Navigating Strange Spaces: Sri Lankan Performers in Colonial Exhibitions  

Performers always navigate spaces. Focusing on Sri Lankan dancers and performers, this paper discusses how dancers had to navigate strange spaces when brought to colonial exhibitions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These spaces include more public spaces such as human zoos, menageries, circuses, world fairs. However, at the same time, they also had to navigate more intimate spaces such as dinner tables, bedrooms, boats, wagons, where they had strange encounters with their customs, traditions, identities, relationships, and aspirations. I traveled to Europe and the US as a Sri Lankan student and a dancer between 2006 and 2018. Based on my experiences, bodily knowledge, and critical reflections, I read and historicize the experiences of Sri Lankan performers brought to colonial exhibitions between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I mainly follow a story of an elephant trainer named Epi Vidane, who traveled for a colonial exhibition, ended up staying and making a family in Germany. Tracing Sri Lankan performers’ histories and personal stories, I demonstrate the complexities of various spaces that Sri Lankan performers had to go through. On the one hand, bizarre, violent, and problematic animal-human exhibitions should be critiqued. On the other hand, some performers were adventurous to survive in strange spaces and challenged the notion that they were just victims of colonial exhibitions. 

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Bio

Sudesh Mantillake is a dancer, researcher and an educator. He received his BA degree from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, his MSc from the University of Lugano, Switzerland, and his PhD from the University of Maryland in the USA. He teaches in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka.