More from the Circus
Photo courtesy - Twiggy Wijesinghe
Picture a Greek style amphitheatre with a tropical twist. That’s one way to describe the Nuga Sevana at the Cathedral on Baudaloka Mawatha. It’s where the Travelling Circus has been camping out lately, going through their paces for the show starting there on the 26th of November, going on till the 30th.
The open-air Nuga Sevana is spectacular and intimate at the same time. The massive Banyan tree under which the stage is built and its long hanging vines give it grand proportions, but a capacity of about 300 people sitting in close proximity to the action make for a cosy night at the theatre.
And so the scene is set for Mind Adventure’s 10th anniversary production – The Travelling Circus. A play devised from MASii’s short story ‘The Boy Who Spoke in Numbers’, The Travelling Circus is a quirky take on the ethnic divide, the price of goods, collateral damage of war and what it’s like to be different. The cast of 10 versatile actors take on the roles of thousands of people who find themselves on various sides of the ‘Civil War of Lies’. The hour long performance follows the Boy Who Spoke in Numbers through fortune and misfortune.
Along the way he befriends a constantly complaining cow, has a run-in with a lying lizard and learns about life from a kind uncle who never speaks. Meanwhile the important aunty at the counter runs her camp with an iron fist although the mad uncle and his mynah manage to shake things up a bit. For the tricky trades and recruitment agents who blend into the refugees and soldiers, it’s business as usual.
Continuing the company’s tradition of exploring alternative genres of theatre, The Travelling Circus is an experiment in Devised Theatre. In this form of theatre there is no script but a performance woven from an idea and a collective input of stories, experiences, skills and wit. It’s where individual flair meets the cooperative spirit in story telling.
The themes explored in the play are universal, making The Travelling Circus suitable for the whole family because it was initially meant to be a children’s story. The author, Mike Masilamani (MASii) is perhaps better known for his long association with the dark art of advertising but is fast making a name for himself as a writer of stories and poems with a particularly eccentric edge.
Tickets for the play are on sale at the Wendy Whatmore Academy at no 5, 3th Lane, Colombo 3 on week days between 8 am and 4.30 pm and also at the venue on performance days.
Related posts:
- The Birth Of The Traveling Circus When the Mind Adventures Theatre Company sat around to decide what to put on for their 10th anniversary, one thing was clear, it had to...
- Mind Adventures Brings The Travelling Circus To Town Ten years ago, three young women decided to add a new dimension to English theatre in Sri Lanka, feeling that an alternative was necessary to...
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