Blog Archives

The Jungle and the Sea, follow-up to Counting and Cracking, uses theatre as a safe space to discuss Sri Lankan civil war – By Hannah Reich and Kim Jirik Source : abc When S. Shakthidharan first told his mum that he wanted to look into their family history, she quickly shut him down, telling him: “That is a very stupid idea.” She then refused to talk to him about it again. Anandavalli, a Tamil dancer, fled Sri Lanka in 1983 at the outbreak of the civil war, settling with her family in Western Sydney. It was 2008 and, faced with a wall of silence from his mum, Shakthidharan (also known as Shakthi) secretly turned to a grand-aunt in London. “She was the first person in my family to open up to me and it became a waterfall of information. I started learning about all these things that I’d never known. It ...