For my third visit to the archives of ‘A Life Less Ordinary’, where I talk to interesting thinkers and doers from Asia, it’s Venuri Perera. Venuri is a Sri Lankan performance artist, choreographer, curator and educator whose work has been shown around the planet from Colombo to Berlin. She is trained in Kandyan dance, a striking traditional Sri Lankan danceform that up until the 60s was only performed by men (more on the context of females in Kandyan dance, as explained by Venuri, here).
In 2014, at the opening performance of the first Colomboscope arts festival in Sri Lanka, Venuri performed a ritual, ‘Kesel Maduwa’, reimagining elements of traditional Sinhala Buddhist healing ceremonies. As a kid who grew up with some exposure to these types of rituals on summer holidays to Sri Lanka, I found her ritual seductive, captivating, even shocking (further reading on ‘Kesel Maduwa’ here). And while I didn’t get all the nuance in the performance or the social critique, I got enough. I along with the rest of the local and foreign audience were gripped for the entire ritual, about 30 minutes long, which grew and grew in intensity. She was brilliant.
Naturally, she was on my guest wish list when planning for my first season of A Life Less Ordinary, centred around Sri Lankan thinkers, artists, entrepreneurs and more. And she graciously agreed to meet with me and my co-host Tanya when we reached out!
Our chat covered a lot, from her approach to performing, the early struggles of building her education and career, and Vipassana meditation. I would love to catch up with her to see how her ideas, art and activism has evolved since we last spoke in 2017. @roadsideninja on IG is the best place to find out more about Venuri Perera. I feel so fortunate to have had chatted to such a bold, creative, unflinching mind.
Photo credit: Venuri Perera, I dance for , Colomboscope 2019 by Ruvin de Silva. Source: https://www.artforum.com/events/colomboscope-244879/