There are no tickets - Gamini Haththotuwegama

Author: Kanchuka Dharmasiri
Date:19/06/2011
Source: Sunday Times




















Gamini Haththotuwegama

As the Wayside and Open Theatre group founded by Gamini Haththotuwegama enters its 37th year, Kanchuka Dharmasiri reflects on their incredible journey
On June 6, 1974, a Poson poya day, a group of students and their teacher from the Ranga Shilpa Shalika enacted ‘Raja Dekma, Bosath Dekma’, and ‘Minihekuta Ellila Marenna Berida?’ in a school playground in Anuradhapura. On their way back the next morning, they spontaneously decided to perform on the platform in the Anuradhapura train station for passengers waiting for their trains.













Taking theatre to the people: A scene from a street drama

These incidents mark the defining moments of a group that came to be known as the Wayside and Open Theatre, led for 35 years by Gamini Haththotuwegama until his passing in October 2009. Parakrama Niriella compares the Wayside and Open Theatre to a bus that was moving towards a beautiful infinity in “Prabuddhayana, Andurana, Mithurana”, a piece written as a tribute to Haththotuwegama. Niriella asserts that “the driver of the bus has left it after thirty five years. But the bus is still there and so are the passengers. Now, it is up to them to think about its destination.”

Yes, the bus is moving forward and the group is celebrating their 37th anniversary this year, in fact this month, and is in the process of reviving some of the older plays with the intention of taking them around the country. What is remarkable about this process is that original and former group members such as Nimal Chandrasiri, Jayantha Gunathilaka, Deepani Silva, Nihal Suranji, Saman Hemarathne, and Upali Weerasingha have joined the venture – they are on board again – and are collaborating with current members, Chamaru Pathirana, W.D. Samaranayaka, Veranga Fernando, Sangeetha Abeywardena, Mohan Deshapriya, Roshan Handunnetti, Manoj Indika and many others to reprise some of the plays that were performed in the seventies.

The mid sixties and the early seventies saw an influx of alternative performance groups, motivated by anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-war movements. While theatres such as the Bread and Puppet Theatre, San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Black Southern Theatre, and El Teatro Campesino were creating radical art in the US, movements such as the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) which began in the 1940s, predating many of the other street and community theatre groups, and Jana Natya Manch (JANAM) formed in India with the intention of creating awareness among people to counter colonial and capitalist onslaughts. Augusto Boal, in Brazil, reconfigured theatre practice by bringing forth his concepts of the theatre of the oppressed in the 60s.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Miiri collaborated with peasants and workers in an effort to create a people’s theatre in Kamirithu. Similar groups were creating radical theatre in the Philippines and France, and many other countries and this is just a small cross-section of what was happening in the world in terms of political and community theatre movements in the mid twentieth century. It was in such a context and also after an economically and politically tumultuous period in Sri Lanka that the Wayside and Open Theatre formed. Several of these groups have survived, including the Wayside and Open Theatre, and continue to create innovative art that stimulates thinking and encourages a critical outlook on society, politics, and culture.

The Wayside and Open theatre was founded with the distinct aim of taking theatre to the people, those excluded from the mainstream theatre experience in the city centres. Speaking about modern Sinhala theatre that flourished after Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s Maname, Haththotuwegama contends that one of the limitations of the mainstream theatre at the time was its audience: the audience was limited to the bilingual and Sinhala speaking middle classes. In order to counter this inequity, the group took and continues to take theatre to villages, factories, mines, streets, temples, and churches. Their audiences range from peasants, slum dwellers, foreign delegates, passers-by on the streets to university students. Discussing street theatre in an interview with Sunil Mihindukula in 1980 for Silumina, Haththotuwegama explained that the distinct feature about the type of theatre they practise is that it can be performed anywhere, in any form, and in any situation.

G.K: The pioneer

A major aspect of the Wayside and Open Theatre is their refusal to sell tickets, thereby moving away from the trappings of commercial aspects of theatre. In an interview with Birnn Das Sharma in Seagull Theatre Quarterly, Gamini Haththotuwegama claims that “Anyone who wants to see the play must be allowed to see it. There are no tickets. This is very important.” This principle is significant in a world that is becoming increasingly commercialized, where everything is predicated on money, in a context where theatre and other arts are becoming an exclusive activity enjoyed by certain classes, and in a time when the capitalist system is demarcating spaces based on class lines.

One of the main goals of the group thus is to make theatre available to all those who want to see it and go beyond class barriers. The work that started with such intentions in the seventies still goes on and the Wayside and Open Theatre travels all around the country taking theatre to thousands of people. Despite grave hardships, they have managed to sustain themselves as an independent group for more than three decades.

In recent months, the group has started reviving several of their older plays including ‘Minihekuta Ellila Marenna Berida?’, ‘Raja Dekma’, and ‘Pinata Gal Geseema’. ‘Minihekuta Ellila Marenna Berida?’ is the story of a man who is not allowed to even hang himself, or in other words his attempt to hang himself gets constantly postponed in a tragically comic manner, because the wife, the priest, the minister, the writer, the sociologist – members of various social institutions – keep interrupting him.

