Politics of Reformulations.
Reformulation of Community Theatre based on Kooththu*.
(*Traditional Theatre of the Thamils of Sri Lanka)
The politics of Reformulation is a shift in the paradigm from machine-centered Industrialization & Computerization to one that people-centered. Redefining or reinventing the concepts of development and technology is the pre-requisite for this process.
It is basically liberating the human beings from machines and re-connects them with the nature.
Fundamentally human beings are also elements of nature but with the power of modern technology to control the nature or the whole Universe for its own benefits. But the “Modern Man” with his powers created the world for a few and brought destructions to the rest.
The concept of Reformulation involves a process of unbinding Man from Mechanization and make him a human being to live in a world of equality where difference is celebrated. This will be achieved through different kinds of ways and means at different levels.
The process of Kooththu could function as one of the means to formulate a people oriented activity in the creation of a world of equality where the difference is celebrated.
Kooththu is not only an art of the artist in the modern sense, but it’s mainly a process of a community. The basic process of the Kooththu system is learning it; by doing it collectively and the primary source of it is Memory. These aspects made the Kooththu process primarily a practice oriented one.
Modernization and Commercialization of Kooththu alienate the people who own it and practicing it for generations. The pre colonial nature of Kooththu is considered as crude, unsophisticated, primitive and the art of the illiterate and the uneducated because those who involved in the Kooththu at the community level are not educated in the Colonial Education Institutions and are not the consumers of imported spirits.
The influence of the politics and aesthetics of Modernization played a vital role in the perception of Kooththu in modern times. This perception made the “educated” to think that Kooththu as Medai Kooththu (Kooththu in the Picture Frame Stage). Kooththu was dislocated from its origin and appropriated to a new space introduced by colonial power. A community oriented performance art was minimized to performance oriented art for the audience in a colonial building and the audience was made to think, it’s modern.
Sivagnanam Jeyasankar
Department of Fine Arts,
Faculty of Arts &Culture,
Eastern University Sri Lanka,
Batticaloa,
Sri Lanka.
