Embodied Witnessing: Performance Expressions as Acts of Citizenship within the Sri Lankan Context

Abstract

This article considers acts of citizenship and the dynamics of witnessing that are negotiated through performance, using as its point of departure the Viratham puja (offering) made by activist Sandya Ekneligoda in January 2022, which, as this article argues, is both an enacted memorial and an act of protest. Analyzed in juxtaposition are also the embodied practices of performance artist Janani Cooray and activist Swasthika Arulingam, which are useful to consider in terms of the articulation of performance as a socially engaged practice and their implications in locating the artist’s/activist’s intentions. Under discussion, the embodied practices analyzed here explore how witnessing takes place through expressions of performance that interpret, enact, and unsettle notions of citizenship by: encountering the materiality of the body in performance that enacts “citizenship” through strategic practices of remembering; the artist’s/activist’s intentions embedded in such embodied practices as performance art, ritual, and song, as read through their distinctive repertoires of staged embodied act(s) that may also be interpreted as acts of citizenship; and the positing of citizenship as a “domain of struggle” that is creatively advanced, where the citizen as subject, as political being, is produced and reproduced through the structures of performance/embodied practice and their material afterlives.