Virtual arts festival that examines pandemic’s effects on children

By Sajitha Prematunge

The Children in Lockdown Arts Festival 2021, to be held from November 26 to 28, 2021, live on Zoom, and livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube in parallel, will bring together artists, children, and adults to reflect on the treatment and experiences of children in Sri Lanka during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Festival is the culmination of a six-month programme curated by Stages Theatre Group (STG) and supported by Kindernothilfe (KNH), through which 20 artworks, addressing the challenges faced by children during the pandemic, were commissioned. They include theatre performances, art installations, puppet shows, short-film screenings, and artist talks.

On the guidance of Festival Director Piumi Wijesundara, the festival will unfold under six themes, vulnerable children, digital wellbeing, health and wellbeing, families, schooling and abuse during the pandemic, and each segment will have a viewing of related artwork and an artiste talk, including child artistes, followed by a panel discussion. The Festival will also provide a platform for communities to meet, discuss, debate, and communicate on the issues faced by children during the pandemic, through talks, panel discussions, workshops, and forums led by children, adults, artists, and professionals working with children. The purpose of the Children in Lockdown Arts Festival is to bring together children, artists, educators, families, and communities to understand and creatively address the impact of the pandemic on children in Sri Lanka.

Freedom to work

“As a theatre company, STG always believes that artists should be commissioned and be given the freedom to work,” said Curator Ruwanthie de Chickera. She pointed out that there aren’t many commissioning programmes in Sri Lanka and artistes have to struggle to fund their own projects. “Or artists are told what to do too often. There is a lot of meddling and micromanaging by patrons. We wanted to let artistes exercise their own individuality, offer them freedom and responsibility, with regard to their artform.” But with the pandemic, doing productions was next to impossible. STG found this the ideal situation to curate a festival on behalf of artists who were going through a rough time due to the pandemic. “There was no money, opportunity or motivation for artists to work because of the pandemic,” said De Chickera. The German organisation KNH was more than happy to provide funding.

De Chickera is an artistic director and founder member of STG, an ensemble theatre company producing socially and politically conscious original Theatre. She works with students, teachers, and schools to help strengthen and introduce creative processes into formal and informal learning. Her co-curator, Malith Hegoda is a filmmaker who began his career as a photographer and a publicist for theatre and film. His directorial debut feature won awards locally and was officially selected for several international film festivals, including the prestigious BFI London Film Festival in 2014. Between De Chickera’s experience in live performance and Hegoda’s experience in film, they were able to cover a vast area in terms of artistic skill. Out of 80 applicants, 20 works of art were selected for the festival. The festival was curated to represent artists of different capacities and experience, to allow children also to participate. In fact, six of the 20 artworks commissioned were proposed by child artists. The open-source art exhibition features the artworks of over 140 children and is curated by two child artists: Acsah Kulasingham and Amani Naeemullah. In order to ensure maximum accessibility to and participation of children and communities, island-wide, all digital interactive sessions will be facilitated in Sinhala, Tamil, English, and Sign Language.

Pressing issues of children

De Chickera said that the objective of the festival was to address the most pressing issues for children, one of the most vulnerable groups and perhaps the most overlooked during the pandemic. “The public is oblivious of the impact the pandemic has on children. Staying at home, away from school, is just the tip of the iceberg,” said De Chickera. She said that, from the turbulence of family life, the digital world they’ve suddenly been thrust into, bereavement, domestic violence to addiction, all contribute to the suffering of children. “Even children with special needs, children seeking asylum and children from the estate sector are represented in the festival. If the needs of the general population of children are neglected, then the public is most certainly oblivious to the needs of these children. In fact, some of the suicides over the past two years is directly connected to the pandemic.” De Chickera blames the Education Ministry for failing the children. “At a time when most of the children didn’t have access to education, the Ministry was not considerate enough to postpone any of the examinations.”

On a lighter vein, Mahadenamuththa and his cohorts are attempting a zoom rehearsal and everything is falling apart. Puwak Badilli’s grandsons and granddaughters are bawling their eyes out; Polbemooni’s husband, Polbemoona, complains that his dinner is late; Usiamma, from the North, has to climb on to the roof to get better reception and complains that she can’t dance on the roof for fear of falling. Rabbada Ayya’s wife has declared strike action, so he is forced to take part in the Zoom rehearsal while doing laundry. The play, ‘Mahadenamuththayi Coronawayi’ (Mahadanamuththa and Corona), another highlight of the festival, sheds light on how the pandemic has thrown the work-life balance off kilter.

‘Mahadenamuththayi Coronawayi’ is the brainchild of Sulochana Dissanayake, Founder and Artistic Director of Power of Play, a company that specialises in performing arts for communication, reconciliation and development, with a special focus on theatre and puppetry. Flanked by rod puppets Rama, Sita, Ravana and Hanuman, Dissanayake said that Power of Play’s goal is to drive home the fact that our folklore and traditional arts are still relevant in the 21st century. “In fact, we can solve most of our existing issues with a pointer or two from Mahadenamuththa and Andare stories. Power of Play is based on this very concept.” Dissanayake has a bachelor in theatre and economics from the UK. She later travelled to South Africa and Indonesia on a Watson Fellowship by IBM Corporation. In Indonesia, she was introduced to rod puppets.

