“In the 1980s, only hotels had nightclubs and packed a crowd of 300 on weekends. The biggest bands to visit were The Wailers or Kool & and the Gang,” says Russell Fernando, a renowned music performer and owner of RnB, one of Colombo’s leading nightclubs. A stalwart of the scene, Russell has lived in Colombo since before the civil war in Sri Lanka. “Now we have so many concerts lined up. The future’s looking good.”
At the Electric Peacock Festival (EPF) on the lawns of the Taj Samudra, a stone’s throw away from the beach, as DJ Yoda’s breakbeats blitzes the air, it is easy to forget that merely six years ago Colombo was plagued by military check posts and sporadic bomb attacks.
“We grew up during the war,” says Leah Bazalgette, co-founder of EPF. “We lost so many friends and family members.”
As the festival picks up tempo, expatriates and Sri Lankans dance their cares away. Kids don face paint, costumes and fairy wings. The Grammy-award winning Mark Ronson pumps his arms in the air as he plays to a thousand-strong audience.
In the last year Shreya Ghoshal, Sean Paul, Enrique Iglesias, and Lionel Richie have all enthralled ecstatic crowds here. The festival has also seen Basement Jaxx, Tinie Tempah and Chicane in past editions. From the look of things, Colombo is shaking the war off in style.
Since the end of the Civil War between the separatist LTTE and the Sri Lankan army in 2009, business and tourism has seen steady growth. The increase in post-war infrastructure and real estate deals, resulting in billion-dollar highways and multi-million dollar hotels across the island-nation, has been followed by arts and culture festivals in Sri Lanka. Colombo Art Biennale, Galle Literary Festival, Colomboscope, Jaffna Music Festival, and the film festivals in Colombo and Jaffna are just a few of them. Audience numbers vary — the largest averaging at 5,000, save for solo acts like Sean Paul’s that gather double the crowd — but festival organisers aren’t worried.
“First, we want to foster a culture of festivals,” says Tasha Marikkar, co-founder of EPF. “That will take some time, but we want to get it right.”
Literary display The Galle Literary Festival, the brainchild of Anglo-Australian denizen Geoffery Dobbs, stands out because of its tidy line-up of celebrated authors. Gore Vidal, Tom Stoppard and Richard Dawkins have held court here. Amitav Ghosh, Anuradha Roy, Jeet Thayil and Samanth Subramaniam will speak at the festival in 2016.
“Initially, the aim was to reconcile with the repercussions of the war through literature and the arts by voicing thoughts and having open debate. Now we want to move forward – not by forgetting the past, but by concentrating on showcasing everything that our beautiful country has to offer,” says Amrita Pieris, Director of the 2016 edition.
When the Galle Literary Festival took a break for three years, the Goethe Institut and the British Council sprang into action to launch Colomboscope — a multi-disciplinary event featuring art, music, film and literature. Curators Menika Van Der Poorten and Natasha Ginwalla gathered a host of international, Indian and Sri Lankan artists and speakers for the 2015 edition.
The skeletal innards of the bombed Rio Hotel and cinema complex fittingly housed charged art, music and video installations. The scars of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom remain evident even today, and each year the festival’s theme has, unsurprisingly, explored war, identity and geography.
In 2015, the Rio also hosted the Pettah Interchange, an electronic dance festival that was co-founded by Asvajit, one of Sri Lanka’s star exponents. Jan Ramesh de Saram, cultural coordinator, Goethe Institut, calls the Pettah Interchange an intense musical experience based on the Berlin model of reviving derelict spaces, but says what is important is that this might be one of the few self-sufficient events.
Self-sufficiency is a term that crops up repeatedly during interactions with festival organisers.
Money matters “Funding for the arts was easier during the war and immediate aftermath,” says Colomboscope’s Van Der Poorten. “Several international organisations and embassies were keen to fund cultural dialogues when the country was under duress. Sadly, there is a lot less of that going on these days.”
On the subject of funding, Goethe Institut’s de Saram is blunt: “Elections and new governments create a reluctance amongst officials of all institutions and foreign missions to approve anything.”
Festival organisers feel the government must step up efforts to support cultural initiatives. Petra Raymond, the newly-appointed Director of the Goethe Institut, points out that artists lack governmental support for everything from venues to creative direction. But something that has changed is that artists aren’t being scrutinised like before, she adds. “There is a freedom of expression in Sri Lanka that I haven’t always experienced in other countries,” she says. Raymond has worked in Syria and Pakistan where discussions on movies, texts or ideas are held while hiding in living room or libraries. “For 10-15 years, we had worked with uncertainty and a kind of trepidation,” says Jagath Weerasinghe, co-founder of Theertha, an instrumental contemporary art collective. “But now, as an artist, I have a real sense of a free psychological space. I can do what I want and I know I am not going to be taken into custody for it. That feels damned good!” he says.
During a Theertha performance in 2015, two artists sported electric halos, which are widely seen on Buddha idols around the country, and walked near a temple. While there were vehement objections from passers by, as well as police questioning, the performance itself was not stopped.
A real marker of the recent tide of freedom and openness in Sri Lanka was when in 2015 the international film festivals in Colombo and Jaffna screened movies with Tamil protagonists. Muttrupulliyaa…? dealt with the plight of Sri Lankan Tamils after the war and Dheepan , the winner of the Palm D’Or at Cannes, traced the life of a former Tamil Tiger looking for normalcy. It is widely surmised that neither of the films could have been screened even a year prior.
As post-war Sri Lanka finds its groove while running and managing events by successfully negotiating with different governments and financiers, a host of indomitable wills keep the island’s contemporary arts and culture scene firmly on track. Small but consistent followings continue to bolster events such as the Centre for Performing Arts in Jaffna, I Love Una, Hikkafest and SunFest, and many more scheduled for 2016.
“The political situation has changed for the better and people aren’t hiding in their houses,” says Raymond. “You can feel the positivity in the atmosphere. Can you point to another country that has had such a start, or demonstrates such optimism?”
Govind Dhar is a journalist, currently based in Sri Lanka