They are resolved to get the maximum out of him before he hangs himself, and also contemplate ways of profiting from the hanging itself: the wife wants the man to pay numerous bills before he dies, the writer wants to compose a poetic novel about the sentiments of a dying man while the sociologist sees another apt subject for his study. The journalist and the photographer find a media-worthy subject in the story of the man who is about to hang himself and are thrilled by the idea of a sensational news item. No one is able to go beyond the use value of the man and think about him as a human being or even to simply inquire about the reasons for his action. All this time the man is standing on a bench with a noose around his neck!

We have arrived at a point where despair is even profitable! Another play that the group has been working on restaging is ‘Raja Dekma’, a piece based on the emperor who walked naked. They have also been rehearsing ‘Pinata Gal Geseema’, a short improvisational piece that addresses sentiments related to guilt and judgment. In their more recent work such as ‘Dead Mobiles’, the group comments on the cellular phone invasion that has invaded the lives of millions in Sri Lanka and the world. Absorbed in their incessant phone chatter, the characters fail to notice the cry of a dying man. Has the idea of communication so utterly changed in the modern world we live in?

The group also performs Ammata Undata, a lyrical composition written in a language that is very subtle and vivid. In the play, several characters sit around in a circle and tell stories about their day and life. Intermittently a doctor enters and asks them to show their tongues and hands, but there is no indication as to where the action takes place precisely.

Through the brief moments in which the characters recount their lives and experiences, we are given a glimpse to a larger part of their lives. One character utters: “my mother’s hands are very soft, very beautiful. They got broken by working for us. Pau (sin). Well, what are mothers there for, but to work! Pau.” With precise timing and delivery these few lines comment on the horrors of a patriarchal system. This is a rare play of the group in which allusions are made to the place of women in society and how gender operates in what is predominately a male-centred world.

Perhaps taking such works as a starting point, one hopes that the future of Wayside and Open Theatre will involve more substantial and complex roles for the female members and move beyond those that are outdated clichés of female stereotypes.

As Ammata Undata continues, various characters offer entirely different vignettes from their lived experiences. One of the characters claims, “I don’t lie more than 45 times a day. It’s true; I’m not lying. Small lies don’t count here, ok? I managed to get my little ones admitted to school by lying.” The beginning of the sentence seems comic, but when the character mentions how he had to lie in order to procure a good education for his child, layers of criticism regarding the school system and the social system are brought to the fore. Many works of the Wayside and Open theatre group manage to create meanings that interact and intersect at several levels.

Group members continue to hold workshops every week and train new actors. They will be starting a new workshop in July. A website of the Wayside and Open Theatre is well underway. This is a significant year for the group as they continue their mission of taking theatre to the people. What an incredible journey…