Virtual production

‘Mahadenamuththayi Coronawayi’ was supposed to be a live show. Ironically, due to the pandemic and resulting health regulation, they had to settle for a virtual production. Its focus was on the pandemic’s effects on families, across all age groups. “And also how phoney the concept of working from home is. We are expected to carry on as if nothing has changed, one has to look perfect on-screen, with the appropriate background, when in reality everything is going haywire.” Because you are working from home while forced to deal with everything from bawling children, pets, high-pitched chirping of squirrels to the choon-pan version of Beethoven’s 1810 classic Für Elise. As a wife, mother of two very young children and an entrepreneur, Dissanayake knows first-hand how stressful working from home can be. “I have performed internationally and have done extensive tours across the country, but I can’t manage one zoom workshop flawlessly.”

It is this mismatch between reality and expectations that Dissanayake hopes to highlight in her adapted version of Mahadenamuththa. Dissanayake has introduced a more equitable and race and gender-equal, albeit modernized, concept of Mahadenamuththa. “The satire factor of the Mahadenamuththa stories play a major role in the current context,” said Dissanayake. “Traditionally satire was used to expose social issues.” In the new Power of Play version, Mahadenamuththa has come to realise that contemporary issues cannot be solved with the help of men. So, the modern ‘golayas’ (apprentices) are Muslim, Tamil, Burgher men and women, the descendants of Mahadenamuththa’s original golayas.

“Theatre artistes are one of the most affected groups by the pandemic because theatres are closed and even when they weren’t, people were reluctant to expose themselves at public events. So any form of collaboration was welcome,” said Dissanayake. She said that what appeals to her most about the Children in Lockdown Festival is that it is the first united effort to shed light on the realities, of a diverse cross section of communities, during the pandemic. “The festival features creative works from children, teenagers, women, men, both rural and urban communities, married and single people. The LGBT community is also represented. This diversity is unique to the festival,” said Dissanayake. “It will be interesting to note, through the various performances, workshops and discussions, how challenging the pandemic has been irrespective of one’s socio-economic, ethnic or religious background.”

Creative work

With a PhD in robotics, academic Maleen Jayasuriya also dabbles in creative work. His group of concerned citizens, the ‘Digital Wellbeing Initiative’, is anxious about technology related issues. He elaborated that smartphones are pretty cheap and just about anyone can afford one and apps are coming out of the woodwork. Smart tech, such as Virtual Reality, has revolutionised the field so much so that they have rendered the usual safeguard ineffectual. “Because the field is moving at such breakneck speed policy is unable to catch up. Because of the generation gap parents have not been able to address these issues either and even schools have all but neglected digital wellbeing,” said Jayasuriya. He pointed out that the pandemic was the tipping point. The Digital Wellbeing Initiative’s project featured in the festival, #RECONNECTUS, which also happens to be their maiden project, brings these issues into focus.

“The best way to resolve digital wellbeing issues is to raise awareness early on. Kids these days are smarter than we give them credit for, they are more aware than we were at their age.”

Jayasuriya reiterated the importance of making kids understand basic information such as how algorithms and addiction work, how it affects one’s well being, all of which were discussed during the workshops that lead to the project. Another issue discussed is how to tackle misinformation. He explained that the main product of social media is data gathered from users, which is sold to advertising companies, who are their actual customers. “Users are not the actual customers of social media platforms, the advertising companies are. They don’t have your best interest at heart.”

Jayasuriya pointed out that social media bypasses gatekeepers such as journalists, scientists and academics, as opposed to traditional media such as newspapers or journals. According to him such conditions are ripe for misinformation. “As such, the young generation has to be taught necessary skills such as journalistic and research skills because they interface directly with these new technologies.”

Next on their list were cyberbullying and privacy. “Cyberbullying affects one’s self-esteem and there are considerable threats to personal information. Once personal information is in the public domain, there is no taking it back. Consequently, it is vital for the younger generation to be aware of these concerns.”

The end result of the workshops was a set of Public Service Announcement (PSA) videos, a digital wellbeing campaign researched, created, and performed by children. In all 21 kids with various artistic inclinations took part in the project. Aptly titled #RECONNECTUS, it signifies the younger generations’ need to connect with technology in a healthier way. “One of our guiding philosophies is that this technology is not inherently harmful. It can be a tool, as long as we can balance the negatives and accentuate the positives.”

‘quaranTEEN’ is a solo performance by 19-year-old Leeth Singhage, wherein a teenager stuck with the bleakness of university applications, on-line life, and poor judgement, investigates how others navigate the pandemic. It is based on interviews conducted with teenagers on their experiences of the lockdown.

“From a policy perspective, if our collective efforts can snowball into some kind of tangible change that could affect policy, that’s a huge achievement in itself,” said Jayasuriya. Dissanayake said that there is a strong connection between art and mental wellbeing. “Art is an outlet for stress. It has huge potential to regulate emotions. Therefore we must find creative outlets that are COVID-19 safe, to release all those pent up energies. Art allows one to pull oneself out of the constant state of negativity.” Dissanayake suggested that people make the festival a family affair. De Chickera believes that the three-day, not to mention free of charge, festival would surely rekindle a sense of community if more people participated.

Official festival webpages:

https://www.stages.lk/curation

https://www.stages.lk/arts-festival

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