With every death, we lose a nugget of our collective memory, a piece of knowledge gained only through experience. Recorded history, quite often, fails to capture these deeply personal stories, which sometimes throw more light on a particular time in the past than scholastic exercises.
When Sri Lankan playwright Ruwanthie de Chickera began noticing this vast sea of undocumented memories, especially of the generation that was born in the 1930s, she knew she had to bring these stories to the wider public.
It is a generation that lived through much of the events that shaped her country, from the days of independence to the ethnic conflict that ripped apart the island.
“This was such a vast loss in terms of knowledge that the experiences of this remarkable generation went unrecorded. We started recording conversations with them, some of them ordinary people and some others known figures. We were looking for people who have lived their lives with passion and conviction. Using this material, we make plays for a modern day audience, the younger generation,” says Ms. Ruwanthie, in an interaction with The Hindu .
Once the project titled ‘Dear Children, Sincerely’ got off the ground with her Stages theatre group, a Rwandan theatre group Mashirika expressed their interest to collaborate. Both countries share similar wounds of ethnic conflict.
“It was like looking at the history of my country through the lens of another country. Whatever happened was similar, it was just a difference of degrees. There, the genocide happened over the course of a few months whereas in my country, the conflict was more stretched out, over 30 years. But in Rwanda, they don’t talk about the genocide or the ethnic conflict in their art. So this got a huge response when we performed in Rwanda,” she says.
The collaborative work was staged at the Tagore theatre on Wednesday as part of the ongoing Bharat Rang Mahotsav International Theatre Festival, organised by the National School of Drama and the Public Relations Department.
A line from the recorded conversation leads to a short performance, which takes the form of a dance drama, shorn of much of the words. The Tutsi- Hutu conflict of Rwanda and the Sinhala-Tamil conflict of Sri Lanka gel seamlessly on stage.
Indian audience
For the Indian audience, it stirred up memories of past and current ruptures in their own society.
Another set of conversations centred on the themes of marriage, sex and love, and threw light on how approaches to these have undergone a change over the years.
For the Stages theatre group, this is an ongoing project. The next collaborations, with Palestine and Ireland, will lead to some more important pages to this on-stage history writing project.
