Chitrasena reminisced

Part 1

Chitrasena celebrates 50 years of dance this year which will take the form of a festival with the revival of some of his classical masterpieces like ‘Karaliya’ and ‘Nala Damayanthi’.

The great maestro who dominated the stage during this time and still remains unsurpassed winning for himself and his Dance Company a repute and fame that is international, has the distinction of being the pioneer of the modern dance theatre of Sri Lanka. His career is synonymous with the birth of the Sinhala ballet and with the setting up of the first school of dance, the Chitrasena Kalayatanaya, an institution incorporating the finest traditions of the country.

He was also the first professional dancer who stood with fortitude and courage amidst the torrents of protest and abuse that marked his early dancing career. He revolutionalised the concept of the dance forging a link between the traditional and contemporary with the vision of one who seeks to preserve while yet extending the horizons of his medium, his uniqueness lying in his inimitable ability to adopt to change but always going back for inspiration to the roots of our rich traditions.

The well known writer on Buddhism and Zen, Mr. Christmas Humphreys, who was at the time a Trustee of the London Archives of the Dance and President of the Ballet Guild, paid tribute to the artiste in a letter to him dated 12.11.1946 from Bombay. “I should not like to leave the East without telling you how much I appreciated your dancing on Saturday night at the Town Hall. I have seen all Indian dances, which have been shown in London, and know the art of Uday Shankar well.

But I place your own work very high indeed, and even Ram Gopal, whom I know well, must look to his laurels. I look forward to seeing you when you visit England with your Company.”

An excerpt from The Times of Ceylon of 1.2.58 under the caption, ‘Family Tradition’, says, “It could perhaps be said that Chitrasena really had no choice about a career. His father decided it for him. By the time Chitrasena was 14 years of age, Seebert Dias thought the boy sufficiently well versed in the art to pay the leading part in a ballet.

It would probably be equally right to say that Seebert Dias made no decision about his son’s future; Chitrasena followed his father, as naturally as a ducking takes to water, and with as much delight for Chitrasena is a born dancer - he lives for his art.”

Q: How did you first get interested in dance?

A: My interest in the dance was inculcated at a very young age. At eleven I saw my first dance at the Tower Hall Theatre. It was Bombay dancing, a degenerate form of North Indian Kathak dance.

Chitrasena in performance

Chitrasena

Fortunately this did not hold any interest for me beyond the drawing room! Of course to dance is a very natural urge in Sri Lanka as we have an ancient tradition here that is an integral part of our society, a remarkable phenomenon being the still extant ritual that forms the backbone of rural society, it being relegated to a dancing caste that hands down this Vedic Shastra from generation to generation.

Iw as exposed to the Kandyan, Low country and Sabaragmuwa dance rituals very early in my life as my father, himself a theatre man, took an academic interest in the traditional dances and would get down groups of dancers from the villages to perform in Colombo, thus instilling in me an abiding love for the dance.

Q: What were the obstacles you had to face when you chose dancing as a career?

A: There were many obstacles and difficulties. Starting from the smallest unit – my immediate family – they were totally against my choice of profession, especially my mother, who was aghast that I should want to live by my art, but I had only one burning ambition and that was to dance, and dance I did with singleminded determination, unmindful of what the morrow would bring, for I was young and the fear of surviving by dance alone did not arise in my mind.

In those early years there were no professional dancers in Sri Lanka, the traditional dancer being a dance priest or yakdessa who administered to the spiritual needs of the community. When I started the nucleus of my school there were days of tremendous hardship and insecurity.

I went through periods of severe depression and loneliness not being able to make ends meet. I had to rely solely on the income from my school to exist. There were very few students and it was a case of surviving from one day to the next.

My father’s death in 1950 was a terrible blow to me. It left a void in my life. For the first time I was left to my own resources.

It may sound incongruous, but when I was ready with Karadiya in 1961 I had no funds to produce it, I borrowed Rs 3,000 from my servant boy. That was how Karadiya first went on the boards.

Also it was a formidable task to break through the conditioned mind of a caste-ridden society, particularly in the heart of the city where it was not considered fashionable to learn our traditional dances or even gain a rudimentary knowledge of our heritage.

Things have changed and I can say with a great sense of achievement and humility that I have not only been able to influence the mind of a generation, but also to survive as an artiste for 50 years solely due to my country men who learnt to value the beauty and dignity of the dance. My next challenge was the larger unit of society as a whole as it then was during the Colonial

period of the ‘30s and ‘40s. That was the time we slavishly imitated Colonial values and lifestyles - speaking of a minority of course. Being a small island nation, perhaps we were more susceptible to influences, and though not absolutely, but almost to a point of losing ourselves and our identity with our roots, the Western educated minority adopted an alien veneer. The urban intelligentsia looked to the West for their spiritual gurus and anything indigenous was looked upon with snobbish disdain or at best with naive curiosity. To them the Kandyan dance belonged to the maduwa.

They referred to it as devil dancing. Their concepts of theatre and the artiste were wholly dictated to by the West. Intellectually and emotionally they were unprepared to accept the idea of the traditional dance in relationship to the theatre.

This was the arduous battle I was compelled to wage; to be recognised, to be accepted as an artiste. Don’t forget I was the first professional dancer, breaking new ground, and what indignities and insults I had to suffer! I remember performing in towns like Matale, Kurunegala, Kalutara, Moratuwa and so on and being actually hooted off the stage.

I was then dancing in the traditional Ves costume. When I did the same dances, but in Indian costume, the response was entirely different. These were the strange anomalies I had to face - the complexes of a people totally alienated.

The attitudes of society were reflected even in the media. There was a time when the press was reluctant to give any publicity and Lake House would sometimes publish photographs without any captions. Leaflets used to be distributed that I was destroying the traditional dance.

I would receive anonymous postcards. Added to this was the fact that I did not come from the traditional dancing parampara and it took me years of hard work to be recognised as an artiste in my own right.

Ironically, the traditional dancers too looked on me as an outsider, for they were the proud custodians of an ancient heritage going back to over 3,000 years, so an outcast from the social class to which I belonged and spurned by the traditional dancers, I was for a time a kind of social pariah!

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