The daughter's dance

Upekha holds Hong Kong spellbound

By Carlton Samarajiwa

Not all parents are blessed with the good fortune of their children taking over from them their vision and mission. Chitrasena and Vajira are such parents, for their daughter Upekha is pursuing the dance tradition and artistic ethos of "Sri Lanka's first family of dance."

Upekha and the Chitrasena Dance Company are indistinguishable. She has inherited her parents' talents and passion for dance. She has also inherited her mother's suppleness, grace and loveliness, and therefore Vajira and Upekha too are inseparable in our consciousness.

Upekha took Hong Kong's sophisticated arts audience by storm early this month. Her two performances held the cosmopolitan theatre-lovers of Hong Kong spellbound for two hours on each of the two days of their performance at the Asian Festival of Arts.

The hall was packed and the ovations thunderous as she and her troupe provided a panorama of folk dance and music styles of the Kandyan and low-country genres; nritta, rasa and bhava were beautifully blended to produce an evening's entertainment of sheer joy and indescribable grace.

"Upekha danced throughout the evening, delighting with the warmth of her presentation and impressing with the unerring discipline and accuracy of her every move," wrote Dino Mahony in a rare review of the performance in the South China Morning Post.

Upekha established a commanding presence from the very start as she opened the evening with a Saraswathy Pooja, portraying joy and spirituality through the magic of her movements.

Splayed limbs, out-turned feet, raised arms and body swayed to music blended in elegance as a chorus of fluent female dancers counterpointed her exquisite movements.

The tone and the stage were thus set for the evening's programme of sixteen items of dance, song and drumming.

The Mask Dance depicting the mythical garuda; the Gajaga Vannama, Kolam and Ves, the Tea Harvest Dance, and Kandyan Dance; Sinhala Folk Songs and Thri Dhara; and Beheri Vrundha and Davul Thammetta - drums that throbbed to a crescendo and made the many Sri Lankans in the audience nostalgic for their motherland were all exquisitely blended to produce a uniquely Sri Lankan performance.

The Hong Kong Arts Festival is one of the world's most acclaimed international arts festivals, and each year it brings to Hong Kong internationally renowned artistes from all over the world.

The Chitrasena Dance Company have spread their wings across the globe. They held performances from the fifties to the nineties in Moscow, Leningrad, Prague, Poland, Warsaw, Berlin, Delhi, Bombay, Lucknow, Shantiniketan, Calcutta, Madras, Bopal, Trivendram, Bangladesh, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Auckland, France, St. Morritz, St. Gallen, Switzerland, London, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Montreal, a seemingly endless list of cities.

This was the first time, however, that Hong Kong savoured a sumptuous feast of the truly unique dance forms of Sri Lanka's cultural heritage through Upekha with the Chitrasena Dance Company.

Upekha is extending her parents' achievement of bringing to the wide world an experience of the heritage of Sri Lankan dance. It was only recently that she had a performance in Malaysia, and close on its heels, Upekha with the Chitrasena Dance Company were in Hong Kong to enrich the cultural scene there. She is destined to take the Sinhala dance idiom across the globe well into the millennium.

This note would be incomplete without mention of the Sri Lankan couple, Sesha Sam and Dali, whose corporate communications - outfit based in Hong Kong - Impact Communications were official coordinators for Upekha's participation in the prestigious Asian Arts Festival.

Their spade work behind the scenes to have Upekha invited by the Hong Kong Arts Festival Society was selfless and tireless. The outcome of their efforts was that Upekha's programme became the first ever indigenous Sinhala cultural item to be included in the Festival since its inception over two decades ago.

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