Ruhanie Perera is a performer and researcher in performance and culture based in Sri Lanka. Her most recent work as a performer includes Life Streaming (Hikkaduwa ‘10, presented at LIFT London; Festival Aan de Werf, Utrecht, Netherlands; Boulevard, Hertogenbosch, Netherlands and Bochum, Germany), a bedtime story (Colombo ‘08), FORUM (Colombo ‘08) and voicing silence (Galle Literary Festival ‘08). And as a performer, in Sri Lanka she has toured Galle, Kandy and Jaffna and her international experience includes performances at the State Drama Festival organized by the National School of Drama, Delhi (Delhi and Calcutta ‘07), the Hindu Drama Festival (Chennai ‘07), Rangayana Mysore (‘05) and the Women for Peace in South Asia theatre festival (Lucknow, Varanasi and Bhubaneswar ‘05).
Her research/publications includes ‘shattering silence: An Examination of the Work of Sri Lankan Playwright Ruwanthie de Chickera, her place in and contribution to the English Theatre in Sri Lanka 2005-2008’ in Continuities and Departures: Essays on Postcolonial Sri Lankan Women’s Creative Writing in English (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa, 2011) and was presented in March ‘08 at the Women’s Research and Education Centre. ‘Perspectives on marital rape,’ focuses on forum theatre performance and was presented at the Eleventh National Convention of Women’s Studies in Colombo in April 2008.
Her current research areas include communities in performance, storytelling as an artistic and political device and sociocultural contexts in aesthetic practice.
She holds an MA in Performance and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2009 and has trained in contemporary performance technique and performance making. She directed Letters in December ’10 for the Dance Platform organized by Goethe Institut, the German Cultural Centre. She currently works as a visiting lecturer in Drama and English Literature at the University of Colombo, University of Peradeniya and the Centre for Research, Education and Social Transformation in Kerala, India.
Jake Oorloff is a theatre practitioner based in Sri Lanka. In 2011 he was awarded the Sunethra Bandaranaike Trust Grant and presented My Other History as part of (Un)making time- a project to support new theatre-making. Earlier this year he directed The Gaza Mono-Logues performed by young actors in Colombo, which was a collaboration with Ashtar Theatre, Palastine. It was later performed as the 67th Annual Commemoration Performance of Dr. Neelan Tiruchelvam on invitation by the Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust. In ‘10, he directed The War Reporter in collaboration with the Goethe Institut, the German Cultural Centre. As a playwright, Oorloff was commissioned for the script Sifting Point by the UNDP to mark the launch of the Asia-Pacific Human Development Report in March ‘10. In ’09 the UNHCR commissioned Scars as part of the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the declaration of Human Rights in Colombo. Past productions include A Bedtime story ‘08. Voicing Silence performed at the Galle Literary Festival’08, and In a Shadow ‘07.
Recent work as a performer includes, Letters (‘10), If I were you (‘10) Looking through my earphones (Galle Literary Festival ‘09), Checkpoint – three strangely normal plays (Colombo ’06), (Delhi, Calcutta and Chennai ‘07), Voicing Silence (Colombo ‘06) and Stories from around the Dinner Table (Colombo ‘06).
Past collaborations with artists include Australian Dramatist/Researcher Matthew Tyne with whom he applied theatre in a series of workshops for youth of sexually diverse communities in Colombo. He is also the co-founder of Bolo Theatre, a theatre company that evolved out of this effort. He worked with Dries Verhoeven, an artist based in the Netherlands on his theatre project Life Streaming (Hikkaduwa ’10, presented at LIFT London, Festival Aan de Werf, Netherlands; Boulavard Netherlands and Bochum Germany) and Janine Sharp – actress/theatre practitioner co-conducting a series of workshops for applying theatre in classrooms for English Teachers in collaboration with the British Council and the Ministry of Education.
Oorloff, works with non-actors to produce theatre and collaborates with the Center for Research and Education for Social Transformation (CREST) in Kerala, India, where he works with youth of ‘backward communities’ to produce theatre. Through the collaboration with CREST he has conducted workshops and devised performances with Tibetan youth in exile in India via the Foundation for Universal Responsibility. He currently works on the visiting faculty of CREST.
