{"id":104179,"date":"2022-11-19T10:12:31","date_gmt":"2022-11-19T10:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websitedesigns.com.au\/elankanew\/?p=104179"},"modified":"2022-11-19T10:13:23","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T10:13:23","slug":"the-jungle-and-the-sea-follow-up-to-counting-and-cracking-uses-theatre-as-a-safe-space-to-discuss-sri-lankan-civil-war-by-hannah-reich-and-kim-jirik","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websitedesigns.com.au\/elankanew\/the-jungle-and-the-sea-follow-up-to-counting-and-cracking-uses-theatre-as-a-safe-space-to-discuss-sri-lankan-civil-war-by-hannah-reich-and-kim-jirik\/","title":{"rendered":"The Jungle and the Sea, follow-up to Counting and Cracking, uses theatre as a safe space to discuss Sri Lankan civil war – By Hannah Reich and Kim Jirik"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Jungle and the Sea, follow-up to Counting and Cracking, uses theatre as a safe space to discuss Sri Lankan civil war – By Hannah Reich and Kim Jirik<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
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Anandavalli makes her acting debut at age 65 in The Jungle and the Sea, a follow-up to acclaimed 2019 play Counting and Cracking.(Supplied: Belvoir\/Sriram Jeyaraman)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Source :\u00a0abc<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When S. Shakthidharan first told his mum that he wanted to look into their family history, she quickly shut him down, telling him: “That is a very stupid idea.”<\/span><\/p>\n

She then refused to talk to him about it again.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anandavalli, a Tamil dancer, fled Sri Lanka in 1983 at the outbreak of the civil war, settling with her family in Western Sydney.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was 2008 and, faced with a wall of silence from his mum, Shakthidharan (also known as Shakthi) secretly turned to a grand-aunt in London.<\/span><\/p>\n

“She was the first person in my family to open up to me and it became a waterfall of information. I started learning about all these things that I’d never known. It was overwhelming,” he told ABC RN’s The Stage Show.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Shakthi writes, directs and produces film and theatre, and is also a composer and musician.(ABC Arts: Anna Kucera)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Then in 2010, against his mother’s wishes, Shakthi visited family in Sri Lanka and learnt that his great-grandfather had been the only Tamil politician in the country’s post-independence government (Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, was part of the British Empire until 1948) .<\/span><\/p>\n

“That was the lightbulb moment when I realised that my family’s story, that was hidden from me, was also my country’s story.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Shakthi worked these stories into his debut play, Counting and Cracking, and emailed the first draft to his mum.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anandavalli didn’t reply.<\/span><\/p>\n

But to Shakthi’s surprise, she accepted an invitation from Belvoir’s artistic director Eamon Flack to attend a development workshop for the play in 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Strangers to her, actors, would ask her questions and to my astonishment she would reply, things she would never reply to me, because you can’t deny a stranger,” Shakthi recalls.<\/span><\/p>\n

“They’d ask her a question about leaving Sri Lanka and she’d say something like: ‘If I’d stayed for two more weeks, we wouldn’t have left.'”<\/span><\/p>\n

As Shakthi began weaving Anandavalli’s revelations into the script, he started to understand why she was so reluctant to speak.<\/span><\/p>\n

“It broke her heart when that country broke and the only way she could deal with that pain was by burying it, never talking about it again.<\/span><\/p>\n

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“[The play] was forcing her to open up something she put away in a bottle decades earlier, and she didn’t want to reopen herself to that pain. But the play did it, the play did what our relationship couldn’t \u2014 and it’s allowed her to heal her relationship with Sri Lanka.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

After a decade of work, Counting and Cracking \u2014 directed by Flack, with Anandavalli as a costume and cultural advisor \u2014 premiered in 2019, in a large-scale production that turned Sydney Town Hall into a temporary theatre space.<\/span><\/p>\n

The epic family drama won 14 major awards, including seven Helpmanns and the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature (Australia’s richest literary prize).<\/span><\/p>\n

In August this year, Counting and Cracking opened to rave reviews at\u00a0the Edinburgh International Festival<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Birmingham Festival<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The team’s follow-up play, The Jungle and the Sea, opened at Belvoir this week \u2014 and this time, Anandavalli stars.<\/span><\/p>\n

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“I’m very comfortable on stage … But it is still a huge challenge, to learn lines,” says Anandavalli.(Supplied: Belvoir\/Sriram Jeyaraman)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Flack approached Anandavalli about playing Gowrie, the matriarch at the centre of the play (who spends most of it blindfolded), she thought he was “cuckoo”.<\/span><\/p>\n

“I never dreamt that I would end up doing my debut acting role at the age of 65 on a revolving stage, blindfolded,” she told ABC News Breakfast.<\/span><\/p>\n

“The fact that these two young boys [Shakthi and Flack] \u2026 who are very smart and very good at what they do, have got a huge passion for the art form, and a great truth in what they do \u2014 that is what tipped the scales; that together they believed this old woman could do it.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Australia’s untold stories<\/span><\/h2>\n

Anandavalli was a child prodigy in\u00a0Bharatanatyam<\/a>\u00a0(an Indian classical dance form that originated in Tamil Nadu), touring Europe and Asia as a teenager.<\/span><\/p>\n