Sri Lankan Kandyan Dance Troop at Sidmouth
From the collection of
From the collection of
Dance, music and celebrations at the Folklore Festival
The stage is set at the twenty-sixth International Folklore Festival at Sidmouth in Devon, with a preview into the festivities introduced by TV reporter Lawrie Quayle. A lively yet brief performance of Sri Lankan Kandyan dance, drum music, families playing - all make for an unforgettable summer's day!
TV reporter Lawrie Quayle introduces a preview of the twenty-sixth International Folklore Festival at Sidmouth in Devon. Women perform a Sri Lankan Kandyan dance to drum music. The Kandyan dance is native to the area around Kandy, the last royal capital of Sri Lanka in the central hills and 70 miles away from today’s capital Colombo. The origins of the dance come from the ritual known as Kohomba Kankariya, a traditional Sinhala folk rite for the deity Kohomba Yaka.
From local news to feature film, through home movies and TV documentaries, this collection showcases South Asian Britons in front of and behind the camera. The contribution of colonial troops is illuminated through the earliest newsreels, while hardhitting current affairs programmes highlight the struggles faced in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond. Public information films produced for South Asian audiences feature alongside Hindi-language films made in Britain and interviews with prominent Asian-British figures. A bold wave of British Asian filmmaking in the 1990s is represented through early works by the likes of Gurinder Chadha and Asif Kapadia.