Acting and contemporary theatre has always been my passion. I love the process of creating a piece of theatre and working with different people and sharing ideas.

I’ve learnt the most from being involved in the development stage and it’s the stage I enjoy the most. I love being there from the start and really getting to know all the layers that go into creating a show, while developing your character.

The Mermaid show evolved over a three year long development. I was 12 when we started and I’m now 15. I didn’t really know too much about Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, so for the first year working on this project we brainstormed and developed what we wanted to include in our story derived from the original text. I realised it was the first fairy tale where the female character held power. She was not saved by the prince, rather she saved him. We quickly realised we wanted the play to be about her journey of self-realisation.

It's not a recreation of the fairytale, The Little Mermaid. The play is infused with our opinions of the world. Through our development, the cast discovered the modern ideas that connected to this story. Issues of identity, gender, freedom and power. Something that resonated with me as we workshopped ideas was that the decisions the mermaid in our performance made were for herself and not for the prince.

I learnt as much about myself as my mermaid character. I feel like we, the teenage cast, all discovered who we were in this process too. We looked at ourselves, we talked to each other about what it's like to be a 15 year-old growing up right now. While it can be hard to relate to a mermaid character, I feel like one of the strongest messages in the play is a celebration of self. Above anything else the show is about believing that you are enough. The text and physicality of this work were weighted equally as voice, and what it was to have a voice and then become voiceless was central in the story.

What I love about contemporary theatre is that unlike the somewhat predictable and easily understood Disney production, contemporary theatre gives you greater scope for bringing a kaleidoscope of ideas together and allows the audience to interpret as they will. Sharing and collaborating with a creative team – directors, stage managers, script writers, sound, lighting, set and costume designers. Seeing how live theatre comes together, you need all those different elements to form the world that you see on stage. I believe the wonders of theatre are in the reimagining of stories.

Allegra
Year 9