In conversation with Indika Senanayake...
Indika Senanayake is a New York based theatre practitioner from Sri Lanka. She has taken part in many productions such as The Jackson Heights Trilogy, Serendib and Miss Witherspoon to name a few. She holds a MFA from Columbia University where she was a Dean’s Fellow and a BA from Mount Holyoke College. Indika was awarded a Theatre Communications Global Connections / On the Road grant and fellowship for her project of co-producing and performing in the recent Sri Lankan production of Villa, directed by the Chilean playwright himself, Guillermo Calderon. Our Women at Work cover story today gives us a little glimpse into Indika’s incredibly busy but extremely wonderful life.
When you were a child, did you ever think about acting?
I did indeed think of acting as a child, and performed all through my childhood and adolescence in Sri Lanka at school and elsewhere. My earliest performances were at home, with my dramatic family. However, becoming a professional actor was outside the realm of my imagining: during my formative years, no one I knew counted acting as their livelihood or as their guiding passion. Acting was something I did because I loved it.
Where did you school? What was school life like?
I had the good fortune of switching schools at the age of 13 to Ladies’ College, where the arts and creativity were given pride of place. I had an inspiring literature teacher there, the late Mrs. Indrani Seneviratne, who was perhaps the first person to have real faith in my ability to make a difference in the world through art. My undergraduate education at Mount Holyoke College, opened up my vision of the world, gave me the broad intellectual base of a liberal arts degree, and provided me with a strong community of game-changing women. At Columbia University, I had the opportunity to study intensively with inspiring professors, including Kristin Linklater, a legendary Scottish voice-teacher whose method of Freeing the Natural Voice opened the door to a new realm of expressive possibilities for me.
Did your family support you going into acting?
The support and belief of my family has been integral to my trajectory as an artist. I count myself very lucky to have parents who encouraged me to find my own path, onstage and off.
What do you enjoy the most when you are on stage? Any memorable moments?
What I find most exciting about performing in the theatre is the immediacy of exchange between actor and audience. My most memorable performance experiences have usually involved things not going as planned: whether that be audience members having surprising reactions, technical elements going awry, or fellow performers completely forgetting their lines. One night, during one of the climactic scenes in a play, in which a battle raged between rival monkey-factions, my monkey-puppet’s head somehow detached from its body. Onstage, in the heat of battle, I had to somehow execute the precise choreography of the scene without losing my head – either literally or metaphorically!
Why did you initiate that Villa should be staged in Sri Lanka?
Initiating a production of Villa in Sri Lanka was a new experience for me as a theatre-maker. Villa grapples with the complexity of remembering and appropriately memorializing the brutalities of an authoritarian regime in Chile. The play is about creating a space for memory, about reckoning with peace when reconciliation is elusive. In it, three women find themselves on a commission that will decide the future of a notorious Pinochet-era torture site, Villa Grimaldi in Santiago. They debate, argue, vote, and re-vote, grappling with the difficulty of raising a monument to the real and complex recent history of their nation. When I first read the play, I was immediately struck by its potential relevance for contemporary Sri Lanka. While the particulars of the play’s situation are unique to Chile, the struggle at its heart, about how to look back with honesty and courage in order to better look ahead, resounds in fascinating ways in a Sri Lankan context.
How was your experience of acting and co-producing in Villa?
The schedule for the Sri Lankan production of Villa was condensed, by any standards. Guillermo Calderon was in Sri Lanka for two weeks to direct the play and was assisted very ably by Seth Powers. We were fortunate to have the unwavering support of Mario Gomez and ICES. The actresses were outstanding in their commitment to the project, contributing their considerable talent and intellectual and artistic rigor. I could not have hoped for a stronger or more joyful ensemble with which to work. Our audiences rounded out the collaboration with keen attention and interest.
In the past women in the theatre were unheard of. Do you think that women in theatre are being widely acknowledged now?
Women are certainly more widely recognized for their work in theatre than ever before but also yes, there is always room for more improvement. In the US, the majority of plays performed at prominent theatres are still written, directed, and produced by men. But there is a strong awareness of this trend, a charting of the numbers to track any changes in this gender gap, and funding and artistic programming initiatives that seek to address this issue. In Sri Lanka, there are now several women running theatres, in the vanguard of artistic change, and that’s a good thing.
Interviewed by Mariam Sadique
Photographs by Pradeep Dilrukshana
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