The Daegu Theatre Troupe partnered with the YMCA to bring a fun afternoon of acting and English! Our wonderful middleschoolers performed the story of Hungbu and Nolbum, which you can read here.
I only got to work with them for a day, but it was so cute trying to teach them how to flutter and act like a bird and slither like a snake. I love teaching students through theater. It is hard and challenging but it was what made me the come out of my shell when I was in middle school.
The troupe then performed “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Check it out down at the bottom! ^_^
I am so excited for this upcoming project, I feel really blessed to be a part of. A foreign teacher here in Daegu is also a filmmaker. Matt Root teamed up with Shalisha Bynoe (who always films our Daegu Theatre Troupe and Musical Revue shows) and created a script that they hope will come into fruition some time this year.
I got to shoot for a few hours with them, and wow I cannot express how different it was to theater. A lot of it is technical and our acting is based on making sure the technology captures it perfectly. Whereas in theater, I am not thinking too much over the tech we worked and ironed out earlier in the week before the show’s opening (trusting things will go well but ready to improve if need be), my acting in film has to be repeated, and I’m not sure which take will be used or which way I said some lines was better.
I won’t forget the day…bitter cold for a late December day. Downtown seemed empty on a Sunday early afternoon. We waited outside for a while waiting for the bar to open up for us. Shalisha and I got into an awesome conversation that helped me a lot – talking about the future and what I needed to do. She said I couldn’t go and do something like grad school even though I saw all my friends go. She told me I should continue in all of this – the acting. And it has never been something I’ve taken myself seriously in until this movie. I had to make an acting resume for goodness sakes! hahaha. I think we all get scared of what the future holds, but some have more courage or faith to believe that they continue doing what they love. Shalisha is right. I just need to buckle down and focus. Whether I focus on writing a book, blogging, my art…I need to believe that I can do something with all of this
I’ve had Alice in Wonderland in my brain lately …here’s why:
My First Alice Experience
I’ve been a fan of Alice for a while now… I think it started when a friend told me how she loved it and at the time I was reading it during one of my English classes at Uni. It’s such a funky little story … and I love when literature can be dissected to be this deep philosophical thing or just be an amusing story to pass the time.
The first time I dressed up as Alice was for Halloween the year the Johnny Depp version came out. It wasn’t necessarily because of the movie that I dressed up, but mostly because it was the same year I had fallen for the story. I dragged my friends and siblings into it, and we were cast as different characters. I was Alice, my sister the Red Queen, Franky as the Rabbit, my brother as the Mad Hatter and Jodi as the Chesire Cat. I took the girls to a brunch, a favorite place of mine called “Alice’s Tea Cup“. It is included in my places to go in NYC, so go check it out if you are ever there. We went in and the worker at the tea shop who happened to be dressed up as Luigi from Mario looked at me and cried, “Alice! It’s been so long since you came by!” and immediately I like a crazy drama freak, went into character and said, ” I thought I stop by and treat the Queen to some tea”. My sister was a pretty good queen, surly and acted like everything was beneath her haha. A little girl was there with her father, dressed as Cleopatra. Her eyes lit up and she said, ‘Alice!’. I greeted her in return and felt like a Disney Princess at Disney World.
At “Alice’s Tea Cup”
My mom and I made my outfit!
Alice in Wonderland Camp
Fast forward to this past summer, I was wracking my brain trying to think of a fun theme for my summer English Camp. My winter English Camp is always fun because I do a Harry Potter Wizard Camp. Now you can’t go wrong with that, since then i felt like a set a high standard as my students keep asking me “Harry Potter summer camp??!” and I have to say no. Mostly because I don’t want to get bored using the same lessons. And a wizard cape works best in the winter 😉 Then a student, who must have just read the book said “Alice in Wonderland!” when I asked her for an idea. I didn’t even need to mull it over. It was a done deal:
This November the Daegu Theater Troupe will be presenting “Alice in America-Land” or “Through the Picture Tube and What Alice Found There” by Dennis Snee. It’s a twist on the original story, Alice doesn’t fall through a rabbit hole. Instead she goes through a TV and finds herself in a strange world of the corporate world. I was cast as Alice so I’m excited to be part of this bizarre world and mostly excited to be putting on the biggest and most complex show the Daegu Theater has put to date. We are getting funded by the city of Daegu thanks to the work of the Daegu YMCA. This is gonna be awesome!
Love. When you wish to talk about love, it opens up the door to so many conversations – the weird, the funny, the endearing, the memorable. The Daegu Theatre Troupe did it again. We took something and ran with it. When I heard that the next show was going to be a collection of skits and monologues about love, I was a bit hesitant to think it would work. How can various takes on love and expressions of love come together to make sense?
But it really did! It came together smoothly through the connecting songs of the Magnetic Fields (album: 69 Love songs), which Ed sang between every skit and thus bringing the whole show together. Man, do we have talent out there. For those interested, here are a few bits from some of the skits:
Love, just do it
So I was asked to do a monologue from Shakespeare and I racked my brain for a week, seeing as I had two weeks to practice before opening night.
I chose Viola’s monologue from Act 2 Scene 2 of Twelfth Night. Great play by the way. In it, Viola, cross dresses and takes the name of Cesario. She enters the service of the Duke Orsino, whom she falls in love with. Duke Orsino is madly in love with Olivia, who thinking Viola is a real man, in turn falls in love with Viola’s alias Cesario. In the scene, an upset messenger brings Viola a ring that Olivia claims Cesario “left behind”. It’s really an excuse for Olivia to see Cesario again. Viola puzzles over the ring and questions if Olivia has fallen in love with her. Oh Shakespeare, how you like playing with our minds.
The best part was getting to dress like a boy! haha…seriously, guy pants are soooo much more comfortable. I think I made a cute lil boy ^_^
Aaaaaanyways, needless to say, I had my first experience ever freezing on stage. Yep, that’s right folks. I was basically first on stage, after Ed opened with a song, and I just blanked. And I saw the faces of the 90 people in the audience straight up staring at me and Shakespeare left the building. It could have been worse…I could have actually been doing a whole Shakespearean play. Or vomited… hmm. The audience was great though, and I left not fully traumatized.
The Stardust monologue went a whole lot better. I got a chance to try out my British accent, and apparently fooled some audience members into second guessing that the boyish lookin’ chap at the beginning of the show actually wasn’t me. Yeay!
From Korea With Love 