acting Archives « Sasha M Online

Voice acting for #FacetimeWithHistory

December 30, 2018 by Sasha M

acting, history, interactive, National Museum of Singapore, voice acting

In October this year, I was selected as one of the voice actors for #FacetimeWithHistory, an interactive programme run by the National Museum of Singapore to commemorate its 131st anniversary (yes, the museum is older than our nation state!).

As a voice actor, I was to play the role of one of the grandstand seats at the Old National Stadium (which many of us used to call Kallang Stadium). There were three of us playing seats, and we formed a “Sisterhood of Seats”, which made it really fun. It was a great experience chatting with unsuspecting museum guests, sharing stories with them about the historical events that happened in the museum. We even got them to sing along to National Day songs and do the Kallang Wave! You can see the highlights from the event in this video made by the National Museum of Singapore.

And here’s a photo of all of the voice actors!

Corporate Workshop Facilitation for OCBC

July 4, 2018 by Sasha M

Work

acting, artist, community, corporate, culture, facilitating, HCAC, improv, soft skills, theatre, training, workshop, worldview

Yesterday, I assisted Kamil Haque from the acting school HCAC as a facilitator in an improvisation-based workshop for OCBC. It was a team building workshop with the objective to create a new company culture. We worked with fresh graduates who had just entered the company and had not yet become integrated into the old company culture. There were 68 participants, and for such a huge group of people, we had eight facilitators as well as Kamil leading the full-day workshop.

Kamil is a boss ass workshop instructor who can handle any group size

It was really interesting working with so many people. As a performer, I’m used to training myself to improve my own skills at a craft. It’s very different to try and teach other people how to do those skills, especially when everybody has their own ideas and strengths. However, I must say I was very impressed by how the participants performed in the workshop, as they largely seemed to grasp the principles we were trying to express through our programme.

Everyone was paying close attention even at the end of a long day

Working so closely with such a large group for over 8 hours, I definitely learnt a lot from my interactions with the participants. I’m glad for the effort they put into all our games and exercises, and especially for their sincerity in reflecting on the activities. I, too, had much to reflect on as the day drew to a close.

Seriously there were so many people it was amazing that the day wasn’t mostly chaos

I’m very happy and honoured to have been part of this wonderful team of people, working on something that I find incredibly meaningful, and making an impact on people. My main objective as a performer is to have an impact on how people think and feel about things, and it’s great to be able to open up my perspective on that and do this kind of work in a facilitator role as well. It’s creating art in a whole different way.

Every single one of these amazing individuals is a talented gem of a human being!

Most of all, I feel incredibly glad to be part of this community of people who share similar worldviews as myself, with a similar approach to life and how we interact with the people around us. I hope to always keep learning and growing with them!

The Writers Room at HCAC

March 6, 2017 by Sasha M

Stories

acting, HCAC, monologue, music, personal story, prose, script, stories, story, storytelling, theatre, workshop, writing

Today I went for a writing workshop that was designed to help prepare people for writing personal story monologues for submission to the next edition of Metaphors Be With You, which is themed Music so I am definitely considering submitting something! The workshop was conducted by Aimee, whom I had watched perform her own monologue at the last Metaphors a week ago.

Aimee briefing us during the workshop.

One of the things she had us do was free writing based on prompts that she gave. I’ve been doing some free writing for my lyric writing exercises, but it’s way more fun when done in a workshop with someone prompting you. I also quite liked what I wrote in the end, so decided to share it here for you guys to read. The underlined words are the prompt words; all else is mine.

