Sri Lankan Theater Scene Gets Boost from Playwright’s Fresh Ideas, Annual Festival

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA — It’s the fourth day of the Colombo International Theatre Festival and Mohamed Safeer, the festival director, raps out instructions to his team. Having ensured the day’s workshop facilities are up to standard, he calls together a small group of people to discuss the evening’s performances.

Safeer, as he is popularly known in Colombo’s theater circles, is the initiator and force behind the annual festival held in Colombo, the commercial capital of Sri Lanka. The fifth annual festival was kicked off by Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena on March 31. Participants from around the world performed for six days.

The festival presented 16 theater productions. Eleven of those were from Sri Lankan dramatists and the rest were from foreign participants. There were also workshops and seminars for the public and actors.

Safeer says his aim is to promote theater among Sri Lankans and introduce new theater concepts and techniques. The theater festival is part of this endeavor, he says.

“Culture is an important factor among the criteria used in measuring development of a country,” Safeer says. “The international drama festival is a good opportunity to accomplish it.”

Safeer, 45, is a Muslim. His native language is Tamil.

Playwrights and other theater professionals say Safeer is taking the lead in promoting theater in Sri Lanka, especially among people who wouldn’t usually attend theater productions. He popularized the black box concept in Sri Lanka – performances on spare stages with dark walls – and created the Colombo International Theatre Festival. Now, he’s turning his energy toward another form of theater: drama without dialogue.

Safeer was an unlikely candidate to excel in the Sri Lankan drama industry, in which the Sinhala language is dominant, says Parakrama Niriella, an award-winning film director and playwright, and the founder of Janakaraliya Cultural Foundation, a cultural organization and drama troupe, which performed at the Colombo International Theatre Festival. Niriella was honored at this year’s festival.

“He is a courageous, self-made individual,” Niriella says. “In our country, not only a dramatist but also a musician, artist or dancer has few opportunities to get international experience. Safeer’s effort to hold an international drama festival amidst so many difficulties is very important.”

Safeer grew up in Sedawatta, a sprawling slum in Kolonnawa, a suburb of Colombo. The neighborhood was filled with drug addicts and prostitutes, Safeer says, adding that he doesn’t have sweet, innocent childhood memories because of that.

But the experience provided a wealth of inspiration for theatre, he says, so he’s thankful for them.

Safeer says he first started acting, directing and producing dramas in 1990. He saw how drama could address a social issue without judgment or condemnation, he says. He founded Inter Act Art, a performing arts group, that same year. He still leads that troupe today.

Niriella first met Safeer in 1991. Even then, he says, Safeer was pushing boundaries.

“Even at that time, as a budding drama artist, I saw his quest of trying to create out-of-the-box material,” Niriella says. “He always tends to experiment.”

Those experiments have paid off. In 2002, Safeer received a State Drama Festival Award and a Sri Lanka National Youth Award for his drama “Oya Dora Arinna,” a Sinhala phrase that in English means “Open That Door.”

Safeer is credited by those in the theater industry with introducing the black box technique in Sri Lanka. Dark walls are often used in that technique to create a box, in which the audience also sits.

“This targets small audiences amidst minimal facilities,” Safeer says. “It is a practical, easy way to get the people used to advanced artistic appreciation.”

Safeer says he first saw the technique in Germany. He began using it in Sri Lanka in 2008, and even set up temporary black box theaters in rural Sri Lanka to promote peace, reconciliation and health education, he says.

Safeer attracts people who wouldn’t otherwise see theater productions, says Saumya Liyanage, a senior lecturer at the University of the Visual and Performing Arts in Sri Lanka, who participated in the expert forums at the Colombo International Theatre Festival.

Sri Lanka’s theater scene isn’t yet at a point where it can support full-time professionals, he says. But Safeer is a pioneer, Liyanage says.

“He does not give up his efforts in spite of any disturbances, criticism or poverty that hits him,” Liyanage says. “With the courage of people like Safeer it will not be difficult to take local drama to a professional level.”

These days, Safeer is working to introduce a dialogue-free drama, which uses body movements as language, in Sri Lanka. He calls it a “social movement theater,” and hopes it can bridge the language divide between Sinhala-speaking and Tamil-speaking communities in Sri Lanka.

“If we use this initiative, we will be able to show the drama produced in Colombo to Jaffna and vice versa,” Safeer says. Jaffna is the main city of the predominantly Tamil-speaking Northern Province of Sri Lanka.

He believes this technique may even take Sri Lankan dramas beyond its own borders.

“We will be able to communicate with the entire world in this way,” Safeer says.

As Safeer explores new forms of theater, his international festival continues to inspire dramatists around the world.

Festivals and events such as the Colombo International Theatre Festival create opportunities for growth in drama, says Atsushi Kakumoto, artistic director of d’UOMO ex machina, a Tokyo-based theater company.

“Drama is globally threatened now,” he says. “Because mobile phones and tabs provide more fun, more easily, less people tend to appreciate this form of art. But it is not difficult to overcome this challenge if the creator is clever.”

 

Ajith Perakum Jayasinghe translated this article from Sinhala.