Afropunk

Collaborative project

I started acting at the age of 8 and fell in love right away. The fact that I was doing improv theatre for the most part really engaged me and opened up my mind and forced me to be creative. My acting career hasn't really been influenced by any play at all. Instead iv'e been in constant amazement by my fellow actors in improv. It really is a wonderful sight to see someone come up with something hilarious on the spot and make you laugh your guts out. The west side Stockholm community where I grew up always had many different ways of engaging the youth with positive activities to stay out of trouble, and my theatre club really stood by that. And then I came here to CA and continued acting, and I ended up in a great theatre class and I'm so happy to still act on a regular basis.

And then our group consisting of (Me, Olivia, Linda and Ray) got the assignment to make a short play based on this stimulus:

We had complete freedom and where allowed to make a play based on any ideas that we got from this art piece.

In the beginning it was really hard finding a starting point for our play, we had no idea in what direction we where going other than that we wanted to do some type of love drama. Something with love slipping away was our main idea. So we started off with that, a love square (cus there's 4 of us...get it?) we started building characters based on our strengths as actors. Linda was the first one to be given a solid role, we all felt that Linda would be the best out of us 4 to be the young lady slipping away from her husband due to her strength of playing sad and confused characters. Next up was Ray, we put him in a position where he could be given a lot of freedom on how his character could be sense we didn't really have a plan for how his character was going to behave. In the sense of, should he be the bad guy? or the good guy? in this play. We all knew that Ray could do both so we let it sit on the stove for a bit. We decided to give me the role of the man Linda was cheating on her husband with. Then We needed a perfect spot for Olivia, and that came to be the wife of my character. It was perfect for her due to how she is really good at displaying her emotions on stage.

Now we had a base for our project, we could finally get started and find comfortable ground.

We had our first draft set up as a basic love drama, really dry and no real value at all. It was just Lindas character (Sara) cheating on her husband and my character (Marcus) cheating on my wife, and then Ray's character (Steve) and Olivia's character (Natalie) falling in love. No real message behind it other than " Cheating is bad "

So we all realized that we needed to expand it somehow.

Thats when I proposed to the group that we should change the script a little, we changed so that Marcus and Sara was not having an affair, but Sara was only looking for a close friend to hang her head on. This gave the play a little more depth which made it a lot easier for us to build upon.

Winter Musical footloose review

First of all I would like to thank all the cast members and teachers for an awesome atmosphere throughout the whole process. Even tho I came in late during production to play the role of Coach everybody welcomed me into the family instantly. It was truly a pleasure, thank you. 

Now, the review itself.

The tone of the play compared to the movie was a bit different. Ren was a bit more of a lanky awkward guy in the musical compared to the tuff rebel that he is portrayed as in the movie. But this worked out perfectly. We got the story of an outsider who really just wants to dance. Just like the movie the play gave us the same feeling of rebellion against adults who view fun and dancing as the devil.  The songs where performed well and they delivered the emotions they were designed to do. 

Holding out for a hero was definitely my favorite one and it was also the best performed song in my opinion. The fact that the cast was so big really helped to bring us many different actors to work with. The play had all types of actors and this made it easy to place them into the best role for them. So finding fitting actors to play certain characters seemed to not be a problem. 

The length of the play was good, not to long and not too short. Something that I did not like was the long church scenes. they felt dragged out and was probably the most boring scenes of the play. I feel as if this could have been fixed by adding more energy in the church song. Although this would not have worked due to how the town is supposed to be portrayed as a very uptight and boring town. But I can dream at least. Overall the play was very good and lived up to the Winter musical hype.

// Peace :D