Sending action from component to route in ember.js

Here's the route:

import Ember from 'ember';

export default Ember.Route.extend({
    actions: {
        closeModal: function () {
            alert('asdf');
        }
    }
});

And the component js code:

import Ember from 'ember';

export default Ember.Component.extend({
    actions: {
        closeModal: function () {
            this.sendAction('closeModal');
        }
    }
});

What I'd like to do is to (as the code may suggest ;) ) send an action from component to route, so that the route could act upon it. However the code above doesn't work - component properly handles the action, but the sendAction call inside it's method doesn't do anything.