My thoughts on the
sad realities we see in our tourism in the area of entertainment for a Sunday
morning read. First published in December, 2010 in the ’Daily Financial Times,
Sri Lanka’.
Sunday last, in the Deep South of Sri Lanka
the rain gods also played games. We had touring relatives staying with us and
they were keen on getting away from watching rain drops fall on lotus leaves
all day. The intermittent reading they did was not enough and they wanted to get
a taste of some good Sri Lankan food and entertainment. Having missed seeing a
Sinhala movie in the town of Tangalle due to lack of an audience (five of us including
an American were the only ones there and it was ‘Ira Handa Yata’, a well
crafted movie with a serious theme), we took off further to have dinner at the
Dickwella Beach Resort. The place was well patronized and the dinning room and
the surrounds were hosting a good number of mostly Italian tourists. There were
also some Chinese visitors who looked like they were on a business mission.
What made me wonder is why we do not make
the most of the time, place and the situational advantage of tourism at most of
our resorts. Calypso groups in straw-hats and American cowboys are a usual
scene at dinner time at most of our beach resorts and even elsewhere. At a
destination with such rich traditions and art forms, we seem to offer our
visitors, what I would call ‘crap’ from a ‘nobody knows from where’ culture,
for in Venice, Florence, Rome, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Delhi,
Beijing, Shanghai or Kunming one has the opportunity to feel and enjoy the best
of their own culture, unique to each location.
It is then that my mind’s eye went on to imagining
the performances that I learnt were unfolding each week of our dance and other
cultural forms in the heart of the city of Colombo at the Tourism Training
Institute’s auditorium. Although I am yet to see a live performance of it, for
I live far away from the city and only make it there once a month, I read much
about it and saw pictures of the performances. I also heard from those who had
been to see them how good they were. I venture to congratulate the team at the
Sri Lanka Convention Bureau, led by Vipula Wanigasekera for taking on this most
timely initiative. He himself is an accomplished musician of the classical
tradition having a feel for things our own.
Bringing together the best among the best
of our traditional dance and cultural forms each week is no easy task. While it
is easy to make payment to already established artistic groups that perform at
each and every corporate function and event, it is not easy to find the right
fusion between tradition and class, drawing from the wide-array of art forms,
schools and traditions we have. I often wondered why visitors to our land are
not exposed more often to the real and had always to be satisfied with the fusion
or the stage-crafted forms. Our ‘Kohomba Kankariya’, ‘Bali’, ‘Yaga’,
‘Thovil’ ‘Sokari’, ‘Kolam’, ‘Janagayana’
and ‘Rukada’ reperesenting ‘Uda Rata’, “Pahatha Rata”, ‘Samabaragamuwa’ and ‘Uturu’
ritualistic dance forms will be most enjoyable for visitors, for most of them
prefer the real to the ‘make believe’. There are stories to be told of them and
these are ways of exposing our visitors to the richness of our culture’s
marvels.
During the bad times when terrorism held us
back and there were only a few tourists, that was the cited reason for not
having this exposure made. “It did not make good business sense” we were told.
Now that the demand is a non-issue, what holds us back perhaps may be our own
inability to appreciate the finesse and the richness of things of our own. I
recollect how once a when I was at Sri Lanka Tourism and mentioned that we must
have a performance of ‘Daha Ata Sanniya’,
a newly recruited young executive working on events quipped back, “You
mean the ‘Olu Bakka’ dances?”. I was not sure at that moment, whether I was to
be angry or sad. I was certainly disappointed at the lack of our understanding
of what is our own.
Featuring the best of our own cultural
forms to our visitors will not only be an expression of our rich and vibrant traditions,
but will also be a meaningful learning experience for them. For our traditional
artists, crafts-persons, dancers and performers of rituals who have been
struggling for so long to keep these traditions alive, the trickle down effect
of tourism, will bring in the power and ability to be vibrant again and regain
their pride in their work.
Pic credit: mysrilanka.com
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