Stages Theatre Group is a Sri Lankan theatre company that is focused on creating original productions which entertain audiences while addressing serious social issues.

Dhow Foundation provided Stages with seed funding to collect, collate and script the stories that were to form the basis of the “Dear Children, Sincerely…” (DCS) project. This project focuses on conducting interviews with members of the generation that were born in the 1930s and shares these experiences through theatre with present day youth. The performances consists of short 15 minute monologues that capture the lives of the elders who were interviewed and also longer productions that portray the larger themes that can be extracted from these stories.

People born in the 1930s in Sri Lanka bear witness to the country’s economic and social progress post independence. This is a generation that was born under British colonial rule and who lived through the granting of independence, the rise of communism, race riots, youth insurrenctions and a 30-year civil war.

The purpose of the DCS project is to encourage senior citizens to look back critically and reflectively on their lives and the country’s historic journey. Stages Theatre Group also views the project as a way of understanding how memory works – “what people retain, how they retain it, what gets carried on and how histories are built or why they are erased”.

Performance pieces devised under the DCS Project have been staged in Sri Lanka, Rwanda, India, Ireland and the UK. They have been adopted by ASHTAR – the Theatre International Youth Festival in Palestine and also at the the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.