- Name: Sudaraka Ariyaratne
- Pronouns: He/Him/His
- Where I’m from: Colombo, Sri Lanka
- Major & school at NYU: NYU Abu Dhabi
- How & why did you decide to get involved with VPL?
I first heard about VPL in 2017 when Her Opponent went viral. As someone who enthusiastically supported Hillary Clinton, I stayed tuned to the news and analysis of the 2016 election even following the election, and thinking about it now, there was no way I would have missed it.
Then, in the spring this year, I took a journalism class while studying away at NYU’s Washington DC campus. For the final project of the class, every student had to write a news article reporting on something of our interest, and I decided to write an article on what I then felt was a reluctance of female candidates to embrace their female identities on the campaign trail. I reached out to several people for insight and quotes, and one of them was Professor Joe Salvatore.
Professor Salvatore was not only generous enough to send very insightful answers to the questions I emailed him, but recognized my interest in the intersections of politics and identity, and asked me if I was interested in being part of the work at Verbatim Performance Lab. He also sent me clips of other projects that VPL had worked on, which I really enjoyed, and so I replied with an affirmative ‘yes’.
I decided to get involved with VPL because I was fascinated by how anonymous and identity-swapped verbatim performance can be used as a means of uncovering preconceived biases in politics. I had already immersed in the academic literature that deals with this subject from a more theoretical and numbers-based focus as part of my school work and for my previous internships, but I believe exploring this through theater makes it more real, comprehensible and accessible.
- What VPL projects are you working on?
I have so far worked on The Democratic Field and The Kavanaugh Files, and I also manage VPL’s Twitter account.
The Democratic Field is an attempt to dis-integrate policy from spectacle in the Democratic primary campaign. Usually held around the actual Democratic debates, at The Democratic Field, actors read out anonymized policy statements by the presidential candidates, and the audience then votes on their favorite anonymous candidate. It is interesting to see how people who walk into the event with their minds already made about a specific candidate find themselves surprised to have liked an anonymized statement made by a candidate with completely opposite ideological views.
For the November Democratic Filed, I am helping to source policy statements on Education and Foreign Policy from Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer, and to transcribe them. I have also helped create an inventory of clips and transcripts, some sourced from the previous Democratic Field events, of the Democratic candidates speaking on various issues ranging from civil rights to the economy. To help the others researching the other candidates in the race find clips that can be used for The Democratic Field, I also came up with a document of how to delve deep into the niche political corners of the internet. Researching the Democratic candidates is what I do in my spare time anyway (with a special focus on Kamala Harris who is my favorite, and whose candidacy is also the most interesting to study given her gender and race), so I find working on The Democratic Field extremely interesting and also weirdly therapeutic.
I also helped research Brett Kavanaugh’s voting record on the Supreme Court, as well as the development of new allegations of sexual assault before the performance of The Kavanaugh Files at the Kimmel Center to mark Constitution Day in September.
As a prolific tweeter myself, I enjoy managing VPL’s Twitter account. We are building the Twitter account from the ground up (so give us a follow at @VerbatimPerfLab!), and we are mostly focused on expanding the reach of our work, especially in connection to the daily news cycle where there are countless examples of preconceived biases to dissect and study. In our tweets, we analyze what’s in the news through the lens of what we have learned from our projects at VPL, and nothing feels better than to see other people engage in the online conversation with important insight.
- Has your work with VPL affected how you think about particular issues, theatre and performance, etc?
Because of The Democratic Field, I am more inclined to try to filter out performative aspects of campaigning to drill down to the substantive message of a candidate. It is extremely hard to do given the nature of campaigning, which requires a certain amount of theatrical spectacle on the part of every candidate, but I think it is important to try to understand not only the substance of a candidate’s message, but also how uniquely each candidate uses theatrical spectacle as a form of delivery – given that one of them will have to go toe-to-toe on a debate stage with Donald Trump.
Working with VPL has already brought me closer to theatre, which I nostalgically realized when I attended The Kavanaugh Files rehearsals. I was engaged in theatre in high school as both a script writer and an avid fan, which I have unfortunately not been able to continue as an undergrad, and VPL has reminded me what I liked so much about it.
- Anything else you’d like to share?
I am really thankful to Professor Joe Salvatore and Professor Keith Huff for giving me the opportunity to be part of VPL this semester. It has been a great experience so far, and I can’t wait to see the wonderful projects that VPL will embark on in the future.