Asitha Tennekoon

Since moving to Toronto in the fall of 2014, Sri Lankan tenor Asitha Tennekoon has firmly established himself as a versatile singer, performing in a wide range of repertoire. He won the Dora Award for Best Male Performance as Paul in Tapestry Opera’s Rocking Horse Winner and earned glowing reviews as Gernando in Haydn’s L’Isola disabitata with Voicebox: Opera in Concert.

Asitha recently starred in Edith Smyth’s The Boatswain’s Mate with Opera 5, and in 2018 debuts as Polidoro in Scarlatti’s Erminia with Opera Lafayette in Washington and New York.

Asitha shared the stage with soprano Erin Wall in Songmasters Recital Series and has appeared as a soloist with Toronto Bach Festival, Theatre of Early Music, Ottawa Bach Choir and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra.

Twitter: @asithatennekoon
Instagram: asithatennekoon

Transcript

Welcome to episode 119 of Stageworthy, I’m your host Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more. If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, I would like to remind you, as I often do, that subscribing is the best way to make sure you never miss an episode of Stageworthy.

And there are, as I always say, but it is true, there are some great episodes coming up, so trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to miss them. So make sure that you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or Google Music, or on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, so that you can get every episode of Stageworthy delivered right to your device. And if you want to drop me a line, you can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at stageworthypod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. And if you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Instagram and Twitter at philrickaby, and my website is philrickaby.com. My guest this week is Asitha Tennekoon, who appears in Canadian stages The Overcoat starting March 27th and running until April 14th at Toronto’s Bluma Appel Theatre.

So I come from a theatre background. I don’t have a whole lot of an opera background. I’ve seen a couple.

But one of the things that I’m always fascinated by are the things that draw people to the performance art. And so what was your first exposure to opera? And how did you decide that that’s what you were going to do? So I didn’t see my very first full-scale opera production until I was 22 when I started. I started my undergrad a little bit later at Indiana University.

But the way I kind of got into it was when I was younger, I started off singing in the chapel choir at that school I went to in Sri Lanka. So I grew up in Sri Lanka, I started singing in the chapel choir there. And that’s where I really started to love vocal music, was choral music for the most part, Anglican tradition, all of that.

And that’s where I first realized that music and singing was going to be a big part of my life. And then when I was 15, my mom forced me to take voice lessons, private voice lessons. Basically, I was kicking and screaming.

I was like, no, I don’t want to do it. But she basically put her foot down and said I had to. And I was like, OK, fine, I’ll go in for one lesson, and that’s it.

And she was like, fine, go in for one lesson, see if you like it, whatever. And so I go in, and the teacher whom I went to, she had seen me perform at a school event, basically, and had spoken to my mom and said, if you ever want to send me for lessons, I’d be happy to help out. She heard me.

And on that day, she took out an application form for the concerto competition that the Symphony Orchestra in Sri Lanka was holding. And it was the day before the application deadline. And I was like, sure, fill it out.

And I enjoyed the lesson, but I still didn’t have an idea of, OK, I’m going to keep doing this. So I was like, if you want to fill it out, fill it out. And I kept going for lessons.

I ended up winning that competition, the vocal category of that competition. I was 15 at this point. And it kind of took off from there, as far as solo singing was concerned.

And I really haven’t stopped doing it since then. Do you have a sense of what your mom, what your mother saw, that made her decide that even though this child says that he doesn’t want to do this, that I’m going to make him go to this lesson? I played piano from the time I was six years old, which again, was thanks to my mom’s influence. And because she’s a piano teacher herself, but she was smart enough to refuse to teach me because she knew that I’d just be a tough student, her being my mother and all that.

But I think the feedback… Oh, hello. Some extra sound effects. Yeah.

The feedback she had received from people who’d heard me sing probably encouraged her and gave her an idea of, okay, he has a good natural gift that she would have liked me to develop. And I think that’s what kind of pushed her to put her foot down. And she also comes from a very musical background herself.

Like I said, she’s a piano teacher and she was involved with that growing up. And I think for her part too, she had to work hard herself and fend for herself in a way to do all of the piano exams and all that she’d done. So she’d worked really hard for it.

And I think she appreciated it and she really knew that I wasn’t aware enough to really appreciate whatever gift she saw that I had. If it was your mother teaching you, you would have a very different relationship. Maybe.

Than with a teacher that was not your parent. I think so. Yeah.

