JOIN USPradeep Gunarathna may just be a fledgling setting out to discover the dancer in him; but such is his talent that this Sri Lankan dancer will soon be an eagle soaring majestically in the firmament of contemporary dance.
No one who has seen Kunnava’s Metamorphosis, his first solo choreographed dance presentation, would have any doubts about this. The sinuous grace, the engaging magnetism, the agility and enthralling stage presence is what many young dancers aspire to, but few are favoured with.
Contemporary dance is not highly developed as yet in Sri Lanka, says Gunarathna. The Colombo Dance Platform is seeking to redress this lacuna. Through a translator, the 23-year-old choreographer explained that interest in contemporary dance is limited to a small part of Colombo, both geographically and also in terms of an audience.
Interesting though is that while the contemporary dance scene is committed to a minority, “there are interesting developments” taking place at the Universities, the dance companies at these Universities and also with the more traditional dance practitioners.
“There is a lot of invention happening within traditional dance practices; though it may not strictly be labelled contemporary dance, they are using traditional forms more creatively,” explains this instructor with the Appreggio Creative Dance and Drama Academy.
Gunarathna’s adventure with contemporary dance took a quirky route through hip hop and ballet — “not classical ballet but dramatic storytelling through dance” — when, in 2009, he joined the Appreggio Creative Dance and Drama Academy, helmed by Nilan Maligaspe; a man he considers his guru. It was a paradigm shift for a boy who, at the age of 15, was trained in traditional dance at his high school.
“The traditional dances of Sri Lanka are ritualistic, and were not performance arts until recently,” explains this graduate in Traditional Sri Lankan dances from the Institute of Aesthetic Studies of the Western Province. Such was his meteoric rise that Gunarathna was invited, by the Goethe Institut to perform at the Colombo Dance Platform in 2014. His presentation of Kunnava’s Metamorphosis catapulted this rising star into the limelight.
The conflict of the character being female and he a male dancer was, for Gunanarathna, the main inspiration for the 16th century narration of Kuvanna, titled Kuveni Asne. “I didn’t feel the need to portray her as a woman; rather I was interested in how I would interpret these five different moods of Kuveni,” he says, referring to the mythological queen of Sri Lanka’s transformation into a bitch, mare, leopardess and as an abandoned queen. Gunarathna feels strongly that the female character is someone you cannot do without (when telling a story).
In the traditional form, all women’s roles were played by men. To weave this aspect into contemporary dance is what fascinates and challenges this choreographer, “because that’s what happens in reality a lot.”
He also feels that women characters are not given enough importance and he hopes to redress this through his portrayals. Gunarathna has played the main roles in three dance dramas — Another Tempest, Kuvanna-Vijaya and SapthaNaari — a mosaic of artistic expressions about Sri Lankan women based on folklore, in which he collaborated on the choreography.
Talking of the creative process for Kunnava’s Metamorphosis, Gunarathna explained that he isolated a part of his body for each character in the story, and questioned how or what that would do to that part of the body. It took him two-and-a-half months to work out the movements.
During this time, he keenly observed animal postures and also society, absorbing the different ways in which different parts of the body are affected when there is a particular conflict or mood. But what he found most challenging when depicting the changes in physical language was interpreting the sad mood of Kuveni; simply because this emerging artiste did not want to depict sorrow in a clichéd way. For him, just showing a tear does not depict true sadness; rather, he was interested in how the body responds to sadness. Such is the depth of Gunarathna’s introspection.
Gunarathna’s metamorphosis as a dancer is reflected in his move from the traditional to the contemporary. The major change he sees in himself now is that he questions and is open to questions. And what is the one question to which the answer still eludes him? With wisdom that belies his years, he replies, “The questions almost always have answers, but we look the other way and are not always willing to see it.”
FACETS International Choreography Residency, organised by Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bengaluru, afforded this emerging artiste his first visit outside Sri Lanka. It has been an education for him: this new country, culture, language; interacting with people from around the globe. But in true Gunarathna style, he isolated the process — meditating, absorbing, reflecting — intellectually engaging in the entire experience. Gunarathna is currently pursuing a general degree at the University of Visual and Performing Arts, Sri Lanka, studying and researching.