RUWANTHIE DE CHICKERA & PIUMI WIJESUNDARA

Interview with Ruwanthie de Chickera & Piumi Wijesundara

The conversation with Ruwanthie and Piumi was an intellectually rich space, full of precise detail and ideological nuance, set in the context of decades of practical theatre experience in Sri Lanka and in global contexts.  Ruwanthie has been the Artistic Director of Stages Theatre Group since its founding in 2000, with the intermittent 25-year civil war in Sri Lanka providing the backdrop for the first half of the company’s history. Ruwanthie’s dramaturgical craft and her poetically sparse capturing of human nature has won her international recognition and invitations to work around the world, but she has also earned repute for her investment into the training and development of young artists in Sri Lanka, as well as working alongside state actors to help set transformative social policy.

There were so many directions that this interview could have taken; speaking with Ruwanthie and Piumi was full of the possibilities for so many further thought-provoking conversations about the power and purpose of art. Here Ruwanthie speaks compellingly about the inception of the project Dear Children, Sincerely, but also passionately advocates for the wider project of personal memory to be a credible and forceful historical record, and a recognised step in preventing further political and social conflict. We also see Piumi attesting to the ways in which Ruwanthie’s support has created new pathways of possibility for young artists in the country, and the potential she now sees for herself as a performer and artist.

SRI LANKA PERFORMANCE

Girls at Checkpoints was a coruscating and deeply unsettling examination of sexual violence in conflict, showing how warfare enables and fosters the assault of women as tactical strategy or as a by-product of the brutalisation that infects all members of the community. This performance saw Piumi Wijesundara and Ashling O’Shea, supported by Ewout D’Hoore, alternately play two journalists aboard a bus held at a military checkpoint, two little girls routinely abused by soldiers on their way to school, and a retelling of the infamous story of Krishanti Kumaraswamy, a 19 year old Tamil school girl who was raped and killed by six Sri Lankan army soldiers as she returned home from sitting her first A-Level exam paper…

The assured and pared-down writing of Ruwanthie de Chickera of Stages Theatre captured the age and vulnerabilities of the characters, cleverly diverting us away from the brutality of the attack on the younger characters by letting the assault on the Sri Lankan journalist stand for the trauma inflicted on all of the women in, and beyond, the story.