Dancers

  Dancers 

 Chitrasena

What does forty years of dancing mean in Sri Lanka ? With a rich and variegated tradition stretching back to several hundreds, if not to over a two thousand years, with a tradition of such antiquity within which whole communities passed down an uncontaminated art from generation to generation, there must have lived many a master of the dance who could look back to his fortieth year of dancing with pride and retrace his rhythmic steps with immense satisfaction to the first day, when he stood at the dandikanda (barre) as a little lad and decided to be a Guru some day. To any dancer, forty years is a remarkable achievement, an occasion for celebration. To the dancer in Sri Lanka, it is even more - a test of exceptional loyalty and dedication to his art, a trial of unrelenting perseverance in the face of poverty and social scorn, a great triumph over the severest odds, a tremendous personal victory.

But with Chitrasena, forty years of dancing  is something positively and intensely more
significant, more important. Undoubtedly for him too, the completion of this long period carries a sense of personal achievement, bringing memories of struggle and triumph of quest and conquest of bitter and happy days, of lean and prosperous years.
But these achievements and trimphs are now no more individual and personal. Here, at the end of these forty years, Chitrasena emerges in our retrospective vision, an important artist in an important epoch - whose forty years are now become an indelible part of a country's cultural history; whose personal achievements are now, inseparable elements in a nation's aesthetic and emotional life. His trimphs have so much composed our present, that his failures too must now be reckoned as inalienable from our national destiny. If ever we as a nation, have the capacity to evaluate our own artists, we have now come to a stage,... or rather, Chitrasena has brought us to a stage, when we shall have to speak of his successes and defeats as ours