Meditation on Gamini Haththotuwegama

Source : The Island

Friday, 06 November 2009

Gamini Haththotuwegama is no more. The man, known to some as GK, to others as ‘Gamini’, ‘Hatha’, ‘Haththa’ or simply as ‘Sir’, hailed as the Father of Street Theatre in Sri Lanka, will take his final curtain call this evening. As befitting such a colossus, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs has come forward to give him such honour as is his due, with deference of course to the wishes of the family. In a meeting to discuss funeral arrangements, a Ministry official said that the route that the funeral procession will take from the ‘Kala Bhavana’ to the ‘Kanatte’ will be lined with white flags. Rajith, the son, remarked with the wit, smile and acute consciousness of things human so reminiscent of his father, ‘eya aasa rathu paatata (he preferred red)!’ Like the father, again, Rajith and his sister Chamindu displayed a healthy disregard for ceremony and like their father once again showed a deference to the will of an innocent public want (in this instance the need to demonstrate grief). They did not protest. Red. Yes, that was his colour and ‘redness’ was the theme song that meandered as an unmistakable thread tying together all the things this remarkable man took on. He is called the Father of Street Theatre and rightfully too, but theatre was but one of the many mediums he used to articulate his insightful reading of the social, political and cultural. He was dramatist, actor, critic and human being. And he was a teacher through and through. He will be remembered fondly. Remembrance and grief are largely personal things and one should leave it to the individuals whose lives were touched by the man to remember and lament as per their personal preference. He was a deeply sensitive man but not one given to tearing in public except on extremely rare occasions. That’s a cue I suppose for all of us. Who was Gamini Haththotuwegama though? What was the ‘red’ in his life and work? As I browsed the web for a picture of the man, I came across a lengthy comment by Ajith Samaranayake, perhaps the only other person who was as articulate as Haththa (that’s how my contemporaries at Peradeniya referred to him) in both English and Sinhala on the vast range of subjects that come under ‘literature and arts’. Ajith, alas, predeceased Haththa by a few years (and what a loss!). Ajith was referring to a lecture delivered by Haththa titled ‘Unreasonable postulates and treasonable practices correlative to English’. It was, as Ajith points out, a rather portentous title and come to think of it, quite un-Haththa like. What caught my eyes was a quote. Haththa had approvingly read out something that Ernest Macintyre had written: "…when one grows into another culture through the intensive root-cutting education in English, the creative urge to truthfully turn it back on the soil you were pulled away from, the sentient world of the indigenous culture, is a magnificent compensation, the quality of which is not sometimes available even to those with unmoved roots, in a world of much movement." It was natural that Haththa saluted this observation because Macintyre could very well have been talking about him for he, more than anyone else, embodied the creature described; he cut back through the layers of mis-education, sought his native soil and danced on it with all the grace and confidence that the process ingrained in him, in terms of ideological prerogative, nuance to cultural difference and the ability to pick and choose his waters from the many wells he had encountered and make thereafter a heady cocktail that could jolt his audience with audacity, tasteful humour and creative genius. Haththa knew his English. He was acutely aware of its power, its coercive and violent potential and its other ‘kaduwa’ quality of marking distinction, leaving out and cultural political manipulation. He used it against itself, so to speak, disrupting thereby the entire hegemonic discourse. I remember him telling me in the terrible days following the UNP-JVP bheeshanaya that the JVP could have told the people that English is a necessary part of the revolution. His point was that English, one of the many weapons at the disposal of the enemy, should be picked up and turned against the oppressor. The beauty of his disposition was that when he used the kaduwa he dealt with ‘kaduwaness’ with both unforgiving and subtle strokes, equally effective as per occasion. He was respected, yes; tolerated even, but Gamini Haththotuwegama was never embraced by English Departments in our universities. Why not? The answer can be obtained in the following observation: "What’s the point of giving English at university levels, feeding the students with the highest academic equipment available - the most radical, nay revolutionary cultural theory, by presumably some of the best literary-linguistic brains in the business, yes feeding students whose acquaintance with our culture begins and ends presumably with ‘Thannane naa - thana-naa’ sung by Ba and Sa (and a herd of tune-repeating umbaas) who have been successful as no others have in setting a price to our folk rhythms, as a street drama actor put it so succinctly?" There is then a marked distaste for doing ‘The Macintyre Number’ among those who study, teach, write, do business, brag and in other ways and for a variety of reasons think that their ‘fluency’ in the language gives them automatic membership in that dubious club called ‘The Elite’. As such these creatures are clearly part of the problem and are sadly compromised in the neo-colonialist project even as they speak on behalf of and champion the subaltern (how presumptuous!) and rile against hegemonic discourse. The fact of the matter is that Haththa, even as he called them out for intellectual sloth and ideological confusion was far better at what they believed they were good at: teaching and writing. A few weeks ago someone told me that no one at Peradeniya writes as well as Gamini Haththotuwegama. I don’t know because not many at Peradeniya actually write, but it would be hard to find someone of whose writing it could be said ‘Streets ahead of GK’. This is true not only of academic writing and also creative work. Haththa was not given to spending too much time on producing academic treatise, but when he did, it was always cogent, illuminating and wonderful to read. His essay on Lakdasa Wikkramasinha is a case in point. And outside the lecture theatre, as a creative artist, he was peerless. No one at Peradeniya can claim to have done as much to the development and understanding of theatre, except perhaps Ashley Halpe, probably the only person in that Department who respected and admired Haththa and moreover was able to have a mutually beneficial conversation on a wide range of topic related to literature and arts. Ajith puts it best when he remarks on that lecture thus: It is also a lecture which only GK could have delivered because if there has ever been a teacher of English who has effortlessly related himself to the wider Sinhala socio-cultural milieu without pandering to populist whims or compromising his intellectual integrity it has been Gamini K. Haththotuwegama. His ‘redness’ was of course not limited to a battle with ‘kaduwaness’, he touched all aspects of social injustice in his work, stood with and for the oppressed, and taught them not to hate but to effectively challenge the structures that kept them down. He gave us all a sense of dignity and thereby empowered us in the most important element in that oft-caricatured thing called ‘agitation’. Every man’s life is an epic. Haththa will be remembered for that endearing line that has become a veritable tag-line to the street theatre scene in the country: yadam bindala gejji maala thanaganin (break your chains and make anklets and necklaces out of them). It is imperative that his students (and their numbers are legion) understand that the chains referred to are multifaceted and not limited to class-related politics (as per the quote in the Communist Manifesto, ‘the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains; they have a world to win’). He was larger than that. And this is why Gamini Haththotuwegama will live long and we will hear and be empowered by the drama that was his life long after his ashes go cold. Some curtains refuse to fall, or do so slowly and only after the drama is really, really, done. It is not yet. Gamini Haththotuwegama plays on and we hear his voice; and his words reverberate with wit, insight and a rare kind of love. by. Malinda Seneviratne