So hearing about your going, you went to the contest and then this and the other thing, when did you fall in love with singing? Enough that it was going to become what you would go to study and you would make it your life. Right. It kind of happened in steps.

So the chapel choir I was in, our choral director, Mr. Bartholomew, he was self-taught and he had this amazing approach to how he taught us in the choir itself. He would always use whatever music we were singing and equate it to life events or everyday things that we would do and how we would express the music. He’d always draw from what we saw around.

There was one instance, I don’t know why this is the first thing that comes to my mind, but just outside of the chapel, there was a quadrangle and they would mow the grass on there. And sometimes while we were rehearsing, we’d smell the grass being cut and all that. And he pulled from that and said, this section of the music needs to sound like you’re taking in a breath of that and smelling.

And just different things that resonated with me at the time. He’d been doing it for years. He’s probably one of the most beloved people who was ever taught there.

And he was an English teacher as well. So he had that way with language and he was really influential in my discovering music, but also discovering how to use language in singing and vocalizing as well. Sure.

Where did you think that road was going to take you? You said that you didn’t discover opera until much later. And so how did you discover opera and decide to make that your focus? So I’d sung a few arias from operas in my voice lessons and things like that, but when I finished high school, I took a few years off, a year or so to kind of figure out what I wanted to do. And living in Sri Lanka, being a musician and especially a classical musician, would have been a hard profession to make a living out of there.

So lots of people who are musicians there, they either teach full time or they have other professions, other jobs that that’s their main focus. So I started doing a law degree and I did about a year of it. And a year into it, I decided if I’m going to put in this kind of financial investment into my education, why don’t I try auditioning for a few schools overseas and see what happens if I get in, depending on if I can get some sort of scholarship and things like that.

I was like, I’m going to regret this if I don’t at least try because I know that this is something that’s important to me. My first love, if I had the option to even do it in Sri Lanka, would have been to go straight into music. And I was only doing the law because that was becoming a professional musician wasn’t really an option.

And so I sent an applications audition for five schools in the US and got into Indiana University with an almost full scholarship. So that really opened my eyes to, okay, people kind of see that I’m capable of doing something, obviously. And that encouraged me a lot as well to be like, okay, this is where I’m going to head in.

And we had never had a full scale opera performed in Sri Lanka, at least not during my lifetime up to that point. So when I went in and the first production I watched at Indiana University was Rigoletto. And it’s a massive opera school where they do six to seven productions a year, double cast, four performances each.

So the sets were amazing. The costumes are amazing. I still remember the first thing I saw as soon as the music began with the curtains opening and this really extravagant set.

And yeah, that was definitely a moment I was like, I am where I feel like I really belong. Had you, when you decided you were going to study law, did you have a passion for the law at all? Or was that just the thing that you were supposed to do? It was a topic of interest for me. I think when I finished my education, my high school education, we have advanced level exams.

So we have ordinary level exams. And then after that, for two and a half to three years, you study for your advanced level exams. And I was in the arts stream.

So lots of students in the arts stream end up getting into law or something else connected to the arts even. But law was an option because I knew lots of musicians who were lawyers as well. And I was also part of the debating team in school.

I had done a drama and stuff like that. And debating especially was something that I found exciting and I was really interested in. And I was trying to find, okay, these are my interests.

And this is what I like doing. What is a potential occupation that I could get into in law kind of made sense for that reason. When you started going into, when you got to university, is there something that surprised you about the way that they taught singing? Was there something, a lesson that you had to learn or things that you had to unlearn? There was a lot.

My first teacher there, Brian Horn, he was so instrumental with kind of building up my technique. Because at that point, I’d just been singing and not really thinking a lot about technique. And he really broke it down for me and built my technique from scratch.

There wasn’t a whole lot I had to unlearn, but applying certain things, thinking about things in a different way, thinking about sensations, where are my voices coming from? Where do I feel it resonate? Understanding that what I’m hearing while I’m singing is not the same thing that someone else is hearing. So there was a lot of that that I had to get my head around. And I think the other side of it was how large the school was and how many singers there were, and hearing all these different voices and all of the… You hear, what was it? I can’t remember how many students there were, but definitely more solo voices I’d heard than ever before in my life.

