnic collaboration? Notwithstanding its cruciality as both praxis and symbol of ethnic cooperation, the intersectionalities, interdependencies and differentiations of identity that constitute the pluralities of Sri Lankan society are inadequately captured by this Sinhala–Tamil binary. Dualism, however, is valued by donors and therefore integrated both as a unit of analysis and as an approach to many arts for peace-building projects. The consequence is that the aesthetic, incorporating conscientious multilayered cultural work and agency, remains undervalued.

Evaluations of JK typically focus, therefore, on the impact of Sinhala–Tamil coexistence on the troupe itself, frequency of performances, workshops and sites; of ethnicity, numbers and response; and the establishment of zonal drama groups and funding.Footnote ⁴² The layering of the diegetic, the figurative, the temporal and multiple registers of narration, including the visual and audial, in the JK performances which enable a powerful, visceral aesthetic experience for the audience is barely noted.Footnote ⁴³ The effects of re-aestheticizing community stories and performance traditions for the contemporary, or of cultural alterations (pace Taylor) that govern social relations and reflect transformed inter-ethnic, intergenerational relationships remain similarly unaccounted. Where audiences are saturated with project-driven questionnaires and/or where (as explanations of the project and consent forms are provided) they sense from the beginning what enumerators may want to hear, the widely available lexicon on the war and ethnicity which circulate in the media, political discourse and NGO-led transitional-justice and peace-building programmes can take ascendance over their thoughts and statements on the aesthetic. In a context where, as Derek Paget writes, ‘what people say has acquired a new level of significance’,Footnote ⁴⁴ the inaudibility around JK's aesthetic forms and styles, including their continuities and ruptures, is telling.

This was borne out in the research project of the Postgraduate Institute of English (PGIE) which sampled thirty-five audience members through a questionnaire. The sampling took place in Anuradhapura (a major city in the north central province) after a performance of Thiththa Kahata (Bitter Tea), a play developed by JK through devised theatre workshops with tea estate workers on their struggles. Seventeen questions were asked of the audience with origins in the north central, central and western provinces and an age range of sixteen to seventy-seven years. The questions were on respondents’ ethnicity, first language, performance publicity, memorable scenes, favourite characters, opinions on dislikes, the languages used in the play, portrayal of the local, and their own theatre spectatorship (e.g. were they regular theatre-goers or not). While some questions affirmed the indivisibility of aesthetic form and content, others were targeted at assessing the impact and messaging of the play.

Of significance is that out of seventeen responses to the question ‘What was the most memorable scene?’, only four commented on the staging or embodied storytelling. Scenes singled out for mention were the opening sequence evoking hope and sadness, the wasp attack, the passing-the-ball scene, and the lament of a female Tamil plantation worker at the end. All other answers emphasized plot events, whether of the arrival of Modhi, manipulations of politicians, or payment of salaries in coins. This last example points to how the metaphor of the coin denoting low wages was an effective visual sign onstage, but this was an aesthetic language not consciously marked in the responses. Similarly, only one respondent noted that JK's performance ‘model’ was different from other popular folk dramas he had seen, such as Nari Bena (The Foxy Son-in-Law). What explains this understatement on aesthetics? Niriella attributed it to a paucity of education in the arts at all levels and a commensurate disinterest in the arts – a factor he also blamed for his inability to recruit more actors to JK.Footnote ⁴⁵ Evaluation methodology also plays a role for project-driven research and post-performance evaluations usually take place over short time spans, disavowing a thicker ethnography that may capture shifts in cultural and intergenerational responses. In this context, where researchers may be unfamiliar with how rural audiences engage with the aesthetic, a subaltern audience that does not articulate the ‘required’ register of speech also risks being unheard. Respondent fatigue (common in the former war zones saturated by war-related research) and answers shaped to suit evaluator needs constitute other reasons. When integrated into the larger archive on JK, the data gathered, including what is muted, creates a truth effect; the archive itself gathers a performative stability, and JK becomes largely known for its binaries rather than its pluralities.