The Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts and Culture, Eastern University Sri Lanka had organized an “International Community Theater conference-Batticaloa 2003” in Swami Vipulananthar College of Music and Dance from 24th- 29th July 2003 titled “Re-discovering our Multicultural World through Community Theatre.”
The review article that appeared in an International Theatre Journal
“On the second day of the conference we broke out of the auditorium and traveled to Seelamunai, the village where Jeyasankar was working with locals to develop Kooththu. Aside from papers, there were local performances and theatre workshops presented underneath palm trees in the village square. Not only did the village ‘sponsor’ the event by providing the venue (their square) and sumptuous meals, but they got involved with the discussions and workshops, and presented a stunning six hour Kooththu performance that went on early into the morning. For many delegates, the day was one of the most distinctive and memorable highlights of the conference Freed from the constraints of the lecture hall, it was possible to see the significance of the work in its context.”
(Michael Balfour, King Alfred’s College, Winchester, UK; Mick Mangan, De Montfort University, UK, (2004), Reviews: International Community Theatre Conference: Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, 24-29 july 2003, in Research in Drama Education, Volume:9, Number:1, Carfax Publishing, UK, p.117)
The above statement reveals the capacity of the people who are in the Participatory Action Research Program to contribute to the process of democratizing knowledge, decolonizing research methodologies and to build up an organic form of community theatre based on Kooththu.
The fourth session of the conference was held in Seelamunai village for the whole day under the title of “Applied Theatre and Community Theatre.” The facilitator had narrated a story titled “My story of a Participatory Action Research: Performance as research & Performers as evidence” and panel discussions were held in six groups with the participants of the process under the title, “Reformulation of Kooththu and experience of the participant artists.” Originally the time allocated for the panel discussion was twenty minutes but at the request of the conference participants the community made it to last one hour.
“The strength of feeling demonstrated by the speakers at the conference was matched by practitioners in the villages. S.Jeyasankar, an academic at the Eastern University of Sri Lanka and skilled Kooththu performer, is conducting a practice as research project in Seelamunai, a village near Batticaloa. Jeyasankar argued that conventional research methods confine knowledge to the academy, and fail to involve the local performers in the village. As a response, he has developed research methods which aim to dismantle this authoritarian approach to knowledge and actively to engage the subjects of the research-in this case the Kooththu performers-in the debates. The success of this innovative methodology was demonstrated most clearly in the village itself, where performers argued passionately about the integrity of the form. One performer summed up the significance of Kooththu as a ‘powerful weapon against mass media’.”
(Michael Balfour, King Alfred’s College, Winchester, UK; Mick Mangan, De Montfort University, UK, (2004), Reviews: International Community Theatre Conference: Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, 24-29 july 2003, in Research in Drama Education, Volume:9, Number:1, Carfax Publishing, UK, p.117)
The evening session commenced with the special address, followed by the performance and discussion of the Reformulated six hour long Vadamody Kooththu Titled “Simmasana Yuththam.” The title of the Kooththu was later changed to “Simmasana Por.” This happened on the request of Annaviyar Maththa Singam and discussions took place on it and finally the change was accepted by the community of the performers.