And even as a tenor, that was where I learned, oh, there’s not just one kind of tenor voice, there’s different facts, if you will, within each voice part too, and trying to figure out, okay, so then where do I fit in? What does that mean for my voice? So there was a lot to learn and there was a lot to explore, but it was a really great environment for that. Cool. The idea that what you are hearing as you’re singing is not what other people are hearing, I think, is not something that I’ve really thought of before.

And I think a lot of people, because they haven’t been trained in that, have not thought of that. How did that change the way that you sing? Okay. You learn how to go by sensation.

And that’s why for singers, it’s very helpful, obviously, to have your voice teacher, you have your vocal coach, and you have… Sometimes if you’re able to, you have different people to go to for different repertoire. If you’re preparing an Italian piece, you have someone who’s stronger with that, that you go to and sing for. So you start to learn and you record your lessons and all of that.

And so you listen back and try and remember, okay, at this point, what were my sensations? What was I doing with my soft palate? How is that working? Because we use all that space inside for resonance and everything. And learning to trust that, learning to trust the sensations, as opposed to what you’re getting back. And that helps a lot, especially if we’re singing.

So we don’t use microphones or anything when we sing. So if you’re in a hall that is heavily carpeted, and you don’t have any feedback whatsoever, it’s easy to over-sing if that’s what you’re listening for. If you’re listening for the resonance, as opposed to feeling the resonance, that makes a huge difference.

So from Sri Lanka to the US to Canada. I went back home to Sri Lanka for about a year and a half in between. Okay.

So what was the draw for Canada? What brought you back here? So after my undergrad, I went back to Sri Lanka, because I hadn’t been home in about three years. That’s a good reason. Plus, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue on a career path of voice.

Because I think one of the other things I learned in my studying in the States was how difficult the career itself is, and how it takes time to build it up. As a tenor, as a male singer as well, your voice is going to mature a lot later. So can I take that amount of time that’s necessary? Am I just going to be stuck without making anything? I went home to try and figure all that out, to try and figure out what my next step was going to be.

Halfway through my time in Sri Lanka, after the States, was when I decided, okay, yeah, I’m going to go forward with this. I’m going to make it work somehow. I wanted to continue studying, because I wanted to have that background, develop that background of having regular lessons, taking classes.

But I also wanted to be in a place that was more of a city where I could work at the same time in singing. That was one of the reasons I looked at Canada. For whatever reason, I still can’t pinpoint why I didn’t want to go back to the States.

I didn’t look like a place that I wanted to settle down eventually. I was looking at that as well. Yeah, I ended up here at the Royal Conservatory at the Glenn Gould School.

They were extremely generous as well, gave me a full scholarship to be here. So I ended up here. Nice.

A lot of people who listen to the podcast are theater people. We don’t have a lot of visibility into what the life of an opera singer is like, and why you might have had some trepidation or worry about what a career after school might look like. What does that look like? It’s different for everyone.

I’m sure there’s a lot that translates into what theater students go through as well after they’re done. You basically get into the whole hustle of auditioning, auditioning, auditioning, and you end up taking whatever jobs you can take to fill in the time, but then also trying to find the time to practice, trying to find a space to practice in. Very often, you have to have a piano or you have to have a space where sometimes people don’t like it.

If you practice in your apartment, your landlords don’t like it or something like that. So there’s a lot of that that needs to be taken into consideration. Even when you start off with the gigs, a lot of the gigs that you start off with right out of school aren’t the best paying gigs.

If someone is like, I’m doing this thing, would you like to be a part of it? You’re like, yes. Because at that point, you haven’t had any singing projects. You’ve been working at wherever, and then all of a sudden this thing comes up and you’re like, yeah.

It’s a lot of balancing because you want to have a steady income, but you also need to have a job that’s flexible enough where they’re like, okay, yeah, we’ll let you go do this singing project that you want to do. So there’s a lot of those challenges that come into it. So we’re here.

We mentioned earlier, this is the first day of tech for The Overcoat with the Canadian stage. The Overcoat is based on a short story by Nicolai Gogol. I’ve read it.

It was a long time ago that I read it. So it’s about a guy who finds an expensive coat and it changes his life until he loses it, which changes his life again. Is that basically? Yeah, that would basically be it.

Were you familiar with the story of The Overcoat beforehand? Not really. We did a couple of workshops on the piece. So that was my first exposure to it.

But prior to that, no, I didn’t know anything about the story. Were you familiar with any of that? Had you heard of Nicolai Gogol before? I don’t think that’s uncommon. He’s not necessarily known outside of Russia, except to some people who like absurdist things.

