By Joanne Andrea Joseph For centuries, Viharamahadevi has lived in chronicles and classrooms as a figure of duty, so brave she seems almost unreal. In The Ballet School of Colombo’s production of ‘Devi: The Golden Voyage’ which will be staged at the Bishop’s College Auditorium from November 12 to 15 November, the dancers will portray [...]
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For centuries, Viharamahadevi has lived in chronicles and classrooms as a figure of duty, so brave she seems almost unreal.
In The Ballet School of Colombo’s production of ‘Devi: The Golden Voyage’ which will be staged at the Bishop’s College Auditorium from November 12 to 15 November, the dancers will portray the courageous girl who became the legendary Queen.
The dancers chosen to carry her story have had to find that girl for themselves. Along the way, often to their own surprise, they discovered they already understood more of her than they expected.
For The Ballet School, this production marks a milestone. Founded by Romina Gyi and Tara Cooke, the school has spent a decade nurturing classical ballet in Colombo, training dancers from early childhood to adulthood and making sure every student has the chance to perform on stage.
Devi began in a room full of teachers, challenged to create something that had not been done before. Having spent their own dancing lives in The Nutcracker and other European classics, they looked instead to a story from home.
Tara Cooke shaped the legend into a storyline, imagining the parts no chronicle describes. Choreographer Nadine Shums gave it movement, drawing on the qualities of traditional Sri Lankan dance. Film composer Sachiththa Fernando wrote an entirely original score: almost an hour of music in which Sri Lankan drums and traditional scales colour a Western orchestral sound. The result is a full-length classical ballet drawn from Sri Lankan history.
Bringing this extraordinary production to life is an ensemble of 60 highly trained and accomplished classical ballet dancers. Together they deliver a full-length theatrical production of the technical and artistic calibre associated with a professional ballet company. Dancers who have grown up through the school’s earlier productions share the stage with others discovering, for the first time, what it means to carry a story of such significance with the youngest member of the cast being just eight.
Two dancers share the role of the young princess, and each has found her way to Devi from a slightly different place.
In Amodya Hirumi’s Devi, you see the laughing girl who brightens her father’s court before the sea arrives, all quick feet and open joy. Watch those feet closely. From the audience, satin pointe shoes look delicate; for the feet inside them, they are anything but.
Where others might see a fearless heroine, Nelinsa Wijenayake sees a girl who is afraid and goes anyway. She speaks of Devi like a friend she has finally come to understand. “Being brave doesn’t mean that you’re never scared,” she says. It may be the truest line anyone says about this production.
Word reaches the king that the sea is rising, and the glittering court dissolves into panic. At the centre of that storm stands a mother. History gives Queen Uththara barely a line, so Kyra Wafa, who has grown up alongside the school, built her from the inside.
She imagined a woman who is a queen in public and a mother in private, who must hold herself together while her world falls apart, and who learns in one terrible moment that her daughter is the price of saving the kingdom.
It is a scene that asks her to act more than dance, as composure slips and a mother quietly breaks. “Strength doesn’t always mean being fearless or in control,” says Kyra. “Sometimes it simply means facing what is in front of you while you are frightened.”
Across the stage, a king wrestles with the same impossible choice. Samishka Perera’s King Kelanitissa is a man torn between authority and feeling, who must look strong while carrying a decision no parent should ever have to make.
When Devi comes ashore, she is no longer a girl. Here the story passes to Anitra Gunaratne, who dances the young woman washed up on a strange coast and goes on to become a queen.
Offstage, her own days begin well before rehearsal, teaching the school’s youngest dancers before she becomes a student again herself. She is honest that a queen’s poise doesn’t come naturally to her. Learning to walk onstage with Devi’s calm authority has meant practising a kind of self-belief she is still growing into.
Love arrives too, in the form of a prince. Anushka Madhuranga, who dances the role, talks about finding the human being inside the character before worrying about the steps, and is quick to thank the teachers who trusted him with it. “An artist’s journey is never a solo journey,” he says, and you sense he means every word.
The duet that follows is, for Rankala Hasan, who also dances the prince, the most demanding moment of all. Two dancers must trust each other completely and tell a love story with nothing but movement. Yet what he most hopes young audiences will notice is not the prince at all. It is the women, and the courage, strength and determination that history has too often left in the background.
Most people picture ballet as tutus and music. But it asks for a strong core, steady balance, supple joints and enough breath to get through a long scene with some left over to smile.
What struck me most is how much of the work happens in the mind. A dancer on stage is doing several difficult things at once: remembering the sequence, holding the count, staying in time with a partner, landing safely and carrying a character’s feelings all the way to the back row.
Their teachers’ advice through all of it is disarmingly simple: listen to the music, and the smile will find its own way.
It helps that nobody is doing this alone. “Even when everyone is dead tired, we somehow find something to laugh about,” says Kyra. It explains how a cast this size makes it through a year like that.
None of them pretends not to be nervous. Opening night is close enough to feel. But when they describe what they hope audiences will take home, they sound less like performers and more like young people who have learned something worth passing on.
You don’t need to know one ballet step from another to feel what happens on that stage. Bring your family, and bring the friend who insists ballet isn’t for them.
Devi: The Golden Voyage runs from November 12 to 15 at the Bishop’s College Auditorium. Tickets are on www.boxoffice.com
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