Yoshita Abayasekara-Jacobson doesn’t look like your typical 41-year-old. Her short hair, streaked with pale gold highlights, is cropped closely on one side in a homage to punk; it allows you to see the two crosses that dangle from thin silver chains from one ear. She has the slender build of a dancer and is dressed in bright blue. All these elements combine to make Yoshita look younger than she is, but when it came to enrolling at the UK’s well known college of the arts LaSalle three years ago, she felt every bit her age.

Yoshita: Experimenting with dance moves. Pic by Susantha Liyanawatte

“It was the hardest time in my life, going to school at that age was tough,” says Yoshita. In a class made up of primarily 16 – 25 year-olds, Yoshita found she had to work twice as hard to match their flexibility and skill. She’d warm up for an hour, only to watch her classmates walk in and do a full split in five minutes. Identified as a mature student, she credits her teachers with believing in her enough to give her the chance to prove herself – which she did, graduating with First Class Honours. “It made me a better artist,” she says of her time there, adding that it also taught her a great deal about contemporary dance – both how to perform it and how to appreciate it.

She’s hoping to share some of that with Sri Lankan audiences with her upcoming festival ‘A New Direction.’ Explaining her choice of title, Yoshita says she felt she was seeing huge personal changes in her life and that this was echoed in Sri Lanka’s progress since the end of the conflict. Currently based in Singapore, where she freelances as a dance teacher, working at schools and studios in the city, Yoshita loves working with young people.

Growing up in Sri Lanka, the daughter of a teacher and an engineer, her own interest in dance was kindled at a young age when she used to tag along with her mother to ballet class. By age 5, she was enrolled in Aunty Oosha’s classes. Her father is also an avid dancer, with a fondness for ballroom. Though she began her career in dance as a ballerina, Yoshita has picked up other styles along the way, training in hip-hop, contemporary, Latin American and jazz techniques. She drew on this early training to establish her ‘School of Dance Moves’ for children and adults in Sri Lanka and then set up shop again when she moved to Shanghai. While she had students approach her for private classes, Yoshita says the lack of a formal degree disbarred her from teaching in schools and colleges. Determined to rectify that she began taking summer classes at the Laban Centre for Dance in the UK and then enrolled at LaSalle.

Looking back at those early years, Yoshita says she gave the very best she could to her pupils, but in retrospect she had a lot left to learn. She has since danced in works by international choreographers such as Loretta Livingston, Liz Lea, Roberta Shaw, Ming Poon and Marion De Cruz and worked with the MAYA dance theatre in Singapore, performing in a number of festivals in both Singapore and abroad. It is the contacts she made in those years touring that she’s called upon to furnish the talent for this new festival.

Yoshita hopes to make it an annual event. The workshops for children from Jaffna are particularly close to her heart. “The bigger part of the picture is that I want to train teachers and build a facility in the North,”she says. “That’s my bigger plan, but this is a little seed.”

Performance and workshops

Yoshita is gearing up to stage the inaugural ‘A New Direction’ festival in Sri Lanka. The festival will combine performances and workshops. The performances will be staged at Barefoot Gallery and Bishop’s College Auditorium on December 14 and 21 respectively.

Dance, music, drama and film workshops are planned for the 19th and 20th of December. The first workshop for children and young adults from Colombo will be a ticketed event. For the second workshop, Yoshita is partnering with the Sevalanka Foundation and the Abhina Academy of Performing Arts, headed by Anoja Weerasinghe.

Working with a small group of children from the north of the island, she hopes to use the performing arts as a means of rehabilitation and regeneration.

Among the featured artists are the likes of Singaporean multi-disciplinary artist Elizabeth De Roza, piano maestro Claudio Di Meo and award winning performer and choreographer and LaSalle lecturer Susan Yeung. Mexican musician Mauricio Sotelo will be collaborating with Claudio.

Others include teacher and dancer Melody Tee and the artist known as AN, both of whom hail from Malaysia. Charmain HO will fly in from Singapore along with Russell Morton. The latter, a film producer, will present a dance film alongside an art installation complete with a live dancer.

Tickets for the performances of A New Direction are on sale now at the respective venues.