And that’s one of the things that he’s kind of known for, is sort of an absurdist look at the world. And you’re playing the manager and also the secretary to the important person in it. Okay.

And what does the manager do in the play? So my arc is basically I’m the manager of this department, but there’s someone else who’s above me as well, the boss, the head of the department, if you will. And for the manager, he’s this guy who’s trying to control everybody, but also trying to make sure people aren’t doing more work than is necessary in the sense of his relationship with Akaki, our protagonist, is that Akaki loves numbers and he loves to work on them, and he does a lot of work at the department. And so my character’s like, you doing all this work makes us look really horrible, so what’s the deal? And so he kind of tries to rule these four people under him with an iron fist, but also is very beholden to the head of the department.

That’s basically the manager’s, how his entrance is set up for the piece. And that’s kind of like, I mean, Gogol was writing during Tsarist Russia at a time of great bureaucracy and where status was everything. So it would have been very important for the manager to make sure that he kept his status and everybody below him could not rise above him, because he could not rise above the people above him.

So it’s very, very tenuous. Exactly. And there’s also a very, going along with that mindset, there’s a very groundhog day feeling to it too.

So you see all these people going about their lives, but it’s always the same day. And everyone has a place in society. Everyone has the things that they are expected to do, nothing more, nothing less than that.

And that to me is why it’s so interesting to see this character, Akaki, who’s the only person on stage you see has a love for something and wants to explore his love for numbers, his love for the work he does. I think it’s set up really well. And I think Morris has done a really great job with how he’s come up with the libretto for it.

And James, the composer, it’s so amazing. I still remember when I was preparing the music for the first workshop, I would listen to it and play it out and be like, there’s some really weird things in here. And you meet Morris for the first time, and you’re like, oh, all the quirks make sense.

And it’s amazing that James, I think, has been able to get in. He’s basically laid out in music form what I feel is going on in Morris’ head when he thinks about how he wanted this scene to go, how he wanted this scene to be, the arc of each scene to go. You mentioned that there have been some workshops of this.

So how long have you been involved in the production? I’ve been involved with this for about, I want to say about a year and a half, on and off. So we do a week of workshops. I think the first workshop that I was involved in, it was just all music.

We just went through the music, sang through it, worked on what could we change, you know, what could be developed even more. And then the second workshop, which must have been a few months or a year after that, was with Morris. And we staged a few scenes.

And then thereafter, it was here that we started working on it as a production itself. The show as a whole started off in 2014 when Morris was a part of Lib Lab with Tapestry Opera. And Lib Lab is this thing they do over the course of a few days where they put librettists together with composers.

They have to come up with a certain number of scenes in a very limited amount of time. And I hope I’m getting the story correct, but Morris was working with a composer who had to leave on the last day or something like that. And James, who was mentoring some of the composers, decided, okay, I’ll step in and work with Morris.

And that’s when Morris was like, I kind of want to see if I can use one of these scenes from the overcoat that he’d done at that point, probably 16 years prior, and work on a libretto for it and see how that scene would come up. And I think it’s the scene between the tailor and his wife and Akaki that they put together. And when they performed it at the end of that Lib Lab session, I think that’s when Michael Mori at Tapestry Opera saw it and he thought this needs to be made into a full-scale opera.

It’s interesting because the first time I heard that Can Stage was doing the overcoat, I remembered the production from 16 years ago, or however long. 20, I think. I think, I’m not sure.

People talking about a very physical piece and everybody I knew just having their minds blown about this just simple choreography and all this movement and things like that. And that seemed to be what people were talking about in my circles anyway. And I wondered when I first heard what the connection was between the two.

And it figures that it’s Morris trying to take it further. So I think that a lot of people don’t think of opera as funny. And Gogol is almost always funny because that’s the best way to show the ridiculousness and the tragedy of Russian life that he’s trying to get across.

Now, of course, there are comedic operas like The Married Wives of Windsor and others. What was your, what’s your reaction to the comedy in the overcoat? I think with the reason, just to take a step back from it, there’s obviously a very stereotypical response from the larger public to opera itself. We always see it as very serious.

Right, exactly. And I think part of that has to do with the fact that there are these people singing, endlessly singing, using huge voices on stage. Often not in English, which is something that they can separate, right? Often not in English.

