Who or What is MANAVELI?
Exile is a very powerful force of creativity.
Exile is so intimately linked with a multiplicity of feelings; love, the sadness of being forced to leave that ambience where one was born and bred, the melancholic longing for things that are always good back at home, a passion for justice, and last but not the least the trials and tribulations in building up a new life in a new country -- feelings that lie so deep in heart, yet so powerful and beautiful once expressed. Thus, it is no surprise that exile literature has been brilliant and has brought the best out of human beings.
The long-drawn ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has produced more than half a million Tamil refugees, and about 200,000 of them have sought refuge in Canada. Among those who were forced to leave their country of birth were numerous writers, poets, playwrights and artists.
A longing for serious plays and dramas that stimulate a serious cultural awareness and debate, rather than the superficial feelings that the cheap cinema-based culture creates/awakens, brought a group of exiled Tamil artists together in 1996 and the Manaveli Performing Arts Groupwas born. The artists of the group are aware that they have a significant role to play in multicultural Canada.
Tamils have a very strong sense of cultural identity, dating back to at least three thousand years in south India. The Tamils in the north and east of Sri Lanka developed their own culture based on that of the south Indian Tamil culture, and in the last century it witnessed a renaissance with new forms of drama and musicals, like the dramatized form of reciting poetry.
However, this growth had fallen victim to the brutal ethnic conflict that flared in the seventies and has only gotten worse since then.
The Manaveli Performing Group is in a unique position because it can blend the rich Tamil cultural, artistic and performing traditions to that of the Canadian. Moreover, they have undergone a plethora of experiences such as loss of one's own country, the village or urban settings that one learned to cherish, loss of loved ones to the war, the passion one feels about justice after having witnessed so much inhumanity and injustice, and the trials and tribulations in the new country of refuge.
Living, and performing, in a third country endows the artist with a unique status to observe two cultures, and this from an objective distance.
Even though it is only five years since the group was formed, the Manaveli Performing Arts Group has come a long way; it has staged more than twenty plays, including six performances, 15 dramas and two kavitha nigalvugal (dramatized form of reciting poetry).
It is true that Diasporic arts tend to concentrate overwhelmingly on (lost) life back in the home country, and the trials and tribulations of refugee life and Manaveli is no exception, but the artists have also transcended their national borders and 'tamilized' playwrights like Anton Chekov (The Bear), Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Sigfried Lenz, Jean Janet (The Death Watch) and Vaclav Havel.
The directors that are involved with Manaveli are Cheran, Cheliyan, Gnanam Lambert (Thomas Lambert), A. Puranthagan, P.Vickneswaran, N. Santhinathan, P.A. Jayakaran, Gnana A. Fernando, V. Thivyarajan, Selvan-Rajan, Seevaratnam, Sudarshan Durayappa and S. Sabesan .
Manaveli's audience comes mainly from the 200.000 strong Tamil community in Toronto. However, Manaveli is beginning to expand its activities into the larger Toronto arts and theatre scene. The performances are mainly in Tamil language. Manaveli's work has been hailed as path breaking by critics in Toronto, Europe and Sri Lanka.
(Thanks - chennaitheatre.8m.com)
Premil (Tharmu Sivaramu)
The next play, Forever Rains, is a take on the issue of cultural imperialism and how we have fallen victims to the media organisations that want to protect the status-quo. It is scripted by Cheliyan and directed by the well-known Tamil Canadian director Puranthagan. Cheliyan is also a well known face in Sri Lanka, India and Canada. The author of Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter was, Cheliyan has authored several short stories and poems as well.
