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1 results

  • Actants and Fault Lines: Janakaraliya and Theatre for Peace Building in Sri Lanka

  • NELOUFER DE MEL
  • Journal:
    Theatre Research International / Volume 46 / Issue 1 / March 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 March 2021, pp. 39-52
    Print publication:
    March 2021

  • This article provides a contextual analysis of Janakaraliya (‘Theatre of the People’), a theatre company acclaimed for its excellence in theatre for social justice and peace building in Sri Lanka. It discusses the governing conditions that enable its practice and evaluates its impact, whether this be the biopower of the state and non-state actors during periods of political violence, donor funding frameworks, or the Janakaraliya archive itself as an actant shaped by donor rationalities. Drawing on a recent research project entitled The Theatre of Reconciliation, the article builds an argument for changing the terms on which the arts in peace building are evaluated, and for a shift in the dominant narrative on Janakaraliya which collapses its sophisticated aesthetics to a binary of Sinhala–Tamil ethnic relations. The logic of this revision would be fuller acknowledgement of the troupe's aesthetic forms and styles as a more robust signifier of the pluralities that constitute Sri Lankan society today and therefore of post-war reconciliation itself.