And also, I think from the part of the performers, sometimes what gets lost is this idea of being present and telling a story on stage. Because there’s so much focus on the singing. And I want to make sure everything coming out of my mouth is perfectly in place, that the resonance is just where it needs to be, that the beauty is there.

And so there’s a lot of that that gets lost, that becomes secondary. Which I think, I’m finding working with a lot of the indie opera companies in Toronto, there’s a lot that they’re focusing on changing that attitude towards it, to making the vocal stuff is always going to be important. But trying to make, you know, telling a story, making sure everyone is present, making sure there’s reactions on stage, which sounds stupid to say.

You know, it’s funny because I remember years ago when I was in theater school, there was a gentleman who was staying in the house that I was in. He’d just come in for a little while, he was working for a little while with the Canadian Opera Company. And he came back from his first day of rehearsal and he was like, well, this guy, he has a great voice, but we are going to have to tell him how to move everything because he is just a rod on stage.

Which I think speaks to how at the time opera was performed without acting, without reacting, and without interaction. This whole thing called park and bark that we use for fun, hopefully for fun in opera, where it’s like, you know, you have this big thing to sing, so you’re going to stand in one place, make sure your body is aligned, everything’s set, and you’re just going to do that. And I don’t think there’s been any room for that in the last so many years, for good reason, because, you know, that’s not interesting.

Because if you’re singing, if you have a beautiful voice, great. If you’re singing and your breath control and all that is amazing, great. But that’s only going to keep an audience captured.

I mean, that’s the kind of thing, like, if I wanted to hear that as an audience member, there are plenty of recordings that I can go to where I can hear that. I think, you know, one of the things that maybe, which is one of the what’s important about the indie opera companies, with an emphasis on this is to change the way that people are thinking about it. I think Toronto’s, that’s one of the things that I see very special about Toronto is the fact that you have all these smaller companies, trying to change what opera is trying to change the boundaries of it.

And especially with this show, like, it’s not just an opera. It’s not just a theatre production. It’s not just a movement piece.

It’s something. The most exciting thing for me about it is that it doesn’t fall into any of these, these boxes. And they’re creating something new.

I mean, you don’t have these large arias, but that one person just sings forever and ever that you would find in opera. There’s all these moving parts. One of the challenges, I think, for the singers has been trying to incorporate all the movement into it, trying to make sure we move on this beat.

It’s funny, Morris mentioned in, in rehearsal, a few days ago, you know, he was like, in the same way that you would learn the perfect note at the perfect time, so that it comes out, you sing the right note at the right time. That’s how specific I want all of you to be with your movements, so that if you’re going to move your hand, it needs to be at this spot that we’ve decided on and to just concentrate on that, which is a new thing for opera singers, I think, is we think about that specificity with the music, but never, not always with our movement. Has that been a difficult thing to incorporate? Not particularly difficult.

It’s a new thing. Wendy’s working on, Wendy Gorling is working with us on a lot of the movement stuff, and she really makes sure we get, we get our movement down exactly where it needs to be. And it’s been really eye-opening for me working with her as well.

And we have a couple of guys who were on the original Overcoat, Colin Heath and Courtney Stevens, just watching them in every scene they’re in. They have no vocal part, they’re in there, but they’re so on the money every single time. And I think that’s one of the exciting things about regular theater that I would love to see come into the opera world.

Did you personally have difficulty with the movement? Not really. You get a note from Wendy or Morris, and then if you’re not on stage or not in the scene, you kind of work on it. While they’re off it, you write it down and you kind of explore different aspects of how you would.

And like every good director, Morris and Wendy have asked us for specific kind of, this is what I want, this is the kind of thing I want you to do, but they’ve also given us the freedom to explore within that. Okay, what’s the best way that would work for me? No, it’s been, if I had to call it a challenge, it’s been the best kind of challenge. And that’s the environment you want to be in.

That’s the kind of environment you want to work in. That’s why this stuff is so exciting is you’re pushing your own boundaries and you’re discovering new things for yourself and having all that feedback from the people who are directing as well. Because it’s difficult to think of this as opera because I think that’s not something that I think of for Canadian stage.

Like when I think of Canadian stage, I don’t think, ah, opera. I don’t even usually even think, ah, musicals. So it sort of makes it an interesting and different aspect of the Canadian stages.

Yeah. I hope, I hope by the end of the run that people will learn to look at, because there is this idea of, okay, this is what opera is. Sure.

