By arts editor HELEN MUSA

Veteran Bharatanatyam dancer Anandavalli never imagined she would spend almost three hours on stage wearing a blindfold.

Nor did she imagine that, after a lifetime devoted to dance, she would be cast in the central role of a major Australian play.

But in The Jungle and the Sea, written by S. Shakthidharan (her son) and directed with Eamon Flack, she has found  the role of a lifetime.

The play, which premiered at Belvoir in 2022 and comes to Canberra next week, follows one Tamil family through the decades of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Built from real-life testimonies and drawing on both the Mahābhāratha and taking the characters’ moral stance from Sophocles’ Antigone, it centres on Gowrie, a mother who responds to an act of devastating violence by blindfolding herself, refusing to look upon the world again until her family is reunited.

When I catch up with Anandavalli, whom I have reviewed many times in the past, she recalls receiving an unexpected phone call from Belvoir artistic director Eamon Flack in 2019.

“I thought he wanted to talk about Counting and Cracking (the play which this year won Shakthi the $250,000 international  Windham-Campbell Prize for drama),” she says. “Instead, he asked me to play Gowrie. I told him, ‘I’m not an actor, I’m a dancer.'”

Reading the script changed everything.

“I realised Gowrie had been written with me in mind, the dancing, the family and my own unresolved relationship with my motherland, Sri Lanka.”

Although she still directs her dance company Lingalayam, Anandavalli says teaching, especially young children, has become increasingly demanding, while collaborations in theatre have opened new creative possibilities.

The role has demanded plenty from her physically as well. In the original production she spent almost three hours navigating a constantly revolving stage while blindfolded.

“The revolve still moves, although it stops when I’m dancing,” she tells me. “Getting on and off it isn’t quite as hard now, but walking on it blindfolded is still a challenge at 68.”

Yet she believes the role arrived at exactly the right time.

“Five or ten years ago I probably wouldn’t have done it. I thought I’d be concentrating on being a grandmother, but I don’t think I was ever meant to become just a babysitter.”

For Anandavalli, Gowrie’s blindfold is far more than a theatrical device. Like Queen Gandhari in the Mahābhāratha, she believes the character chooses not to witness the destructive path of those she loves.

“She doesn’t want to see the folly of her children. She doesn’t want to see their evil.”

Her understanding of the role has deepened since the play premiered.

Having left Sri Lanka during an earlier period of unrest, she admits she once felt detached from the country’s long civil war. That changed after a five-week visit home, where she met women who had endured unimaginable violence.

“They never asked for pity. They only wanted to live. Every night now I carry those mothers with me onto the stage.”

Wearing a blindfold, she says, has also changed the way she performs.

“When you lose one sense, the others become stronger. Blindness gives you another way of hearing what’s happening around you.”

Despite repeatedly insisting, “I’m just a dancer,” Anandavalli is full of praise for Flack’s visually spare production, its seamless ensemble cast and the live South Indian Carnatic music that underpins the action.

“It’s a traumatic story, but it’s also full of humour and family. At the end of the day there’s something beautiful about it.”

“It’s every mother’s story.”

The Jungle and the Sea, The Playhouse, August 6 to 9.

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