Dear Reader,
Yo yo yo! What’s up? Writing from Arnhem, I’ve been lovingly asked to give you a little update on my acting journey. What did I learn from Elisa Academy? How does that inform my experience with my study here at ArtEZ (Arnhem Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) now? What a task it is to answer all of it, but if you’ll indulge me, let’s try shall we?
My time at Elisa Academy (2021 - 2024) was fruitful to say the least. Coming in 2021, I was gutsy and full of ambition. And during that time it only grew, throughout the classes we kept deepening the meaning of acting through experience. Discovered and rediscovered ourselves through practice and play and forged bonds through fire 'aka' the bright lights of theater.
It wasn’t always fun and games, bettering your craft never is...
We were challenged, to meet our potential where it is, confronted with the walls we needed to break to get there.
One of the biggest examples of this is when the opportunity presented to come do auditions at ArtEZ, a week before the date itself. Sounds insane, right? It came as a bit of a whirlwind at the time, we were preparing to leave for April so this came quite ahead of schedule. But it was the opportunity of a lifetime, once in a lifetime. So after an intense week of preparation, organization, and some self-confrontation, the only thing that was left was to take the leap. So I did and I flew on my own for the first time, went to a state I had never seen before to audition for something that had seemed like a pipe-dream. After a week of giving it all I had, I was accepted into the ArtEZ University of the Arts.
Up ‘til now this has been all sounding like a well-wrapped present tied with a neat little bow right? But as you know life isn’t always present on Christmas morning and never as neat. While my journey to ArtEZ was forged through broken walls, this linearity was not meant to stay forever.
Dear Reader, I’m afraid I have to remove the rose tinted glasses of this blog from you. In my first year at ArtEZ, I quickly realize that the study isn’t solely about technical skill at the craft, but also about your process of becoming an artist. I had to face rediscovery in a place, in a system, that never thought about someone like me in its conception. I had to figure out how to tap into every part of me as a source of my artistry in a place with people who weren’t familiar with the parts I had grown to know the most, just as I wasn’t familiar with theirs. This aforementioned wall took a little longer to breakthrough.
I was advised to redo
my first year, as a way to sit in this process just a little longer with the tools I had until that point,
in hopes I would come out stronger. But I’m not one to sit still, so I moved forward to the second
year. I was hungry for more, more knowledge, more challenges and more freedom. This didn’t
go as planned either. But in the heat of that challenge I had rediscovered an independence to
embrace all facets of my intersectionality to use in my process going forward. 
So dear reader, that’s where I am now. Finished my latter-half of the year back in first year and now doing a full-run in second year. I got my Propedeuse, finally!
If I could look back now, I would say with confidence that it really became the through-line of my journey. Discovering and rediscovering myself, through the craft, heat of challenge, my intersectionality, my world and artistry, has been the through-line of this journey with no destination yet. If I could give something to you, whose been so kind to indulge me so far, is to have faith in yourself, in your own power, and your ability to hold your identity, your essence in the face of rediscovery.
Sincerely,
Alumni Reflection #1