And this is very different from any opera that I would ever have attended, but it still falls into that genre in a broad, broader sense as well, while also expanding the boundaries of what opera is. And I hope people go away with it thinking, you know, opera isn’t this thing where we have to dress up and know something about the show before going into it and all that. Yeah.

I would really hope so. I mean, for myself, that’s always been a barrier to, to going to opera is like, it seems all very serious and formal and, and, and that if I don’t have a clean suit that I’ll be staring at what will be the reaction. Like, it’s just so, it seems like a foreign thing.

Yeah. Because I’ve worked with a few of the indie opera companies, I can say, you know, a lot of them do their performances. Sometimes there’s a La Boheme that’s done in a bar or in different settings.

And that’s made it much more accessible. You know, you can go and just wearing jeans and a shirt, get a beer, get in an opera done, sometimes done in English where, you know, they’ve translated it and they’ve done it that way as well. And there’s a lot of that that’s changed that I’m really excited about.

Well, it’s interesting because that’s the, that’s the other thing is, is I’ve heard some people and they don’t even know if this is true, but they’ve said, Oh, you know, even if you speak Italian and you go to an Italian opera, you won’t have a clue what they’re saying and things like that. But in, in translating to English, does that remove the need for sur titles and things like that? Sometimes, um, I think it’s more immediate when you, when you have it in English, of course you, you have there, I’ve come across really bad translations, translated versions, but I’ve come across some very good ones as well. Because if you have the sur titles, sorry, if you have the sur titles, you have, you know, you usually have the entire line while this guy’s still singing it.

So that immediacy of what the does is kind of lost because I already know what he’s going to say. Whereas when it’s in English, you’re not necessarily following the sur titles, even if they have them, because you can actually understand and you can watch what’s going on on stage and that immediacy of being in the exact second, a certain word comes out, you know, you’re there with the person who’s singing. Sure.

Like for example, if you see something like a Stephen Sondheim musical, which often is sung through, um, you don’t need to sign the sur titles because you can follow along and experience it with the characters. You don’t need that. Right.

Yeah. Um, is there something that you’re particularly excited about for an audience to see what you’ve done? This, this thing, is there anything that, that like really excites you? There are so many moments in this piece that I think are very cool. Um, it’s always working.

It’s like a clock. I mean, you, if you’re watching the show from start to finish, there’s something that’s always moving. And I, I find that fascinating, especially as an opera singer, because traditionally it’s okay.

You sing your thing, you’re done. You’re still present in the scene, but whoever else is singing their Aria, they take the spotlight. You don’t do anything to kind of do too much.

Whereas here, you know, someone’s singing, the story’s still going on. There’s a lot happening. There’s so many other characters on stage.

And it’s like, it’s more like watching something happening in reality, but with the frame of the absurdist kind of mind mindset to it as well. Um, but yeah, I’m, I’m excited for people to see how they’ve taken, you know, what was done 20 years ago. And what I love is that they haven’t Morrison, when they haven’t tried to replicate what’s happened, they were extremely clear from day one that they wanted to take it and make it something new, something where they incorporate the music, they incorporate opera singers, they incorporate the movement, but come up with something that is brand new to compared to what they, they did earlier.

That’s true. I mean, I can see the temptation. I mean, I would be tempted to be like, I just want to do what we did before, but it takes a certain amount of bravery to go.

We have new, like everything is new. We can’t possibly do what we did before. So let’s throw it open.

Um, but still sort of like have elements of that. Exactly. Um, it sounds from the way that it’s that you’re describing it, that, um, there’s a certain amount of spectacle to watching this just with the constant movement and things like that.

Um, which I think is not particularly something that people expect. I mean, an opera often they’re known for like the lavish set, right? But often the idea that I have is people come out onto the set and they stand there and they watch somebody else sing, and then it’s the chorus’s turn and they’ll do some movement and they stop and things like that. Right.

And that lends itself obviously to this story in particular as well, because there are, there’s all these things that are always happening. And I think the fact that you have this one character Akaki in the middle of all the regular bustle of life, having his own story. Um, but that is something new for me.

And I think for the rest of the cast too, as opera singers is we can’t ever, this sounds very silly to say, but we can’t ever switch off because there’s always, Oh, this I’m supposed to take this table over here. Now this table needs to go off. I mean, it’s not just a, okay, take the table out stage left.

