At the start of the second semester, Ms. King introduced us to a new play. It was called Once on This Island, and for the past couple of weeks we’ve been working on it with one pagers, notes, and

other stuff.

On February 3rd, our acting teachers, Kolby, Michelle, and Gabriella took over our ELA classes twice a week for 11 weeks.

At the start, we did basic stuff like getting to know each other by playing games and remembering names. At that time it was fairly boring but it quickly changed.

In the later weeks, the teaching artists started assigning the roles of the characters, and each class had its own set of actors for the act it was in charge of. Some students had main roles, others had side roles. Personally, I had a main role of Tonton Julian, the father figure, and it was pretty fun to learn and remember the lines that my character had and learn the acting cues.

During this time we all learned the show’s dance that we would perform after the last act. Some of th

e people in our class who were usually pretty quiet came out of their comfort zones and performed well during the show. 

We started practicing the act and the show. It was definitely pretty difficult at first and kind of embarrassing, but then it became much easier to do in front of everybody. People started to remember th

eir lines and perform well in our practices despite it being very early in the morning (I’m in first period ELA).

On (April 28th), we had our dress rehearsal, which was a day before the main show. Parents were invited to join.. It was decent, nothing special, and there were a few mess-ups from classes but it was still good. It was the first time all the different classes performed together, and it came together fairly easy.

Then the day came, the real day of the performance, we did rehearsal before all the school came inside and it was fine. However,  as the auditorium was filling, the nerves kicked in.  It got hard to really think and the only way to ease the nerves was to look forward and block out all the people to perform as best as you can.

When our act was up I just walked, ignoring the crowd and focusing on my fellow partners helped me  get ready to act.

It felt so quick and relieved when we finished. I did as good as I could but it felt weird when we finished. Our purpose was to set the tone for the other acts, which I felt like we did well. We were the most complete act, so I was very confident in my partners not messing up 

After we finished we walked off the stage and proceeded to watch the rest of the performances. Although they had messed up a little during the rehearsal, when the real show came they performed well. Once they finished we had to perform a dance which was annoying to learn at first, but once we finally learned it at performed the crowd cheered and I felt so very relieved just like everybody else that was acting.

 In the end this act ended up being very fun and there were a lot of amazing moments, and ended up being something to remember.