(pix courtesy Malaka Premasiri) On April 1, the crowd at the Lionel Wendt gallery kept buzzing, ‘What do you think it meant?’ They had been captivated by Mesh Academy of Dance’s Deconstruct the Embody but were struggling to make head or tail of it. Different ideas floated amongst people: some believed the dance had a storyline about escape, others ...
I know people mean well when they ask these questions at a funeral. I know it’s a weird combination of genuine concern, not knowing what to say but needing to express care somehow, that ends up in a cocktail of awkwardness and discomfort for everyone. But really, it’s harder being on the other side of the question, the receiving end. ...
On the dirt road from Wellawaya to Buttala, there stood two little shacks in a small expanse of garden. One would often spot an elderly gentleman there dressed in a sarong and simple baniyan. Peering out at the world from his characteristically oversized glasses, Fr. Mike, as he was referred to affectionately, seemed like any other villager from Buttala, an ...
Demons in the plural Demons in Paradise is neither the only creative work that provides a critical introspection of the Tamil community, nor the only one that constructs the image of the perpetrators of violence as otherworldly ‘demons’. In 2014, Neervai Ponnaiyan, a veteran Sri Lankan Tamil writer, published a collection of short stories called Devils and Demons. The stories ...
The Distance between the Wendt and University: A Review of Jehan Aloysius’s Rag … ලයනල් වෙන්ට් රඟහලේ සිට සරසවියට ඇති දුර: ජෙහාන් ඇලොය්සියස් ගේ ‘රැග්’ ගීත නාට්යය This review of Rag: the Musical is absolutely brilliant and articulates spectacularly (and bilingually) the poor treatment of ragging culture in the musical. Only issue is that it fails to address the absolutely cringey ...