You’re still taking the, you know, there’s a very specific movement involved with your character. And Wendy’s really, she’s done an amazing job bringing in specifics to, okay, your character would not go and move this, this way. And there’s always, you know, there’s a very circular element to everything and how everything happens.

Um, and I can’t, I can’t wait to try and incorporate some of that into my work on, you know, a full scale, regular opera. Um, which is one of the things I’ve learned a lot about in this process for this show. So you think that, that like that working on this show has, has changed the way that you might approach.

Oh, definitely. Definitely. There isn’t as much involvement for, um, the other characters on the stage.

Usually I don’t want to speak in general terms. I’m sure there’s an opera director, someone who’s done this, but where, you know, someone singing and they have the main sort of, um, focus of the audience and all of that. But the, the other people in the background aren’t really doing a whole lot.

So here it’s like, my character is still invested in doing these other things in the background and doing all of that. And it sounds, it sounds silly saying it, but it’s not, there are lots of aspects of it that are new in the sense of I’m not only making this character my own through my vocal singing. I’m also making this character my own in the way I physicalize and in the way I move my body.

And that’s something that doesn’t often get talked about in opera because your physical body and your physical presence and your posture, all of that needs to be a certain way in order to produce sound in a healthy, in a healthy manner. But I think we can afford to play around a little bit within that mind. That’s that setting of, okay, as long as I’m sure that my body is the way I need it to be, to feel comfortable, I can still play around with other aspects of my character in a physical sense.

Then my experience doesn’t always happen. Has that, has like finding those, the balance between the, that, that physical presence, the posture and the movement of the character been like a challenge? Is that a new thing to try to play with? It was a fairly new thing for me to play with. There was one character, I play a doctor at the, towards the end of the show.

And there was a certain physicality that um, when you wanted me to play around with, which I found was constricting for me vocally because I had to kind of scrunch my shoulders up in, and um, that was, that felt uncomfortable. So I talked to her and she was really helpful with trying to help me find something that still brought out what she wanted from the character, but also in a way that felt comfortable for me, comfortable for me vocally as well. Um, which is another, you know, interesting thing.

It’s kind of, you, you learn where your body’s boundaries are for the important thing, which is the singing, but also making sure that the presentational aspects of the acting and the character aren’t lost in the process. It sounds like it’s been a lot of, like, how long has this rehearsal process been for this? We started on the 27th of, what month is it? We started on the 27th of February, I believe. Yeah.

So it’ll be almost a month. Yeah. Just about a month.

Yeah. Um, is that normal for a, for an opera? I would say four to five weeks is usually, usually how much time we have to put something up. I mean, speaking from a theater world where it’s often like two weeks and you’re up, right.

And how many times I’ve been like, Oh, if I only had two more weeks to have that, what, um, what is happening at those rehearsals over the month? So usually you’d have a lot of those rehearsals in the first week, be music rehearsals where you’re just going through the music, um, singing it. And that’s, it’s been a little different with this because we’ve had a chance to work with, uh, Les Dala, our, our conductor before in the workshop. So we already know what he’s looking for, um, with some of the phrases in the music, with his ideas.

But usually we’d have about a few days, two to three days of music rehearsals where we sing through it. And then we go section by section and the conductor will be like, okay, I want you to do this with this phrase, kind of work on that. And then we’d get into staging with this.

It’s been a little different because we’ve already had some of the music beforehand, um, and worked with Les beforehand in the, in the workshops and, um, that process. So we started staging day one. Um, and because there’s so much movement involved, there’s, you know, um, Jeff Surratt, um, our lead, he’s who’s doing an amazing job.

Um, it’s just inspiring watching him. He’s in every scene, but there’s also other people involved. There are people who don’t even say anything, but they come on stage, they do something and then they go off stage.

So because of all that involvement, um, it was, it was important for us to, to start staging day one. Yeah. Wow.

Are you, are you on social media on the web? Yes. Yeah. Can you share your, oh, sure.

Um, my Twitter handles probably Asitha Tennekoon, A S I T H A T E N N E K O O N. I believe I tried to make everything my name, which would be the easy way for me to remember it. Um, and Instagram as well. Yeah.

Do you have a website or no? Well, I, uh, I’m on my agent’s website. Okay. Kathy Dominey, domineyartists.com. Great.

Well, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. Thanks for, yeah.

Thanks for having me over here to chat about it.