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

 

Collaborative project final draft review

The final draft was finally filmed and uploaded yesterday, its been too long due but it is finally finally done. And I think we did a great job overall. There were some misses here and there when it came to scene changes with the stage light crew due to us actors improvising some of the lines in the script which made it hard for the crew to know when to cut the lights. But other than that everything went very smooth, we all did a great job with our characters and emphasizing their emotions during scenes. Ms G said that this whole play was very emotional driven, and that is something that is very true and we as actors prolly did not realize it. I think we wanted to show people how complicated love can be by showing the audience how the love you have for someone can quickly turn into doubt. I think we did a good job doing this even tho everyone who will see the play will probably interoperate the play I different ways.  But we hope that they get the basic message, "Don't break your relationship apart based on assumptions" Know the facts before accusing someone of cheating.

Looking at my character "Marcus" there was really not much going on emotion wise, he really only had  2 emotional states "confused" "angry"  So there was not really to  much in my opinion that could have gone wrong with that character. Biggest props go out to Linda "Sara"  for having to carry the play with 2 monologs and having to show many different emotions such as "love" "anxiety" " Sadness" we really threw a lot at her and she handled it very well. Olivia also did a great job on showing the upset and frustrated "Natalie" She showed great emotional acting skills during our scene together (scene 2) the way she pitched her voice up a notch when she said "how Marcus, how do you show me that you love me?!"  (something like that) was perfect. Really was a pleasure doing that scene with her. And last but far from least we have the drunken master Ray "Steve" To start of, the costume that we picked for him was perfect. It really helped to show the audience that "Steve" is your classical drunken husband.  One thing that I noticed with the way Ray did his character was how he moved as "Steve" it was a perfect blend of "drunk but in control" so big S/O to him for that.

So in conclusion, thank you guys and great job!

Progress

Since  the start of the second semester our group has mad a lot of progress on out short play now called “ A peculiar state of love”  We have changed a lot of the characters and the play now really represent our thought about how love can be very complicated and in some cases peculiar. Marcus in now just a regular guy trying to do his job and support for his wife. Sara is now a more relatable character who just envies the relationship that marcus has with his wife. We changed her husband Steve to a more likeable character, we did this by making him an alcoholic who does not support his wife and spends most of his time at the local bar. It really feels like a whole new play, but at the same time it feels like a upgraded improvement of our first draft. WE.ARE.MAKING.MOVES.

Fall play review

The fall play was in my opinion to long, it had way to many long and useless conversations.

That could have been cut out. The long and "boring" conversations made me feel like time was

passing by extremely slowly. There were some good parts where the jokes made me giggle, but the

long boring conversations that led up the finale where Algi and Jack are confronted by there two

loves did not do the play any good. For example the scene where Jack and Algi are arguing at the

coffee table should have been 2 minuets instead of what felt like 20.

On the other hand I did like the back and forwardness with Algi and Earnest in the beginning of the

play. It set a sertatint tone to the play right from the get-go. We see what type of character Algi is and

how he uses blackmail to push Earnest to talk about personal matters. This opening scene makes Algi

a pretty unlikeable character and he never makes up for it. It is also one of the reasons it does not

feel real when he gets Cissaly at the end. Speaking about the end, it in general felt very forced.

The character just blindly go back to being in love and all is forgiven.  Other than that the play

was very good. The actors did a solid job bringing out specific emotions for specific scenes.

I would rate this play a solid 7/10

Workshop experience

The workshop reminded me a lot of my improv theatre classes back in Sweden. The way it was

structured was just like a normal theatre session, exercises and improv. The improv part is what I was

most comfortable with.  What was different was when we sat down to talk about the various text they

brought with them. Analyzing the texts and then implementing them into an small scene gave me an

even better understanding for creating a play. Other than that I really liked the session with Ben &

Steve and would gladly do it again.