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OBITUARY- Amaratunga Arachchige Maurice Dias alias Chitrasena - (1921-2005)
DEPARTS THE MUSE OF DANCE
By Rajpal Abeynayake
The Colombo cognoscenti would have at a certain point in time bottled and sold Chitrasena if they could do it, but Chitrasena stood like a rock against the rampant vulgarization of his image that the Colombo cognoscenti seemed to prescribe. Someone quipped, that the man was shaped a like a rock too.

When I visited Chitrasena as he lay ailing just last week, with Chitrasena’s old time (but younger..) friend Ajith Samaranayake, he still looked like a rock. Physically he had not diminished and neither had he mentally, but quite obviously he was very sick. But with the assuredness of the accomplished, he sized up his condition and deadpanned: “ leda vennath onenne’’ (Must fall sick also no?)

Those who wanted to bottle and sell Chitrasena had got one thing correct. This was that the twosome, Chitra and Vajira, came as a brand name for what they did: pioneering dance as a form of expression and story telling in this country.

Eventually Chitrasena was not bottled and sold under franchise - - he was honoured with almost all of the key accolades that could be bestowed upon an artiste in this country, including the so called highest awards such as Deshamanya etc., which awards Chitrasena began to accept almost as a matter of routine. When J. R. Jayewardene gave him the kala soori he accepted that too - - albeit perhaps with an inward invisible shrug - - because it was Jayewardene government that caused his dance school in Kolpetty to be taken over for urban development. It was appropriately brazen for a government which knew so little art but so much artifice.

Eventually Chitrasena’s own assessment seemed to be that the elite of this country knew that he was great, but not for the real reasons. In an interview he did with an Indian art critic, Chitrasena, just two years before he died said that he “did not experience the kind of reception in Sri Lanka that he got in the Soviet Republic for instance, where artistes waited outside the theater with flowers to get in.’’ That was the extent of the considerable scrum to fete him.

So, in his lifetime Chitrasena went from being someone that was looked upon as a brash - - even mad --- innovator, to an icon. Those who understood his art as well as those who didn’t, wanted a part of him.

Even daughter Upeka did not have that much of a good word for the Colombo cognoscenti - - and she once said something to the effect that the reaction to Chitrasena was something that came painfully and gradually from among them. They looked at him through the prism of what they had imbibed and inhered from Western forms of art.

That was true for the most part. Chitrasena was witness to some of the most ludicrous usages of traditional dance, and one form of prostitution, which he signified this decline with, was the fusion of Kandyan dance with cha-cha!
In this way what can be the uncomplicated assessment of his work was that Chitrasena never declined; his audience did. Every King in every court wanted him to dance for them and this included British governors such as Caldecott and the non-aligned visiting heads of state. He had stormed the dance world in an era are of renaissance in the arts and culture on the one hand, even though that in itself did not guarantee that his right of passage was smooth.

He was booed when he first introduced Nala Damayanthi and Kinkini Kolama and the like. They didn’t know that a young man returned from Shathinikethen -- like they almost all did those days -- could actually invent an art form.

Everyone knew that he was formidable thespian Seebert Dias’s son; and perhaps they preferred him to do Othello and King Lear and forget about it, and as a matter of fact he did all that - - Othello in particular -- to the kind of acclaim, which wasn’t even grudgingly his when he returned from under the tutelage of guru Gopinath in Travancore. Almost everybody in the field saw him in his return a quantity they could not comprehend, and one reason was that Chitrasena’s dance took elements from all of the traditional – which he diligently discovered and then made his own.

This baffled both his mentors and his protégés: this man seemed to be blazing a trial that went in all directions. But, while his doubting audience exchanged glances among themselves, all Chitrasena was doing was dance. The now almost cliché line about him that he was what Sarachchandra was to the stage, what Martin Wickremesinghe was to the novel, what Lester James Peiris was to the cinema and what Amaradeva was to song. Bestowing this cliché on him like a bouquet was the done thing. But all that line did in the end was to distinguish some of the others in the list, by the fact that they came to be associated with Chitrasena. That’s because he dealt with an art form that was part and parcel of the everyday culture of the Sinhalese, and due to this familiarity, he had more pressure on him to conform than the others did in their own pursuits.

But he was not intimidated by the tradition, and eventually he moulded the tradition and invented forms that did not exist in the old received motif.
At the outset he was thought to be tampering with the hallowed, but that was in part because he was in fact almost consumed by what he did. He was training his wife-to-be in dance when she was seven years old and as Vajira later confessed, she never liked those unrelenting practice sessions at that time. She hid behind the door at Chitrasena’s approach, complaining the “ya ka is coming.’’

Going strictly by physical appearance if there was a ‘’ya ka’ in the family, Chitrasena was he, being dark muscular and of granite visage.. Upekha’s sharp features came from the mother. But Chitrasena was possessed by dance, and he once said he “danced and danced and danced’’ at school until he could “dance no more.’’

That could very well be used as a metaphor for his life. He danced and danced and danced in a career spanning 50 years until he couldn’t stand no more – last week he accepted the Chevaliers L'Ordre des Arts award being seated all the time. All this was in a career that straddled three generations, and then some. Granddaughter Heshma who danced in the more recent Berahanda for instance is a fourth generation product of the Chitrasena tradition.

For those who knew him at least in passing, the image of Chitrasena, the Laird of Mahara, at the centre of the small nucleus of unalloyed art lovers that was family, will be the enduring image of him. As a lady Vajira can grow old gracefully, but for Chitrasena dashing and dusky are about the only two physical descriptions that can be appended right to the very end.

But his death does leave an uneasy kind of angst behind. Here was a man who was given the role of Arjuna in Shanthinikethan productions, and whom Tagore no less, predicted would become a very great dancer, which prediction took a paltry little interregnum in time to come true.

He defined a certain era, and when certain people talk of their times, they sill speak of going to the cinema to see Rekawa and going to the Wendt – that temple now desecrated -- to see Nala Damayanthi, Karadiya, and if it was Karadiya, to have “hoiya hoiya ‘’ ringing in their ears for weeks on end. They will remember, and the grateful will say he was awarded a Doctor of Arts and all that, so all is well that ends well, no?

But we leave the scene of his death with a certain feeling of inevitability. As someone mentioned “will these kids of today know who Chitrasena was?’’ Upekha had a quick rejoinder to that one saying she will never let that happen.

But, there is the sense of inevitability yet of a cycle having closed. If one manufactures an epoch – as Bandula Jayawardnene credited Chitrasena with doing - - then the epoch is ended with the passing of its maker. His legacy will live no doubt – but like the stories that animated many of his performances, Chitrasena’s story is one that’s hugely heady and melancholy all at the same time.

But that’s the nature of all epic stories, and it’s not for nothing that Chitrasena borrowed his alias from one of the grandest epics of all.
So Chitrasena ends - - so does the story of his life, ups downs and all. What his legacy will be, is altogether another matter.

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