Music is the thing that brought me safely through my youth into adulthood. In the absence of consistent human characters, human behaviour, life circumstances etc, music was always a constant that I could depend on. A record once made remains in the same form that it was made, and lasts eternally. It can be shared without ruining the quality of the original (unlike Xerox), and it helps me access a world of fantasy. The songs I used to listen to tended to bring me to other worlds, which I did not have access to myself. Songs like those from musicals like Cabaret or Moulin Rogue, which I loved, took me into a world of glamour, but beyond that, the dark side of all the lights and sparkles. The dark side of the moon. I was also heavily into Linkin Park when they first started out, as they created a world which was dark, twisted, and very enthralling. I couldn’t believe my eyes at some of their music videos in particular, which featured creepy rooms, nightmarish characters and had a very strong sense of the tangled webs of one’s psyche. I totally get that because I get some really messed up dreams at night. I don’t consider myself a depressed or twisted person, but these dreams just come to me. I have no idea what might trigger these dreams because often times they are completely not connected to anything in reality, as far as I’m aware. For example, most of my dreams are about being on a mission; sometimes in a large steel-and-glass cityscape, or school building (which is unfamiliar), sometimes in a third world country in Africa. There’s also often betrayal, or suspicion, or some psychotic things happening. Sometimes when I think about these dreams it makes me shiver. These topics are really pretty disturbing, especially when I start to wonder why they even came about in the first place. Surely I can’t be a crazy person? What sort of monstrosity might actually be there, undetected, lurking beneath my generally positive outlook and usually cheerful personality? It’s so weird trying to psychoanalyze myself because it makes me feel like one of the characters in these musicals, like Sally Bowles in Cabaret, singing about how joyful it is to come to the Cabaret and cast your woes aside. But actually deep inside she’s hiding some deep pain and problems that she just simply isn’t dealing with. She has so much to hide under that bright smile and attention-grabbing vocal. I wonder if she is that way because she’s unable to find love. The kind of pure, selfless, beautiful love that people allude to in romance movies. Cabaret isn’t a romance movie. Neither is real life. It’s not sugar coated, not soft around the edges, sometimes not easy to swallow. But it is definitely a fascinating puzzle to try to figure out, one messed up character at a time.

Just some prose that I hope you enjoyed reading, for its own sake 🙂

More Therapy Than Theatre: a review of Acting 101 at HCAC

February 7, 2017 by Sasha M

Stories

acting, class, course, development, drama, education, introduction, lesson, personal, psychology, reflection, school, theatre, therapy, training, workshop

An acting workshop with Kamil Haque at the Haque Centre of Acting and Creativity (HCAC) is not what you might expect. Instead of reading out lines from Shakespeare, or even doing physical warm up and characterization exercises, we (the students) were thrown into the deep end by being asked to delve into our inner psyche, and ask ourselves personal, reflective questions. In some way, it was more like therapy than theatre.

The reason for all that affronting self-reflection lies in Kamil’s philosophy and approach to acting: before you can truly understand a character, you must first understand yourself. Hence all the confrontations with ourselves and our inner demons. But it was a truly cathartic experience, and by the end of the first hour of the eight-hour session we had variously (depending on the level of investment of each student) either poured our hearts out, or at least chipped away slightly at the walls around our emotions.

Following this emotional excavation, students were provided with some very handy and everyday tools with which, Kamil assured us, we would become better actors. Who would have known that the secret to improving our acting abilities lay in something so simple? We also engaged in some fun exercises like making completely baseless judgements about our classmates, stalking strangers in the streets, and eating Indian food (which is not included in the course fees). And we got to do some acting at the end, too.

For myself, I have had some theatre training in the past, and so some of the concepts and techniques were familiar to me. Nevertheless, I most enjoyed this workshop because of the different approach it took to acting from what I was used to. I also really enjoyed my group dynamics, as we had a good group of 11 people who were very positive, supportive and constructive with their input. There were also multidisciplinary artists (musicians, dancers) in my group so we could even take certain discussions to another level, which I enjoyed very much. I also got to meet people from other worlds than mine (therapists, neuroscientists etc) who helped me to become a little more sensitive to different kinds of people.

For just one day in the studio, I think we got a lot out of the class. Students were definitely pushed out of our comfort zones. We got to learn new things. We got to perform in front of a forgiving audience. And we learned to work together as a group, though we all began as strangers. These are opportunities you don’t always get to have, and I’m grateful they can be found here in Singapore.

Not only is this introductory class good for actors, I also feel that it is good for every single human being, because I think it is very important for people to be able to confront themselves and ask themselves difficult questions, much like what we did in the class. No matter who you are or where you are in life, I feel that this class would benefit anybody who is willing to give it a try. So go for it!

The next Acting 101 workshop at HCAC is on 19 March. Early bird pricing and more details can be found on their webpage.

P.S. The Indian food which is not included in the course fees refers to lunch. If you didn’t get that joke, I’m sorry.