“If there’s no work, then you make your own work.” This is the crux of Grace Kalaiselvi’s drive and life philosophy. In the year after graduating from ITI in 2014, Grace could not get acting jobs and secured very few auditions. She decided to put herself out there, create her own opportunities and prove herself on her own.

She noticed the lack of Indian perspectives in the theatre scene, so she started Brown Voices, a collective of theatre practitioners that focuses on Indian narratives. Members of the collective have successfully continued to create more work, which has contributed more enriching stories to Singapore’s theatre landscape.

Grace recalls, “One thing that Kuo Pao Kun said, which Sasi [Sasitharan] told us: ‘In order to do theatre, you need to be human first.’ And I think that’s the basics that everyone who goes to ITI will definitely learn.” And it is this emphasis on humanity, and ITI’s intercultural and multilingual approaches to theatre, that have shaped her to be an advocate for minority voices.

Grace considers her greatest career highlight the Goddesses of Words, a performance series created in 2019 that explores sexual abuse and assault. The response to the show was so positive and resonant that it has led to many iterations since—including one staged at the Arts House in 2020 for Textures: A Weekend with Words, a festival celebrating Singapore literature and the diverse community that drives it.

Another example of Grace’s versatility is Amma’s Sarees, a play she directed in 2021 about a single-parent family for Esplanade’s PLAYtime! series for young audiences. It defied expectations of a conventional young-audience production; she used music, dance and shadow puppetry to help young audiences process grief, which resonated deeply with the children and their parents.

“There’s a lot of learning that has happened along the way, and I’m still learning,” Grace says about her journey since graduating from ITI. “But what I enjoy is the ability to do what I love and to say what I think is needed.”

She has come a long way from creating her first independent work. Her final-year assignment at ITI was the first time Grace had written and directed anything, an experience that would prove to be priceless and would lay the foundation of her theatre career. She staged her first public show Mother I—about motherhood and childbirth—at The Substation, where she was the playwright, director, producer and actor. This milestone led her to work on several more productions with The Substation. Since then, she has worked, and still continues to work on commissions from a variety of companies like Esplanade and National Gallery of Singapore.