Nu finns vår slutproduktion ute på Youtube för de av er som inte sett den, eller för de som vill se den en gång till! Jag passar även på att slänga upp min sammanfattning av gymnasiearbetet, främst för att många tvåor verkat oroliga över hur de ska göra den och jag vill visa hur lätt det egentligen är!
 
 
 
I had been looking forward to do our final production ever since I saw “Two Days”, the final production two years earlier. It was so impressive and inspiring to see how good the actors and dancers had become during those three years, and most of all, I was sure that we’d make our final production even better.  The final production is the most important thing we do in the acting and dancing programme, our peak, and we were sure that we’d create the best production ever.
A final production is a big responsibility. It's our last show together as a class, and since our school is known for its professional productions, I really knew that I’d have to give it all. However, I do not think any of us realized how challenging it would be, and how different our process would be compared with previous classes.

When we first started with “Alice in Wonderland”, the play that was thrown at us from one day to another, our class was going through a crisis. We had been through a great loss and our director was completely new to us, we had no time to get to know him before the roles would be distributed and we had no more time than a month and a half for us to get everything in order.
A lot of us were skeptical, insecure of how we were able to make it, etcetera – but I was never one of them, because my goal had changed. Now it wasn’t to make the subjective best final production, it was to make a final production at all, because I knew that we were going to do it against all odds. In the end, the play became fantastic, but at the time was not the quality most important but that we actually achieved something.

One of the most important things, to make our production as good as possible, is to have working groups. That means that we divide the class in different groups, mixed actors and dancers, to be in charge of different disciplines. My working group was the multimedia group, and thus we were responsible for filming the movies, find the projections and cut the music that would be in the show. 
We handed out the various responsibilities within the group; I was responsible for the projections, which meant that I looked for pictures that we could project on the white pillars that formed a screen at the back of the stage. I also helped with the filming which we both performed in the schools green screen room and the nursing programmes facilities. 
We had a lot of movies that we wanted to do, but we had to wait for the costume group to get done with the costumes before we could film. I also had a period during which I was away much and had trouble focusing, so I was not as effective as I wish I had been. I could have done better, and I should have, but it is easy to be hindsight and I worked hard in terms of conditions, so I still think I performed okay.
The time ran away for our group, but the work that was shown in the show was well done and I'm very proud of what we accomplished given the circumstances. 

In addition to working in the working groups, we also needed to rehearse our scenes. My character, Mock Turtle, was really fun to play in many ways: she was emotional, unstable and incredibly pessimistic. I created the character in an early stage since character creation always has been easy for me. Mock Turtle had a whiny voice, a hunched back and very large emotional variations. Her main interest was art, especially dance and painting, and she feared loneliness more than anything else.

I was honestly amazed at how good the character suited me. I've never been a comedy actor, I prefer to be funny by playing seriously, and as Mock Turtle, I got to play just that way. I began to relate to her on a personal level, I felt empathy for her situation and even though I started to develop my character from how I behaved in eighth grade, she soon got to be much older than me. 
My biggest challenge was to get more speed in the acting; I'm naturally a person who takes things at their own pace, and as the Mock Turtle in general was very leisurely even in the script, I thought it was hard to play her in the pace that was required when I didn’t have an energetic counterweight to play against. That's the worst thing about being subordinated to a script if you’ve created your own character in every detail; even if your character, as you imagined it, does not work in a certain way you must be able to adjust it in order to play the role and follow the script.

One of the best things about Alice in Wonderland was that we were involved in the process and improvised a lot together. My favorite scene, when I'm locked in the dungeon, was actually created that way. The fact that we improvised together as our characters helped me to understand how the other characters worked, and my character interacted with them in a natural way.
I had a hard time learning the script at first, because my lines were long harangues with text. In addition, I did not work very hard to rehearse the script because I arrogantly thought that I knew my lines better than I actually did. This changed, however, as soon as we got into the intense rehearsals. It was also not until then that I began to believe that our production would be fine.
We rehearsed a lot, and I could not live at home during the last weeks since we stayed in school so late. All were really trying to do their best, which could be seen very clearly. I think we generally had a great atmosphere and we tried to encourage each other very much. It required a lot of us as a group for us to succeed, but we did it well.

Facing the audience is always nerve wracking. Since my role was not particularly comic, without one-liners and ingenuity, I did not think the audience would appreciate it that much. I knew that my character will become fun only when you become accustomed to her, because it is her behavior that makes her comic, but I could not expect that the audience would understand it. 
With these circumstances included, I feel that my performance got a good response. Many people, both familiar and unknown, afterwards told me that they liked my character and that I was funny in a way that made their laughter get stuck in the throat. I also exchanged rapidly between taking much space on stage and to almost not be noticed at all, a challenge I very much enjoyed.
Every time I walked off the stage after a performance, I felt like a winner. It did not matter if someone told me I was good, because all I did on stage, I did for my own sake. After three years of uncertainty, I finally felt like I belong there.


 
That's the way I developed the most through this production. I have gained more confidence in my own abilities on stage, I've stopped caring about what the audience might think and I have finally regained the love of the acting that made me start.

That our class is unbeatable in many ways, we have witnessed during this production. I never thought that I would become so close with my classmates or that we would put up with each other through thick and thin, and I could never have dreamed that our production would be as successful as it became.

Other things I learned is to have faith in the people who say that everything will work itself out, that hard work pays off better than anything else, to trust my own abilities and that you can climb any mountain with the right equipment; we definitely ascended the mental mountain that was our final production, and our best equipment was another. 
Never could I have imagined that it would be this difficult, demanding, confusing and stressful. I could also never have guessed at how much fun, flipped, exciting, crazy, amazing and shimmering it would be!

The memory of Alice in Wonderland, I will carry with me as a piece of jewelry for a long time to come. We, the whole ensemble, are a shining example of how we can cope with anything as long as we cooperate. I am incredibly grateful that I got to go along on this crazy journey down the rabbit hole, and I did it with an amazing company!

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