”The Junglebook”
”The Junglebook” is about a girl, named Mowgli. When she was born her parents died and a wolf pack took care of her to protect her from Shere Khan, a blood-thirsty tiger craving for blood and revenge for not getting to kill Mowgli. The whole play is about Mowgli when she grows up in Stockholm, Sergels torg. During the play she has to find herself and learn how she’s supposed to survive in the big-city jungle. She learns all the different clan’s master words and grows enormously as a person. By her side she has Bagheera, Baloo and Akela, the leader of the wolf pack.
Phao, a wolf in the wolf clan challenges Akelas position as a leader. She goes behind Akelas back to make a deal with Shere Khan and her companion Tabaqui. She wants to be the new leader so she manipulates the other wolves and begins a new clan. She fools Akela to take down a big buffalo so that they, the wolf pack, can see how weak she is.
Meanwhile, Mowgli tries to stay alive. Every new person she meets basically tries to kill her. Thuu, Noppe and Joppe, Shere Khan and of course Kaa. But she gets pretty chill when she hears that Mowgli knows how to say her master words and they become very good friends after being down in Thuus cave.
In this project I worked in the scenography group and that mostly meant building stuff, painting stuff and finding solutions. J So, in the beginning I carried a lot of props for the stage of course, I went with two of my teachers to pick up building-stages at an off-road farmhouse. I also picked up the catwalk at another teachers home, with help from my theatre-teacher and Louise. One of my biggest project, being in the scenography group, was cutting styrofoam into pieces of a large brick wall supposed to hang on the walls on stage. It took some time to get done with it but I had some help from a Klara in this case. My absolute biggest project working as a member in the scenography group was painting the wall, the background. And it took a couple of weeks to get it ready. Maybe 4 or 5 weeks I believe. First I painted the structure of the apartments with help from a projector to see where to put the house-lines, after that I painted the apartments in different colours, asking my friends before doing it. After that I started to paint structures for the windows on the apartments and after that I started to paint black windows on the houses, with a little bit of help from my teammates. We have had some wild discussions in our group about how we wanted our scenography but we have always solved it.
In this play I played two characters, a gossip-mad vulture I called Mrs. Scoop and a threatening cobra named Thuu. I think it was very funny to get the opportunity to show two sides of my acting-skills. My funny part and my serious part. It was a funny and learning process to give form to these lovely and different characters. Even if they were very small as characters I felt that I could make them bigger on stage. I felt that I was given the right tools from the theatre-teachers to grow as an actress and to help my characters to grow.
I feel, after long working days, that I have reached my goals. I had some ideas and I think that some of them played its part in our production.
I just have to say that we had some lovely audiences when we performed! I was really shocked actually, since I expected the worse! The evening before the “worst” audience was supposed to take the seats I was really nervous. But they were small, little angels in the seat rows. I was a happy and pleased actress, the whole week!
The result of this production can only be described with one word: Fantastic!
I think that everyone, now afterwards, are pleased with what we did, what we created!
I have loved this project since I got to know that it was “The Junglebook” we were supposed to play as a theatre and –dance show the last time together.