[image]
[title]It’s been over a week since S Shakthidaran opened his latest collaboration with Eamon Flack at Belvoir St Theatre, The Jungle and the Sea (playing at Belvoir St Theatre until Dec 18, 2022), the much-anticipated follow-up to Counting and Cracking, to praise from critics and audiences alike. And funnily enough, Shakthidaran’s life actually shares a lot of similarities with my own. We are both Tamil, Hindu and have mothers that were heavily involved in the classical artforms of our culture.
Almost everyone in our community learnt how to sing, dance or play an instrument. Our weekends were filled with music concerts and Arangetrams – derived from the Tamil word for stage (‘arangu’) and ascent (‘etram’), meaning to ascend the stage – some of which were held by Shakthi’s mother through Lingalayam Dance Company. As Shakthi reminds me, this is a “cultural habit that is built up over a couple of a hundred years.” Art for us is for everyone, by everyone – but here in Australia, it is often just for the community.
Every night of Counting and Cracking, Sri Lankan and South Asian audience members would tell Shakthi how surprised they were to see all these other people love the story. “I came to realise that a lot of migrants are their full selves at home or inside their own community, and then when they're out in wider community, or in public in Australian life, they put on a mask and perform a simulated version of themselves.”
With so much to unpack, naturally I started at the centre of our venn diagram – our mothers.
How did your relationship with your mother shape your artistic voice?
I’m the only child of a single mum. I spent a lot of time with her growing up… I definitely had to spend a good deal of my twenties living away from her. I don't know if that was necessarily finding my artistic voice, but it was kind of finding myself as an Australian, outside of her.
The development of my artistic voice came from some kind of inner need, which I think lots of migrants have, more so kids of migrants. I just think you can’t really know yourself properly unless you know your past properly. Although Amma (Tamil for mother) inculcated me into the arts of Tamil culture, very deeply in the sense that I just grew up surrounded by it, she didn't talk about Sri Lanka, her personal story, or my family’s story, at all. So I think I was quite blocked from that. The development of my artistic voice was in tandem with the development of me, trying to understand my family's past and my homeland better.
Photograph: Belvoir/Sriram Jeyaraman
You and Eamon Flack have been working together for quite some time now, what makes this collaboration work?
I come from the small to medium sector, with a deep understanding of community collaboration and community storytelling, and [both] works are very personal for me, particularly Counting and Cracking. Eamon comes from mainstage theatre and the business of just putting on relatively large-scale theatre constantly. And I think the power of these two works is the fact that we're bringing together two parts of the industry that don't normally work with each other. There's greater power to be gained in solidarity across difference than there is in segregation.
Was there any sense from the small to medium sector that you had gone to “the dark side” by working with Belvoir?
Not the dark side, but there's definitely a lot of mistrust between [these] two parts of the industry. The processes are entirely different and it's tiring work because you constantly have to educate and train [mainstage theatremakers] in a different process and be vigilant in order for them to be constantly cognisant of that. Belvoir knew what to expect working with me again, so there's definitely proper significant change happening [but] it's impossible for that to happen quickly.
You have cited The Mahabharatha and Antigone as inspiration for this show, how did they influence the writing of the show?
I turned to The Mahabharatha as pretty much one of the first things I ever read (the Amar Chitra Katha version). It's been one of my oldest friends in terms of the texts that sit in your life, and that text deals so much with surviving and growing through loss. Eamon said that Antigone had done the same for him. What those texts did for us is... it opened up the writing process. It gave us permission to make ordinary people extraordinary and to say that the people who survive and and have courage and determination to keep their agency alive even as bombs are falling all around them deserve to be made heroes as much as the people in our epics. In fact, they have gone through more than the people in the epics go through... and it’s hard to make that decision on your own as a writer, but those epics give you permission to do that.
Photograph: Belvoir/Sriram Jeyaraman
Some people within the community may feel that the depiction of the war in the show doesn’t accurately represent their experience. Was this something you thought about during development?
None of it is unthinking and every single choice is considered. I think this show deals with a more recent part of history and it's one that is less resolved in people's hearts and minds, so it brings up a lot more in people. I don't make any decisions on my own and the same goes with the cast. I feel comfortable with the decisions we've made because it's been through a really extended process of community review, and it's impossible to make something that pleases everyone.
Those who don't know about this war in the detail our community does will go home after the show and research it. I hope that all the people who want to portray a different aspect of our collective story go out and do so, and I can't wait to see those works.
When a war finishes, there's an opportunity to change the future of a country. The story of how that war is told, and the way that that war is talked about, will determine the future of that country for the next generation.
How do we get more people from our community coming to the theatre?
Longterm thinking is the main reason we're struggling. If you think about the relationship that South Asian audiences have with Arangetrams and Bharathnatyam performances and so on, that’s a cultural habit that's built up over a couple hundred years. And if you think about inner city Western audiences and their relationship with theatre companies, that’s also something that’s built up over 50 or 60 years. So, in order to encourage young people of colour to come to the theatre, we need to think about a collection of 10 to 15 shows over a period of five to ten years to make any significant inroads into building that audience.
The difference between Counting and Cracking and The Jungle and the Sea has been amazing. It's kind of a seismic shift in audience expectations and relationships. It's all about how you relate to humans on a very personal and direct level that just requires leadership and collaborative teams who have the capacity for longterm thinking and the resources for that.